Reservations and guest services for a Latin American airline group

The client is a Latin American airline group headquartered in the region, operating across several countries with a large Spanish-speaking passenger base and growing English and Portuguese demand. Reservations and guest services are central to both revenue and reputation.

The airline's reservations operation was slow and its attrition was crippling. Average speed of answer stood at 386 seconds, and agent attrition ran at roughly 64% annualised, which meant a permanently inexperienced workforce making complex fare and routing decisions.

Attrition was the deeper problem. Reservations is a knowledge-intensive role, and an operation that loses two-thirds of its agents a year never accumulates the expertise that good reservations service requires. Every metric downstream suffered from it.

Disruption handling, the rebookings and rerouting during weather and operational events, was where the inexperience hurt most, precisely when passengers most needed competent help.

The airline had cycled through providers and locations without solving the attrition, and had concluded that workforce stability, not training, was the missing ingredient.

Corpshore Mexico proposed Mérida specifically for its low attrition. The city's stable, loyal workforce and its quality of life produce turnover far below the industry norm, and for a knowledge-intensive reservations operation that stability is the whole point.

Corpshore proposed to measure the engagement partly on attrition and tenure, not only on service level, aligning the commercial relationship to the root cause the airline had identified. No competing bid centred stability the way Corpshore did.

Seventy agents in Mérida, native Spanish with English and Portuguese distributed across the team, plus six team leaders and three QA analysts. Coverage is 24 hours for disruption support, with reservations concentrated in daytime and evening. Agents complete a five-week onboarding on the airline's reservation system, fare rules, routing and disruption procedures.

Stability as the core strategy. The engagement was built around retaining agents long enough to become expert, using Mérida's naturally low attrition, a strong onboarding and a career path that rewards tenure and knowledge.

Disruption as a specialism. A subset of the most tenured agents was developed into a disruption-handling specialism, so the hardest interactions go to the most capable people.

Knowledge as an asset. As agents stayed and accumulated expertise, the operation built a depth of fare, routing and disruption knowledge that a high-turnover operation cannot.

Joint calibration with the airline. Quality is calibrated with the airline's own team against a shared standard.

Average speed of answer fell from 386 seconds to 56 seconds by month 12, and service level rose from 73% to 93%.

Agent attrition fell from roughly 64% to 19% annualised, which the airline identifies as the change that made every other improvement possible.

Reservations conversion rose as tenured, knowledgeable agents converted more enquiries into bookings, turning the service operation into a revenue contributor.