Asia's leading low cost carrier, AirAsia, unveiled its new booking system on July 11. Corinne Wan gives it a test drive.

AirAsia's revamped booking website

At first glance AirAsia's booking website does not look any different than before its system upgrade. But I feel the difference when I start the booking process as it's much faster and login is a breeze too despite the fact it was just a day after the new system was up and running.

Perhaps the best feature of the News Skies system is the ability to book seats for multi-cities in one transaction, which was not possible under the former Open Skies system.

For example, if I want to fly from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore and Hong Kong return, I just need to make one transaction without having to make two separate bookings. This was a limitation with the Open Skies system.

Another welcome feature is the "Low Fare Finder" where I can search for the lowest fare available according to the selected destination and preferred date of travel. Most airlines in the region, like Malaysia Airlines and Jetstar, have this feature on their website but it's a new addition to AirAsia.

The New Skies reservation system is also able to support characters such as Mandarin, Thai, Japanese and other language characters, making it easier to include more robust content for AirAsia's multi-lingual guests around the globe. The Open Skies system was only able to support alphanumeric characters.

To add value, passengers can also choose from more than 70,000 hotels and 5,000 tours and activities on airasiago.com.

For AirAsia's members there is a change when they want to login as they now have to use their email address instead of their user name to do so. The airline informs all members of this change through an email, which is a nice touch, even though the website does indicate that email address is required when you want to login.

"We are very excited that we can add another milestone to AirAsia's list of achievements. Surpassing our own expectations and completing the new reservation system successfully ahead of schedule only reiterates our commitment to provide the best services to our guests," said Kathleen Tan (pictured left), AirAsia's regional head of commercial.

Guests could look forward to greater savings, which will arise from the more efficient operational processes under the new system.

With the new system in place AirAsia hopes to launch additional destinations, including Seoul in South Korea and Haneda in Japan in two to six weeks, Tan added.

AirAsia has invested RM10 million (US$3.1 million) in the New Skies system, which will double its capacity to handle almost one million bookings a day. It will also help AirAsia cope with the huge volume of bookings during peak periods and sales promotion.

New Skies is powered by Navitaire, a subsidiary of industry-leading technology and business solutions provider, Accenture.

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