Air Malta CIO: APIs helped us to return to profitability for the first time in 18 years

The airline, which had no formal approach to APIs, needed new ways to compete in a crowded market

Malta, an island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea near Italy, is a popular tourist destination, accessible by boat or plane. With a population of under 500,000 people, the market for flights to and from the island is fiercely competitive: something that presented a challenge to the island's national airline, Air Malta, until recently.

Like its home, Air Malta is small but its reach is wide: it owns just 10 aircraft, but flies to 45 destinations across Europe and North Africa and carries 2 million passengers a year.

"Given our limitations in terms of size, we cannot exploit full economies of scale," CIO Alan Talbot told Delta. "And given that we also have to represent Malta, because we are one of the island's strongest brands as well, we're ultimately dependent on what the perception of Malta is and what it can offer.

"Besides that, we are not a low cost carrier, and we are a point-to-point carrier. So even though this makes us quite unique to a certain extent, it still places us at a disadvantage in a highly competitive environment. So change was necessary in order to ensure, or at least to drive towards, sustainability [of the company] more than anything else."

Competition in Malta's airline industry, which is served by around 40 companies, is fierce. "You can imagine it is extremely competitive, trying to carve out a niche and to retain it," Talbot told us.

"We have to be a bit disruptive, and obviously we had to seize any feasible opportunities that came along. Besides that, we also wanted to increase our digital distribution in order to increase our revenue, and one of the ways we could achieve that was to create a form of connectivity, both internally between different applications in order to drive towards usability and efficiencies; but also with third parties, in order to be able to provide access to our inventory and any other resources we could sell, the services that we could sell, so that we make up for the limitations of our size and our positioning."

Air Malta adopted MuleSoft to connect its legacy systems with new technologies and to add new partners. The company worked with MuleSoft's Maltese reseller Ricston - "ironically" as its first Maltese customer - and built an application network using the Anypoint Platform, connecting third-party SaaS, e-commerce platforms, CRM and airline booking systems with APIs.

One such system was Salesforce, which Air Malta has now hooked into its reservations system. "Practically every reservation" created with the company now has automatically has a record created in Salesforce. Other benefits have included the ability to roll out joint offers with other airlines, provide real-time information to customers and make faster modifications to flight arrangements.

The company had previously not had a formal approach to APIs, but knew that it needed an orchestration layer. Talbot and his team researched many products before deciding that MuleSoft was the best fit; he called the Anypoint Platform "a sandbox for innovation," adding, "We could test things out without impacting any of our operational environments. That gives you so much flexibility that you can run several scenarios there and you carry several possibilities to development and by also integrating with it easily… This is the flexibility that it gives; it offers a sandboxing environment for the whole organisation, whereby we can test across the different functions to try things out."

Although he does not put the credit entirely on MuleSoft's shoulders, Talbot said that the companies' work together has been a factor in Air Malta's return to profitability - for the first time in 18 years.

"The last couple of years were quite significant for us as an airline, because after a significant amount of change, we've managed to return our figures back to the black. That is something that we have struggled with for a significant number of years, so the reality is we are extremely happy in managing to achieve this result."

Air Malta's operations are now running at high speed, and they even have their own "integration junkies" in the technical department. Talbot says:

"Through the integration capabilities...we've achieved certain results and certain solutions that effectively made it much easier than it was a few years back. There is a firm acknowledgement and consensus that there is success after success.

"MuleSoft has been part of the success that we've been building and actually using with positive results, and hopefully it will assist us in building our application network further, and can translate in the future into a much more sustainable Air Malta."

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