Improvement of Boarding Processes and Development of Cabin Baggage Control Systems Turkish Airlines
Bilkent UniversityIndustrial Engineering DepartmentImprovement of Boarding Processes and Development of Cabin Baggage Control SystemsTurkish AirlinesMay 2013Team Members:Pınar OkutgenMehmet Mithat ÇınarNur Selin ErbengiÖzgün ŞahinTuğçe BenliAcademic Advisors:Asst. Prof. Ayşe KocabıyıkoğluIndustrial Advisor:Elif Balaban YakayAbstractIn the airline industry any complication in the boarding processes decreases customer satisfaction and increases the ground service costs. Therefore, development of the boarding processes is the key element of cost reduction and customer satisfaction.In the following report, problems and critical objectives about the boarding processes of Turkish Airlines are explained in detail. For this purpose, system description with the general information about the company is stated. Also, by defining problems about boarding processes, the current system is analyzed. By making literature survey and sector analysis, certain solutions are proposed and validated through observations. Finally, project results are mentioned to show the development boarding processes and improvement its’ sub-processes
System Description and AnalysisInformation about Turkish AirlinesTurkish Airlines is the national flag carrier airline of Turkey. The main hub of Turkish Airlines is at Istanbul Atatürk Airport (IST). Turkish Airline has quite a large extent of flight destinations, which include Europe, Middle East, Far East, South Africa, North Africa, South, and North America. In 2011, Turkish Airlines carried about 32 Million passengers, who flied to around 200 different destination points (international and domestic [1]. Currently, Turkish Airlines is the 3rd largest airline among European airlines and the 7th largest airline among all the airlines in the world in terms of number of destinations. Furthermore, the total number of flights they operate monthly is around 25.000 with over 200 of fleet capacity [2] (Appendix 1). The effect of the increase in the number of destinations versus weekly frequency that is distributed by years is shown detailed in Appendix The market share of Turkish Airlines in the international market is about 47 % and the corresponding figure in the domestic market is about 50 % (Appendix 3). Moreover, starting from 1 April 2008, Turkish Airlines became a member of Star Alliance, which is the first, largest and the most prestigious global airline alliance in the world. [1]Turkish Airlines’s aim is to become the first 5-star Airline Company of Europe. In order to gain competitive advantage, Turkish Airlines gives priority to customer satisfaction and cost reduction. All complaints that are received from customers are evaluated; solutions about these complaints are proposed in order to provide better service to the customers.