With thousands of travelers stranded at Pacific Northwest airports, one Seattle company is doing its part to keep people informed. If you've requested a flight alert from Alaska, Delta, Northwest or other airlines in the past week, you've probably come in contact with Varolii.

The 8-year-old company's communications software powers the text, voice and email messaging alert systems for six of the top 10 airlines in the country, many of which have been forced to cancel or delay flights for passengers at the Seattle-Tacoma and Portland airports over the past few days.

"Volume has spiked quite a bit," said Varolii spokeswoman Robin Rees in an interview today. The company delivered hundreds of thousand of alerts on behalf of airlines from Friday to Sunday, a rate that was about 60 percent higher than the previous weekend. As of Monday afternoon, Rees said the system was working well and no major glitches had occurred.

"We have pretty high capacity," said Rees, adding that they plan for the holiday travel period with increased server capacity.

Bad weather also hampered travel in the Northeast and Midwest over the past few days, meaning that travelers across the country were turning to email and text-message alerts to get critical information. (I used Northwest Airline's alert system and other technologies as I sat on the SeaTac tarmac for seven hours Sunday waiting for my flight to take off.)

Airlines certainly get a bad rap for customer service, some of it much deserved. (I spent 35 minutes on hold trying to reach a Northwest customer service rep yesterday.)

But Rees said there are new ways that airlines can use technology to reduce customer frustration. For example, she said some of Varolii's airline customers are calling passengers directly on their home phones to notify them of the changes in the flight hours before they arrive at the airport. If that message doesn't go through, a text message or voice call can be directed to a cell phone. Something as simple as a gate change also can be communicated to passengers in advance, removing an unnecessary walk to a distant terminal.

No one benefits when people show up for a flight that has been canceled or delayed. It costs airlines money and creates irate travelers, some of whom were on full display in the lines of SeaTac Sunday.

Varolii, which withdrew plans for an initial public offering earlier this year due to tough market conditions, is one of those companies that could perform well in a recession since it helps companies save money on customer service efforts. More than 350 companies use the technology, including banks, utilities and mortgage companies. It posted revenue of $68 million last year, up from $51 million in the previous year.

Rees says they are expanding efforts in the airline category, one of the company's biggest. Next up will be technologies that flight crews can use to communicate with one another about their status, an employee-to-employee alerting tool that could also help airlines save money by incorporating more efficient scheduling.