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Source: ONE News -
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Air New Zealand will meet IBM on Monday over a computer crash which crippled the airline's services and disrupted thousands of passengers on Sunday.
An IT outage crashed airport check-in systems, as well as on-line bookings and call centre systems about 9.30am Sunday, affecting more than 10,000 passengers and throwing airports into chaos.
The airline says most systems were restored around 1.30pm, but the passenger backlog did not start to clear until self check-in kiosks were up and running again about 3.30pm.
Air NZ's short haul airlines group general manager Bruce Parton told Radio New Zealand the fault appeared to have been caused by a power failure, followed by a delay in a backup generator running.
Air NZ would meet with IBM on Monday to look at what the issue was and "to get some confidence that such an occurrence won't happen again", he says.
The airline used manual check-in systems and opened about 10 extra counters while the system was down, and the manual process was far slower than electronic check-ins, Parton says.
"We'll be going through today and analysing and reflecting on our performance... We'll certainly take this very seriously."
"Ten thousand-plus customers affected on the last day of holidays and millions of dollars of revenue not going through our online site, you can be assured we'll be having some very serious discussions with IBM today."
But most passengers delayed by the outage were unlikely to get compensation.
"We'll go through that today. Most people moved within an hour and so it doesn't hit the threshold (for compensation)," Parton says.
Some passengers booked on cancelled flights to Wellington and Christchurch might be eligible.
"There's pretty clear guidelines on it and we'll just work
through with those customers."
Some passengers were critical of the airline for not notifying
individual travellers of the problems and likely delays.
Air New Zealand welcomed customer feedback about the information it provided and what could be improved in the case of future outages, Parton says.
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