Norway - New Zealand

Message queues, Kafka topics will get me there

Today I am traveling to Taranaki, New Zealand to visit my sister and her boyfriend.

The trip began in Asker, Norway, with a train ride to Gardermoen airport, just outside Oslo. The first flight is a short, 2-hour journey to Heathrow. After a 2-hour break to stretch, there is a rather long flight to Singapore, lasting 13 hours. In Singapore, there is another short layover of just under 2 hours, before the next flight to Auckland, New Zealand. This flight is just under 10 hours, still rather long. From Auckland, there is a Dash 8 plane waiting to take me New Plymouth, which took 50 minutes after a 2-hour break. Finally, I made my way to my final destination, Taranaki.

The great thing about the flight is that it is handled as a single booking, with one booking reference triggering events to SAS, Singapore Airlines, and Air New Zealand. This information is visible in each of the apps.

Singapore Airlines has launched a new site called mySQupgrade, where you can purchase last-minute upgrades for a discounted price. Once payment is made, the events flow back to SAS, who then update the boarding pass accordingly.

This makes me wonder about the number of queues and Kafka topics that I need to go through to make all of this work. My luggage will be tagged and hopefully follow my flights by using magic performed by some integration developers many years ago. I wonder if it has a correlation ID that consists of my bookingref and ticket number when the tag is scanned between different luggage handlers in various countries?

Supposed to be on vacation, but all I see is the ticket desk with their online systems fetching data through integrations. The monitors showing flights poll for updates every 5 minutes; why not real-time?

Despite the long journey, traveling to visit loved ones is always worth it. The excitement of exploring new places and spending time with family makes the effort worthwhile. Plus, the convenience of having a single booking reference for multiple flights and being able to purchase last-minute upgrades is a game-changer for seamless travel experiences. The airport is also an interesting place to observe various integrated systems and architecture.