Kingfisher Airlines connects 70 cities and operates over 425
flights daily. A large chunk of its ticket sales are generated
online through its e-commerce portal. At the end of 2006, the
airline complained to the Economic Offences Wing of the city crime
branch that it had been duped of Rs 17 crore due to an online
ticket booking fraud.
A well-organized group used stolen credit cards to book flights
and then resold the tickets at discounted rates. As a fallout,
there was a huge chargeback from banking institutions; naturally,
the airline’s business was hit.
To counter online fraud Kingfisher developed its own solution
called FANS, but after using it for a year or so, the airline faced
great difficulty in maintaining it. Kingfisher was investing a lot
of time, money, manpower and resources to curb fraud using its FANS
solution. What’s more, the system could not generate alerts
in real-time; it generated alerts in batches, every three hours. In
an e-commerce environment where it’s common for people to
book tickets within a few hours of the flight, this kind of delay
was simply unacceptable. Also, the number of alerts being generated
by FANS was fairly high, so Kingfisher had to deploy a large team
to scrutinize all those bookings.
To focus on its core competency, Kingfisher needed to offload
and outsource the task of screening bookings to a service provider.
Its in-house solution was resource-intensive, expensive to operate,
and not very result-oriented.
The
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About Author
Brian Pereira is a veteran IT journalist based in Mumbai, India. He is currently the Editor at InformationWeek India. Brian has written several articles on consumer and enterprise technology, since 1992. He has also spoken at Forums such as Nasscom, Cloud Computing World Forum and many others. During his career he worked for reputed organizations like Times of India, Indian Express Group, Jasubhai Digital Media and Infomedia18.
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