The travel industry is uniquely, and very visibly, at the mercy of having a ‘Really Bad Day’ – capital letters intended.
The industry is vulnerable to all the challenges of operational logistics, IT failure, staffing rotas or industrial relations similar to most other businesses.
However, most other industries aren’t left with unhappy customers with literally nowhere else to go if an incident shuts down transport or accommodation.
VP for EMEA at PagerDuty.
What can go wrong?
The consequences of a technical hiccup in aviation are magnified because of its reliance on tightly integrated systems. A few seconds of downtime can cascade into hours of disruption.
This July’s UK air traffic control incident is a case in point as a 20-minute failure grounded flights across the country, with knock-on effects causing cancellations and delays stretching into the next day.
It doesn’t take long before a minor system glitch morphs into a crisis stranding passengers, clogging terminals and dominating headlines.
The fault lasted only 20 minutes, but this was enough to ground planes across multiple airports. It caused 150 flight cancellations and delays, with calls for the head of air traffic control to resign.
Airlines, airports and travel operators of all modes of transport, along with their various partners, are under immense pressure to build resilience into every layer of their IT operations, or ITOps.
The challenge is that these organizations are not just managing flight schedules and ticketing platforms, but also supply chain systems, baggage handling, partner integrations and customer service channels, all held up by a complex tech stack of APIs and services from in-house and third-parties.
If a booking engine falters, it doesn’t just affect one website. It ripples through hotel reservations, car hire firms, loyalty programs and more.
For customers, that means disrupted holidays. For businesses, it means revenue loss, reputational damage and mounting costs in compensation and remediation.
What makes these incidents particularly damaging is their visibility. A manufacturing firm can absorb a short IT outage behind the scenes, but a travel company has no such cover. Travelers tweet from airport lounges, frustrated passengers speak to TV crews and regulators demand explanations.
The scrutiny is instant and relentless, and that public spotlight is what turns IT downtime in this sector into a national story rather than just an operational problem.
What could have gone right?
Building resilience in such a high-stakes environment requires more than just traditional backup systems.
The focus has to shift towards anticipating problems, containing them quickly and preventing them from spiraling into public crises.
This is where modern IT operations practices come into play.
Continuous monitoring is the starting point. By streaming telemetry in real time, teams can spot early warning signals that might otherwise go unnoticed until customers are already affected.
Automated responses, such as self-healing runbooks, can then deal with many incidents at machine-speed before they escalate.
Where human intervention is needed, playbooks for cross-team coordination mean the right experts are mobilized immediately, rather than wasting precious minutes deciding who should respond.
Equally important is preparing for the unpredictable. Resilient organizations rehearse their incident response much like airline pilots practice emergency procedures.
This builds the muscle memory that allows teams to act with clarity in the midst of chaos.
When everyone knows their role, downtime is reduced, communication is clearer, and confidence is restored faster – both internally and in the eyes of the travelling public.
Resilience is not just a technical concern either. It extends into customer experience.
Clear, timely updates delivered through multiple channels can soften the blow of delays and cancellations. Transparency reduces frustration and shows accountability, even if the outage itself cannot be avoided.
For travel businesses, winning back trust often hinges on how they communicate as much as on how quickly systems are restored.
Failure happens, recovery is where organisations shine
Ultimately, the risk of outages will never be eliminated entirely in ITOps, but the way organizations prepare for and respond to them makes the difference.
In the travel sector, where customer journeys are built on precise timing and trust, resilience is a business differentiator as customers can easily swap providers if they hope it will save their holiday or essential travel.
Companies that can maintain continuity in the face of disruption stand to protect not only revenue, but reputation. Passengers remember which airlines or booking platforms left them stranded, and which ones kept them informed and moving.
Regulators, too, are taking note, increasingly expecting operators to demonstrate robust contingency planning.
Investing in the technology, the training and the cultural changes needed for resilient IT operations should be seen as a source of long-term competitive advantage.
With proactive monitoring, automation and rehearsed response plans, travel businesses can turn potential crises into manageable events, preserving customer loyalty and keeping the wider ecosystem running smoothly.
In an industry where a few minutes of downtime can snowball into a news cycle covering nothing else, resilience is the quality that ensures organizations are judged by how they recover, not by how they fail.
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