Retail inMotion would like to introduce the new version of our product vPreo! It aims to introduce an easy to use, fast and stylish way for pre-orders/pre-selections to be made for all passengers.
This solution, which launched last month with Alaska Airlines, enables passengers to pre-select any offer type that is uploaded and agreed with the caterer. In short, passengers can pre-select and pre-order their meals and have the food delivered to their seat during the flight.
All Alaska Airlines passenger classes can now benefit from the pre-selection option, which means they can pre-order a meal up to three weeks in advance of their flight by using the airline’s apps or website.
The food menu can be found in the reservation details – the following step-by-step is using Alaska’s own user interface, specifically built for this solution:
Step 1
When passengers click the “pre-order now” link, they are immediately taken to the new experience, where they can see the description of a meal and its price by tapping on it.
Step 2
Passengers must tap the picture to select the guest for the food item.
Step 3
Passengers travelling together can choose which guest would like a certain food item, as shown in the image below. The names will be displayed on the food image.
Step 4
The last step is to review the selection(s) and click on “Reserve”. All orders can be changed or canceled (when within the pre-order time window).
vPreo
The solution is designed with passenger data security and reliability in mind; there’s a base performance requirement of serving a minimum 1 million unique requests per day. Furthermore, the infrastructure is designed to be both horizontally and vertically scalable in order to accommodate future growth.
Any application can seamlessly integrate with vPreo using our restful APIs.
For the Alaska Airlines project, the data — meal availability and fulfilment, handled by the LSG Group — is integrated between Alaska Airlines, eGate IFX and Retail inMotion’s Vector via a set of connectors.
To ensure a successful implementation of the program, business rules and offer availability can be configured and managed by Alaska Airlines admin staff without any code changes.
“This is a milestone for Retail inMotion to expand our end-to-end platform and enhance our technical solution to reduce our time to market for future developments”, said Giacomo Tomolillo, Engineering Manager at Retail inMotion.
The migration to a new architecture represents a shift in the software development methodology, technologies and techniques used by our teams to develop and deploy features and products.
We aim to make each team more independent and autonomous in order to allow them to build, run and manage their own modules.
This will have a huge positive impact in terms of team velocity, continuous deployment and will make our company able to adapt to market changes very quickly.
We’re currently on a journey of migrating all our software towards this direction and last month’s release is an important milestone on the path to success.
Alaska Airlines is the first client to take advantage of this new version of Retail inMotion’s pre-order and pre-select solution. However, the product has been created with a wider audience in mind, therefore any future clients can use this technology to tap into new business opportunities and allow their passengers to pre-select duty free products and pre-order their meals.
