Comair Taps Google Cloud for Digital Transformation

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Google Cloud is teaming up with Comair, operator of the British Airways brand and the Kulula budget carrier in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

The collaboration will accelerate the aviation group’s digital transformation plans, in line with its mission to deliver seamless travel experiences for customers and help the travel industry regain momentum, according to Google cloud this month.

Comair completed its infrastructure optimization plans as it migrated six labor-intensive, on-premises data centers to Google Cloud. 

The migration of traditional IT infrastructure enables the airline to run key workloads that include important financial data, secure customer records, airplane navigation information, and more.

Google Cloud helped increase the airline’s efficiency during high-traffic seasons and peak travel times, as it needed to scale to meet consumer travel demand. 

Comair is also now better positioned to build a data foundation with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) using Google Cloud tools. In particular, Comair will be able to analyze customer data in a deeper manner, creating personalized products and services, opening up more opportunities and improving the customer experience.

Google Cloud is supporting Comair in modernizing its legacy applications, such as its kulula.com booking application, and using prominent tools like Firebase and Flutter to upgrade its functionalities and provide the scalability. Comair customers now turn to the kulula application as the main channel to interact with the airline, following upgrades that have enabled more seamless booking and flight payments.

Comair’s digital transformation journey started before the pandemic and was accelerated by it, but the airline took a head start to digitization before the global lockdown was even in sight by migrating to the cloud, said Niral Patel, director of Google Cloud Africa. 

Also, by accelerating cloud adoption, Comair is able to reduce processing power for its systems and become more sustainable.

Avsharn Bachoo, chief information officer of Comair, said, “The sooner you digitally transform, the quicker you’re able to respond to uncertain times. As a result, the digital maturity measures we’ve put in place have helped drive a post-lockdown recovery.”