ICT and e-business in the tourism industry ICT adoption ... - empirica

Tourism
understand: “You choose the suppliers, let us provide the dynamic packaging technology
and then empower your customers to package their own holidays”.
When online consumers visit a website powered by Travelberry, they can find travel stock
such as flights, hotels, car hire, tours, transfers, ferries, cruises, travel extras and more,
all from a variety of operators and suppliers. Based on customers’ searches, the results
are returned and displayed with packaged prices, without showing the individual product
prices. This allows mark-ups for specific items to be concealed by the travel agent. This
feature, along with the additional opportunities for other related purchases prompted by
but not an integral part of the main transaction, provides the basis for increasing margins
across sales.
In terms of their customer’s website expansion and growth, Travelberry can incorporate
additional new data sources quickly, by adding new inventory data suppliers providing
resort information, holiday activity information, etc. This allows travel companies to utilise
product feeds more readily and release new products to market more quickly while
avoiding costly downtime of their travel website. As soon as new products are ready, the
customer can start buying them straight away. Travelberry will integrate with most backoffice
systems and provide total flexibility with regards to customer facing web page
layouts. Without the DP services, each travel product source would have to be contacted
independently by the web site, which is cumbersome, slow and inefficient.
Tour operators and other suppliers can use the Travelberry system to package their own
products and re-distribute via their own XML feed. Suppliers wishing to provide their content
for DP but do not already have an XML feed, can avail of other CSI Media services to
generate such feeds, thereby opening their products to a much wider customer base.
Travelberry Lite
Travelberry Lite is based on established templates and provides a complete low-cost
entry level online travel system for small to medium companies. It integrates access to a
variety of XML based travel data sources (e.g. charter flights, low cost flights,
accommodation) into consumer facing websites and includes an easy to use payment
system together with email forms for consumer product enquiries. It is designed to be
easily expanded to the full Travelberry functionality or parts thereof.
Technology Building Blocks
Exhibit 4-16 shows the main building blocks of the system: website, XML suppliers, DP
Engine and Back Office System. The DP Engine’s integration process is based around
the ability to search feeds from various multiple travel data sources such as XML Feeds,
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Web Services. Travelberry returns
combined results for multiple travel products (e.g. flights/hotels) at a single price and in a
common format on a consumer facing travel website. A service provider can control their
web site by selecting as many or as few data feeds as they wish. They may also add
features such as price discount / mark-up, special offers and more to the Rules Engine.
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