Travel Innovations Blog

Travel Innovations has now completed the integration of holiday offers data and descriptive content for Olympic Holidays and Holiday Malta, to increase the range of products available on the Hot Holiday Offers consumer web site.

Travel Affinity operate the Tour Operator B2C distribution and sales platform, which enables consumers to search and book holidays from a range of smaller companies, who are specialist tour operators for the destinations they cover.

Integration involves taking daily availability and pricing feeds from the Tour Operator reservation systems and integrating them into the Travel Innovations data cache and internet booking engine, ti.Portal. These are then auto-matched with the Holiday Descriptive information held in the ti.CMS – a travel-specific, cross-media Content Management System.

The Hot Holiday Offers site utilises both these systems to drive the search and results functionality and content within the site, along with booking functionality. TI have then added Blogging functionality using Wordpress, for Travel Affinity to be able to feature supporting Holiday Destination Articles and pages for Search Engine Optimization.

Travel Innovations supply innovative travel technology to the travel & tourism industry.

Today’s UK Travel Marketplace is extremely polarised, with around 75% of bookings being taken by Brands owned by either TUI or Thomas Cook.  The remaining 25% is fought over by around 2000 other Travel companies and specialist Tour Operators.

How can smaller Tour Operators compete in today’s travel marketplace?

The challenge facing these smaller tour operators is how to become visible in the marketplace, either through Travel Agents, or directly to the consumer.  They obviously don’t have anywhere near the same level of travel marketing resource available, so how do they compete? 

Many smaller travel companies also offer very specific, or specialised, products.  Many don’t even use computer reservation systems to manage their contracts, product information and sales processes, making it even harder to distribute information to Agents and Consumers, or enable their holiday web site to be a dynamic Sales channel.

Medium-sized companies – who do tend to have Reservation Systems – may opt to include their product on some of the industry’s “Distribution Platforms”.  These are companies that take data feeds from Reservation Systems and aggregate pricing and availability into a single source of data for Agents to Search, View and Book product, using a PC-based Sales Tool.  Companies offering this type of service include Comtec Europe, Multicom, Micros Systems, Vertical Systems, Traveltek and Hot Dog.

However, distribution systems pose yet another challenge for the smaller Tour Operator, as getting product onto these platforms costs money.   And, which one do they choose?  Each has a share of Travel Agency coverage in the UK and each one consumes a chunk of their available marketing resource.  Again, the cost quickly becomes prohibitive to many smaller companies and they remain invisible in these channels.

In our research, we have found that smaller companies tend to resort (no pun intended) to a combination of direct marketing, traditional advertising and their own web site; relying heavily on customer loyalty and word-of-mouth.  The odds of competing on a ‘level playing field’ for these types of travel companies are nil.

Hot Holiday Offers – a new travel distribution / sales web portal for tour operators

One solution aimed at filling this gap is a new Distribution/Sales web portal, to be launched in April, offering direct bookings for consumers.  HotHolidayOffers.co.uk – built by Travel Innovations Ltd – will provide a new platform, where Medium sized travel companies can supply data for inclusion, whilst Smaller travel companies are able to submit their offers via a simple data entry system.

Another interesting feature of HotHolidayOffers, is that it will provide a much more ‘content-led’ Holiday Search for the consumer, as opposed to the ‘price-led’ approach that most Travel web sites seem to focus on.  Full pricing options are only presented to the customer when they have chosen a specific holiday description that interests them.  Reservations are then taken on the site and sent directly to the Tour Operator concerned.

The portal offers a whole new opportunity for the missing ‘level playing field’ for smaller Travel Company products.  It will be interesting to watch its progress.

Alan Kersley

Travel brochure design doesn’t need to be a headache, although it often is!  Even when the travel brochure is finished, often the effort is then duplicated for the travel website or promotional material. The key to streamlining the management of travel brochure data is organisation.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could enter your content just once into a single database, and then be able to use it for ALL of your distribution channels, i.e. travel websites, printed travel brochures, online eBrochures and more? No more copy and pasting between different computer software applications, saving you time therefore money, and leaving less room for error.

Travel CMS

The ti.CMS application has been specifically built for the Travel Industry. This Travel Content Management System (CMS) aims to take the stress out of your travel data management headaches. Here are just some of the features to cut your time, cost and efforts: -

• Versioning allows you to create different versions of the same Articles for different uses – managing just one item of Content, in one place, for each delivery.
• Content can be tweaked from a page you have created for website use and save it as a separate “for Print” copy
• “Web only” holiday descriptions can be optimised specifically for the search engines
• Production can be distributed to different members of your staff and you will have an ongoing record of which member of your team has worked on which content
• Production “stages” are also provided, to aid with internal workflow patterns, and are colour-coded for easy visual analysis of the status of Content
• Destinations, Resorts and Airports can be supplied pre-populated as part of the solution, allowing you to allocate and link Content to the right locations
• Content can be allocated to “categories” and contain flexible “attributes”, to help index and deliver the material in the right pages or areas of a Web site

Getting your travel brochure designed and into print is now just one step away and doesn’t need to be a whole new project!

Travel Brochure Design & Production

Once your Content is in ti.CMS, using the ti.Publish application you have the option of using travel brochure templates or bespoke travel brochure design, to go to Print. The final steps are as follows: -

• From within ti.CMS, select the Publish option
• This enables you to select the content for each page you want to send to print, along with the page layout template you wish to use
• Now just click on the “Publish” button and the ti.CMS content is transformed into a Quark document and/or PDF. You can even “Preview” the page in the Browser.
• ti.Publish allows you to make any final tweaks and corrections via your web browser, before “Sign-off” for Print and export a “print-ready” PDF which can be sent to your Printers

Now your Travel Content is available in ti.CMS for your Web site, trade distribution etc., and can be kept up-to-date regularly by your own team.

About Travel Innovations, suppliers of technology to the travel & tourism industry

The Travel Innovations team have extensive experience in the travel industry sector. We pride ourselves on robust technology, innovative designs and attention to detail. For more information please telephone 01733 391678 or contact us via our website.

There are many online and offline discussions, articles and websites dedicated to the issue of Usability.  It is the holy grail of most Travel companies who are trying to improve their conversion ratios of “Lookers” to “Bookers”.   But what about Tour Operator Reservation Systems, Content Management Systems, Mid and Back Office Systems, Desktop Selling Tools, even the way we present Reports and Documentation?

The task of making a Holiday website “User-friendly” requires really going back to absolute basics.  It isn’t as simple as making the Content look prettier, or including “ratings”, or reducing the number of pages to taking their money.  It really starts with questions like “What do we want this page to do or offer?” and “What is the clearest way to present it, in as few words as possible, and with clear next actions?”.   However, this post is not about websites.

Tour Operators and Travel Agents have a natural phobia of Travel Technology, and I can understand why!  For so many decades the industry has been steeped with inflexible bespoke systems, VTX screens (Viewdata/GDS) and poor reliability.  If you mention changing Reservation systems or Agent Sales systems, your staff probably do a sharp intake of breath before exclaiming “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it”.  Who can blame them.

So how much is this poor, outdated and badly designed software costing you?   Ahh … I bet few of you stop to consider the negative productivity implication on your staff, or the unsatisfactory output it produces and the workarounds you have in place.  What is the impact on your bottom line!

The point I’m making here is that Usability NEEDS to be applied to the business Software, as much as it needs to be applied to websites.  Why shouldn’t it?

The good news is that things are changing.  Computers are cheaper, software languages and protocols are now completely open.  And Design and Usability lessons learned online are now being applied to the world of Application Software.

Now we can really begin to change the User Interfaces for those day-to-day applications that are used within the business.  Tour Operator Reservation Systems, Content Management Systems, Mid and Back Office Systems, Desktop Selling Tools, even the way we present Reports and Documentation, can now have the same Usability logic applied.

To me, as much of the Process performed by any piece of Software should be as transparent to the User as possible, leaving the User with simple steps to complete their task, in an efficient interface.  I’m not going to give you answers here, but as a business heavily involved in these areas, we try to ensure that all of our solutions have as much Usability input to the interface design as possible.

There is still a lot of terrible software out there, but here’s hoping for a new, more user-friendly Travel Technology world for us all!

Alan Kersley
Managing Director
Travel Innovations Ltd

Welcome to Travel Innovations Blog.   We are a team of Web technology specialists who believe that technology is only a tool to make your business better and your life easier.

We recognise that Tour Operators and Travel Agents are generally techno-phobes and often have to deal with a whole range of applications to perform their day-to-day business of selling holidays.

Our focus is on offering “joined-up” solutions, whether our own products, or integrating other supplier systems and services.  We also believe that the Web is the place to deliver the end solution, enabling our customers to share the cost of the Travel Technology with others, making it more affordable and manageable.

For more information on how we may help you, select one of the “Travel Industry Solutions” on the right.