Carmen announces that Britannia Airways, the world’s leading holiday airline and part of the TUI AG group, has signed a long-term rental agreement for Carmen’s planning products Carmen Crew Pairing and Carmen Crew Rostering. Britannia is already operating crew pairings optimized by Carmen for some crew groups.

According to Andrew Sell, Head of Operations at Britannia Airways, the new systems will bring significant cost savings and at the same time increase individual crew member’s influence on their working schedules.

“Our short-term expectation is to speed up the planning process and reduce the operational cost. This will be combined with a lifestyle package that allows our crew members to influence their individual rosters and their working schedules, using the crew request entry system, Carmen InterBids. We also plan to use the builtin simulation capacity quite extensively and for me, this is where I see the big strategic value. Reducing operational cost is of course important, but being able to react swiftly to market changes is critical.”

Carmen’s CEO, Per Norén, said, “Britannia has a very lean operation together with two seasons that have dramatically different business requirements. Many competitors would find this challenging, however Carmen’s planning products are able to be implemented with unrivalled flexibility and robustness. The project is off to a great start with very good cooperation between Britannia and Carmen staff who are already performing the pairing planning for some crew groups to produce early business benefits.”