Low-cost Southern African airline FlySafair is increasingly turning to technology to maintain operational efficiencies, enhance customer experience and ensure its low-cost operational profile.

From predictive and condition-based monitoring to backend technologies and customer facing applications, FlySafair is incorporating various technologies and AI-driven innovation to continue building a competitive airline with a model based on efficiency, tight turnarounds, high aircraft use and streamlined operations.

“Technology is not just a support function; it is the foundation that enables everything else,” said FlySafair chief marketing officer Kirby Gordon.

FlySafair’s technology strategy focuses on two integrated pillars, namely passenger-facing simplicity: creating tools that are intuitive and genuinely useful, and internal operational efficiency: simplifying backend processes, removing friction and building systems that scale.

The company’s ambitions are not only about deploying new tools, but also about how those tools are introduced, how they affect people and how organisations build the culture to support them.

“Automating a backend process often opens the door to giving passengers more control . . . while building a customer-facing feature forces you to rethink how your systems work behind the scenes.”

Over the past 11 years, the low-cost carrier has introduced solutions such as WhatsApp boarding passes, user-friendly booking management on web and app and its flagship agentic AI customer service interface, Lindi.

Continuous improvements have been made to ensure seamless, and stress-free, flight booking management, with passengers now having greater independent and efficient control over their bookings.

The various new self-service options, for example, have had a positive impact for WhatsApp agents in the FlySafair call centre, which has had about 11 000 calls diverted from the call centre as customers take advantage of the self-service options to make flight changes.

This frees up capacity in the call centre to help customers with more complex needs.

Using the Manage My Booking option, passengers can change or modify parts of their trip while keeping everything else intact, as well as add passengers and make simplified group bookings in minutes.

FlySafair has also introduced auto check-in intelligence, which automatically re-checks-in passengers if no further changes are made to the booking after they have checked out.

Since it was introduced in March 2025, this smart automation feature has helped 1 325 passengers avoid missing their flights.

Unaccompanied minor bookings have also moved online, processing 767 bookings and saving 191 hours of manual work since July.

FlySafair’s AI-powered service assistance platform, Lindi, has helped customers with 1 664 bookings, including 943 flight changes, 275 seat changes, 273 changes to personal details and 321 flight cancellations, since its launch in May.

“The goal was not to replace human service but [for Lindi] to handle straightforward, repetitive tasks that were tying up our WhatsApp agents. Lindi can manage cancellations, answer frequently asked questions, process single-passenger return bookings, change flights and update seat selections.

As the group enters its twelfth year of operation, FlySafair also plans to introduce Voice AI later this year, which will allow customers using the app to talk to the app to check in, set reminders and get responses for frequently asked questions.

By the end of this year, customers will also be able to make payments through Google, Samsung and Apple Pay on the app, which will streamline the payment process.

The broader goal is to extend self-service into areas such as loyalty programmes and travel insurance, always with the aim of reducing friction rather than adding complexity.

In addition, FlySafair is expanding automation into more complex back-office functions, exploring inflight WiFi and mobile payment integrations.

To automate the key backend processes, the airline deployed seven behind-the-scenes robotic process automations in partnership with Datafinity.

“Take group bookings. A tour operator books 50 passengers across multiple flights. Manually, that is a time-consuming process. Our automation, which we named Hercules (a nod to our cargo heritage), completes it in five minutes.”

FlySafair currently runs two Hercules robots, managing everything from group bookings to billing reconciliation, handling the “heavy lifting” so that employees can focus on work that requires “judgement, creativity and care”.

AI is unlocking efficiencies, from simplifying refund approvals to analysing aircraft performance and maintenance needs and everything between.

It is used to eliminate repetitive, low-value tasks and to empower teams with advanced tools to focus on higher-value, human-centric work, with agents playing a new and critical role: handling complex customer cases, auditing AI outputs and training the systems to remain accurate and on-brand.

“Every initiative starts with the same question: does this eliminate friction or create it? It means constantly asking: where are the friction points? Where do processes break down? Where are we relying on heroic individual effort instead of smart systems? It means doing the basics brilliantly, with seamless interaction between people and processes. Technology that disappears into the background because it just works.”

The business case goes beyond customer satisfaction.

Low-cost carriers now represent 33% of global airline seats, driven largely by operational efficiencies enabled by technology. Airlines such as Delta, for example, have reduced unscheduled maintenance by 20% using predictive AI.

FlySafair’s aircraft have millions of sensors, each providing operational performance data for the aircraft, from its altitude and temperature, to its output and vibrations, besides others, delivering a full set of data to be analysed.

There is a lot of work at the moment with various different machine learning and AI enterprises, and the company is working with a new technology provider to obtain more insight to leverage the vast volumes of data for predictive maintenance and condition-based monitoring, Gordon said.

Further, cloud-native systems and digital twins are enabling real-time data sharing between aircraft and ground operations, improving route planning and disruption management.

The carrier is also implementing smart SIM management and local breakout routing to reduce latency and improve network responsiveness.

“These are not glamorous innovations, but they matter when you are trying to coordinate time-sensitive operations across multiple airports.”

Since its launch in 2014, FlySafair has scaled to a fleet of 37 Boeing 737 aircraft and operates over 1 250 flights each week, offering 230 000 seats to travellers across the country every week.