Niche cruise tour operator
The challenge
To provide a flexible and robust reservations system utilising leading edge technologies to facilitate the corporate goals of reducing booking times, improving customer service and flexibility to aid future growth, including integrating additional routes to market.
The solution
By focusing at the outset on the basic business fundamentals, and then building the corporate goals and vision upon that model, a detailed specification was developed for a bespoke reservations system. This system would enable the client to support the existing business model and provide the flexibility to support the future business plans. The development, utilising the latest Microsoft .NET technologies, was based on a Smart Client n-tier architecture and the reservations system was designed to interface with a number of external systems (in many cases using a web-service architecture) such as credit card processing, an inventory management system, a Global Distribution System for flight availability, and in a subsequent phase the same GDS was used to provide an additional route to market for cabin booking by external travel agents.
Benefits
The benefits to the client have been immense, and the impact on business performance has been easily measurable. Some of the key benefits included more user friendliness, a significantly faster booking process, an improved customer experience, higher quality documentation and integrated reporting and analytics to provide a view of key performance indicators to help drive the business. In terms of statistics, the reservations system saved 175 salesperson days in the first year of operation, reduced the booking resources required whilst increasing the booking throughput and reduced the group booking time from an average of 45 minutes to an average of 10 minutes. From a management perspective, whereas previously four or five reports and time consuming number crunching in spreadsheets was required to review business performance, it can now all be done in real-time, and access to performance information and the facility to undertake drill-down analytics is immediate.
"The scalability of the new solution enables us to implement new initiatives and grow the business without redesigning architecture. This is precisely the flexibility we need.”
Cruise line finance and IT Director