Transforming our way of transactions with Order API

What is the Order API?

Every step for our customers is handled by different development teams. After you searched for a flight and picked one that suits your needs, you get to the booking and payment part. This is handled by the Order API Team. They are responsible every transaction is handled correct and safely. It is after this transaction, our customer receives their tickets.

Way back in the days, paper tickets and transactions were the norm. Even as we all went online to book our flights, we still used e-tickets, or “digitized paper tickets”. But we want to change this. The process of searching, ordering, and handling all products and services will be completely overhauled in the near future. We require a new and modern way of doing transactions. Airline trade association IATA is leading an initiative called ONE Order. This intends to simplify airline reservations, delivery, and accounting systems by gradually phasing out the current booking (PNRs) and ticketing records (e-tickets and electronic miscellaneous documents, or EMDs).

What is the impact of this project?

We currently handle between 100,000 and 125,000 orders per month. In Q1 2022, we processed over 2 billion euros in sales for Air France and KLM.

You could for instance work on our Cash & Miles plan. We handle about 50,000 Cash & Miles bookings. Customers spent about 700 million Flying Blue miles this way! Currently, we can take over 100 transactions per second. We work with our internal payments team to process all requests, and we work closely with Amadeus, the global reservation and distribution system for airline tickets. We have 24/7 monitoring to ensure we can handle issues quickly.

The most significant advantage is that we give them one order number with which they can check everything concerning their flight. This means they don't have to worry about different codes, ticket numbers, etcetera. . In the backend, we make sure everything is connected for the traveller. We want to make it as easy as possible for them. We’re constantly looking for new ways to improve the travel experience, and the Order API helps as a hidden middleman who connects all the dots. Likewise, we will be ready for the ONE Order system from IATA, so everything we do is aimed towards this new future. We already open the doors for other development teams to make self servicing as easy as possible for our customers.

Are there technical challenges?

E-commerce transactions are complex, and they require advanced knowledge of API’s and development skills. Working in this dynamic environment is challenging. If you make changes on one side of the platform, unexpected things can happen in another part of the system. We always need to be operational for our customers. When the ordering-system has an interruption, this means direct loss of business for KLM. Higher management will get a text message instantly, we need to be back online as soon as possible.

When you discuss the requirements with your developers, you always have to be aware of this. To support our developers, we have an extensive and modern testing suite. With this suite, we can identify regressions when we have change requests or right before we go live with new features on our production environment.

For example, KLM is introducing Premium Comfort class in the summer of 2022. Our teams need to develop all the logic to make this introduction possible. Customers must be able to book the flights, but also upgrade from Economy to Premium Comfort. When we do all this, we also need automated testing scripts for every possible scenario.

Air France KLM aims to be the leading airline in data & technology. This brings new challenges for all our teams and colleagues. We need to think about a growing number of scenarios where incidents can happen, from unexpected outages at an airport to a worldwide pandemic in which our clients want to reschedule their flights digitally.  This is where our expertise comes into play; how we support the other teams and make sure the middle man, the Order API, stays in business.

What makes it interesting?

When we move forward to the ONE Order system from IATA, we will need a big architectural change in our backend programs to move to this new standard. We need to upgrade our database models to be more order oriented instead of oriented around PNR numbers. This means our team should be able to shift between architectural, conceptual roles and development skills. We work towards an increase in smaller autonomous components. These are microservices in the complete process. They do one thing really well and work together. As a future developer, you will definitely work on these components.

Our engineers collaborate with the architects and analysts about current improvements and future IATA-devised standards into our platforms, more or less converting high-level and functional ideas to working code. But this is also true for regular day-to-day work. When we implement new features or resolve bugs, we really need skilled engineers to come up with and develop working technical solutions. At KLM, you can choose your own career path and learn new ways of working. Whether it is working in Java, developing new microservices or be part of the database architecture migration, there is plenty of opportunity at KLM Tech & Data.