SriLankan Airlines wins National Project Management Excellence Silver Award

SriLankan Airlines was honoured at the recent National Project Management Excellence Awards 2018, winning the Silver Award for ‘Best Managed Project in the Travel and Logistics Sector’ in recognition of its revolutionary ‘Book now Pay later’ project, which opened up the world of air travel for persons without credit cards to book air tickets over the internet.

SriLankan Airlines Head of Information Technology Chamara Perera, who received the award on behalf of the airline at the ceremony held recently, said: “This accolade is of great significance as SriLankan Airlines competed with leading corporate organisations in the island. It is a testament to the strategic vision, instrumental leadership and teamwork demonstrated by everyone who helped the airline to implement an array of customer-centric digital initiatives. ‘Book now Pay later’ was a project that involved multiple departments at the Airline, including SriLankan IT and e-Commerce.” 

One of the most impressive in a string of innovative and cost-effective ICT solutions to be designed completely in-house by a team of subject matter experts having airline domain knowledge, ‘Book now Pay later’ is an amazingly simple solution which integrates airline’s IT systems with several local banks and foreign exchange houses and brings unprecedented convenience to air travellers. It is especially designed for those who don’t have credit cards, those whose credit limits are insufficient for their travel requirements, or credit card holders who simply don’t want to use their cards to make purchases online.       

Through this customer-centric system, travellers in Sri Lanka can book their tickets online at www.srilankan.com for any flight. When the customer chooses the ‘pay later’ option, they receive a confirmation e-mail with a booking reservation number and guidelines on how to make the payment. The system will hold the booking up to 48 hours for the payment to be made, which can now be done through all branches of Bank of Ceylon, Cargills Bank, Commercial Bank, Hatton National Bank and Sampath Bank, and all Cargills Food City outlets island-wide. This facility has also been introduced in the United Arab Emirates by SriLankan through Al Ansari Exchange, the UAE-based foreign exchange and worldwide money-transfer company.

The National Project Management Excellence Awards 2018 was presented by the Project Management Institute Sri Lanka Chapter to honour achievements of the best practitioners of project management in eight categories, who have made outstanding contributions to the development of the country or a large community of the country, and have also improved the practice of project management whilst demonstrating leadership and initiative by advancing project management concepts, techniques, best practices and theories. PMI is the globally recognised, leading professional membership association for the project, program and portfolio management profession with over 2.9 million professionals across the globe.

‘Book now Pay later’ also won a merit award under the ‘In-house Application’ category at the National Best Quality ICT Awards in 2017 conducted by the British Computer Society. The SriLankan IT department is currently certified for ISO/IEC 27001: 2015 for Information Security Management, ISO/IEC 20000-1:2011 for Service Management and ISO 9001: 2015 for Quality Management Systems.