With the arrival of COVID-19 in 2020, many airports worldwide were affected by more than 90%. What was initially thought would be a matter of months, today; almost two years later remains the standard despite high levels of vaccination, prevention measures and mechanisms of constant monitoring of international travelers. New challenges such as lack of pilots, reincorporation of equipment, high demand, absence of crews, new variants, among many others keep airport managers on constant alert before an eventual closure.
One of the lessons that we could define as of great importance, is that without a doubt downtime produces high maintenance costs and without a constant flow of income leads us to a famous phrase “time is money”. While the aircraft stopped operating, the operational departments, now with less workload, could see how the expensive systems that were designed to reduce process times, are not cheap and in some opportunities were not fully integrated as they seemed.
This is the case of the billing systems and payment methods-tools used by airlines to carry out their operations. It is difficult to think that costs billing systems and operations can take several days, even weeks to generate invoices for airport services provided to commercial and cargo airlines. Even in places where a pre-calculated deposit of operations is made, there is a problem in sight: those resources cannot be available until there is billing and reconciliation of services, returning to the origin of the issue, the time required to invoice.
This is when not only technology comes into play, but the proven use of it during pandemic times. An increase in online business operations, working from home, online shopping, mobile delivery applications and self-service made a digital order make its way thru traditional administrative face-to-face methods.
It is possible today, using 40% cheaper systems, to reduce by 75% the billing times of aeronautical services and then by coupling to a simple online payment digital tool; conciliation and access to resources in a matter of hours. This has been demonstrated in thousands of transactions from PAY AIMS, a unique tool specifically designed to attack billing times and provide real-time self-service solutions.
Let’s take a simple example, say that an airport X with a traffic of 10 million passengers a year has revenues of about 200 million USD. Airlines deposit an advance for their operations, but even when using advanced systems (which cost 2 million USD a year), it bills every 2 weeks and then takes two more weeks to receive the funds. This means that flights made the first days of a month are actually paid for after 30 days. Now imagine that with a system like PAY AIMS, immediately after taking off, the airline (and its financial managers ) receive an alert on their phones with the invoice in digital and have advanced verification mechanisms (authorized signatures) where they can verify, report any adjustment and pay in different currencies for those services. In total, the full operation could be performed in as little as 72 hours. This is a simple example that could lead to more employment cases even with commercial premises, store concessions, etc.
This leaves us open the question that any airport manager can ask himself to know if he is using time and technology in his favor:
How long does it take to bill?
Since the bill is issued, how long can I have the resources?
How much can I produce per year if I improve those times?
