London Luton Airport: Stopping the unhealthy race for holiday

London Luton Airport is the UK’s fifth-largest airport with 18 million passengers traveling through in 2019. Prior to edays, London Luton Airport was using a manual paper and spreadsheet-based system to book and track holidays which was not very user-friendly. Employees would submit paper holiday request forms, then the availability of holiday during the request period would be checked against a spreadsheet and either approved or denied by their absence team.

This system for processing absence came with its fair share of problems. One of the biggest issues was the rather unfair first come, first served nature. Employees had to be on shift to hand in their holiday request slip as it could not be done remotely. This meant employees had to often wait for their next shift to submit their request and lost out to one of their colleagues that were on shift.

Another issue that London Luton Airport had come across was that as their organization grew, their manual holiday tracking methods became time-consuming and hard to maintain due to the sheer number of updates required on a daily basis. It was not 100% accurate and open to human error, making it not the most efficient method to manage large groups of employees.

To address these issues, London Luton Airport set out to procure a solution that could improve upon their current processes. Following the competitive tender, edays emerged as the absence management solution that could help them take their absence management processes to the next level, with London Luton Airport citing its user-friendliness and simplicity among the key reasons for their selection. edays and London Luton Airport worked together to identify three main project drivers:

The first was to deploy a user-friendly online absence management solution that would allow their workforce to easily book holiday anytime, anyplace, on any device.

The second was to implement a solution that could assist them with creating and introducing new working shift patterns.

The third and final project driver was to introduce a system that would allow them to track and manage holidays more easily, allowing them to see how many employees have a holiday booked for a certain period.

Since implementing edays absence intelligence platform, London Luton Airport has seen vast improvements to their holiday booking processes. Gone are the days where employees were racing to submit holiday slips, as online holiday booking has replaced them. Employees can now book holiday anytime, anyplace, on any device, removing the first-come, first-served nature their previous system encouraged.

London Luton Airport’s visibility over absence has also greatly increased, allowing them to easily see who has a holiday booked for a certain time and to view and edit working shift patterns. Their absence data has also become far more reliable, giving them a much more accurate picture of planned absence in their organization when running reports.

In addition, when London Luton Airport introduced a new 28 week, 28 crew shift pattern, edays engineers developed the platform so that it could facilitate this need at no additional cost.
London Luton Airport is exploring integrations of the edays systems with payroll and their sickness platform FirstCare, ensuring all three systems are working together as efficiently as possible.