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

Tourism
Customer Experience Management
One of the company’s guiding principles is to keep its customers pleased and happy and
if this is not achieved, lastminute.com needs to know about it very quickly. To this end, all
lastminute.com websites use ResponseTek:CEM, a customer-initiated mechanism to
convey feedback on their experiences. It enables customers to contact centre staff in
their language and get a direct response. Their feedback is stored; aggregate information
from all customer feedback sessions is then used to drive enhancements to company
processes and achieve an improved experience for all customers. The solution enables
lastminute.com to evaluate overall customer experience across each of its brands and
countries. As a result, the company can identify why one of its brands is performing better
in a particular country and then apply that knowledge to improve other brand and product
performance.
Social networking
As shown by the explosion in blogs, one of the currently biggest changes in Europe is the
increasing emergence and importance of online user communities and social networking.
This will have a big impact on travel and purchasing behaviour. lastminute.com is establishing
facilities to enable customers and staff to provide and widely share information
and feedback on services and properties. This interactivity is seen as one of the ways by
which potential purchasers and travellers can ensure that their planned arrangements will
be a positive experience. This approach is also seen as an important differentiator in the
market and one which will help foster long-term growth and customer loyalty.
Conclusions
DP has shown that it can maintain margins, and even increase customer satisfaction in a
period of downward pressures caused by rising costs in both leisure and business travel.
lastminute.com is comfortable in going head to head in competition with the traditional
tour operators and other DP companies. Two years ago the tour operators and DP
companies were operating in different markets. This is no longer the case. Dynamic
content now includes a huge capacity of accommodation and related travel services at
many beach hotels and other popular destinations worldwide, and has extended its
access to low cost carriers, charters and regular flights. At the same time, DP operators
face less risk exposure than, for instance, the traditional tour operators. Unlike the
traditional tour operator they have no expensive brochures to print and distribute, there is
no prior commitment to a specific allocation of hotel beds, and due to the huge scale
factors that now exist for easy inclusion of additional accommodation and other leisure
offerings there are essentially no concerns regarding capacity limits.
How complex can a dynamic package be? Vic Darvey envisages inclusion of more prepackaged
options from third-party tour operators and is confident in the emergence of a
greater number of leisure and other service providers offering XML feeds that can be
incorporated into the DP Engines “There is a ceiling to how complex a dynamicallypackaged
booking can get, but we have not reached it yet. By developing our multiple
brands based on customer feedback and innovation, lastminute.com is perfectly
positioned to understand the market segments and more easily tailor and target individual
offers directly to the most appropriate potential customers”.
126