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Virgin Blue may sue over check-in woes

Airline Virgin Blue may sue supplier Navitaire following Sunday's check-in system disaster, which is still being felt by the airlines' customers.
Written by Josh Taylor, Contributor

Airline Virgin Blue may sue supplier Navitaire following Sunday's check-in system disaster, which is still being felt by the airlines' customers.

Virgin Blue plane

(31.08.2008 image by David McKelvey, CC2.0)

At 8am on Sunday, Virgin Blue's check-in and reservations system New Skies, provided by Accenture subsidiary Navitaire, suffered a hardware failure that forced staff to switch to a manual check-in system. The system crash led to long delays and flight cancellations for thousands of passengers on Sunday, and although the system was brought back up later that same day, the results of rescheduling flights led to further delays and flight cancellations into Monday.

Some customers unable to catch flights were forced to stay in hotels for two nights.

As services began to return to normal today, Virgin Blue group executive Andrew David said legal action against Navitaire for the ordeal is being considered.

"The service agreement Virgin Blue has with Navitaire requires any mission critical system outages to be remedied within a short period of time," David told reporters in Brisbane on Monday. "This did not happen in this instance."

Navitaire's parent company Accenture told ZDNet Australia yesterday that it did not comment on service agreements it had made with clients including Virgin Blue, but indicated that the delay in bringing the system back up was in part due to testing.

"Navitaire and Virgin Blue worked together to bring the systems back online, which included detailed testing prior to turning them back on," Accenture said in a statement.

Virgin boss Richard Branson apologised for the chaos, telling Network Seven in Jakarta it had been a "terrible 24 hours".

AAP contributed to this article

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