Virgin, Tiger and Jetstar airline check-in system fails again

Airline passengers are experiencing delays at Australian airports because of a failure of the check-in system used by Jetstar, Virgin and Tiger Airways.

The Navitaire check-in system failed on Saturday morning, creating delays as airline staff manually checked passengers in for flights.

Virgin Australia spokeswoman Melissa Thomson said the outage was affecting all Australian airports as well as online bookings and web check-in processes.

"We are working very very hard so we can get people on their way," Thomson told AAP.

"People in our airports are being delayed as a result of the outage."

The company has since indicated that systems have been restored.

Jetstar also reported that the failure was affecting its check-in systems, however its services have since been restored.

A spokesperson for Navitaire parent company Accenture told ZDNet that the outage had been caused by a power failure at a datacentre in Sydney.

"A power failure occurred in a third party data centre in Sydney which impacted the Navitaire reservation systems. We are working closely with all impacted clients to restore services as quickly as possible."

Virgin Australia first upgraded to the New Skies system in 2009, however after a massive failure of the system, that led to an 11-day outage beginning in in September 2010, the company was not pleased with Navitaire's response, and had threatened to sue Accenture. Ultimately the case was settled out of court in a deal estimated to be worth between AU$18 million and AU$20 million.

Thomson said Virgin was migrating to a new IT system next year and would no longer be using Navitaire. The company announced in November 2011 that it would be rolling out the Sabre Customer Sales and Service system.