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

Tourism
e-Business activities
SN Brussels' internet site (www.flySN.com) is a major part of the company’s e-ticketing
infrastructure. Serving as a customer interface, it had to be user-friendly and allow for an
easy search and compilation of travel offers. However, the first SN Brussels web site was
not appropriate for the e-travel era. Based on a home-grown content management
system (CMS) with an obsolete architecture and navigation structure, it was never well
thought out and its updating became cumbersome. SN Brussels Airlines needed to
improve and upgrade their CMS, thus allowing customers to search and find reliable
information about the company. The web site also had to offer the most practical way of
booking online with a clear and user-friendly way of helping customers navigate the site.
The first priority was to implement a future-proof technological platform to ensure the
needs of SN Brussels Airlines' customers. The wish to adjust the site to the needs of
customers and create content layers in various currencies, languages and countries
resulted in a challenging content management package. The company wanted a wellknown
CMS to avoid the dependency of a partner or agency, which had been tried and
trusted elsewhere. This CMS should also be able to handle all their web site
requirements including multilingual and multi-country branding issues. For these reasons,
SN Brussels Airlines chose Tridion. 81 Bruno Brusselmans, head of the e-business
department at SN Brussels Airlines, explains the decision process: “Without a robust
infrastructure you cannot react flexibly to market demands and you cannot take
commercial decisions adequately. Layout, navigation structure and the overall part of the
content is centrally controlled at the headquarters in Brussels. The local offices control
their own promotions and contact information. The maintenance and management costs
of the new Web site are minimal, whilst each week substantial changes including
translations are implemented.”
The new web site was launched in August 2004. It was equipped with a significantly
upgraded, user-friendly booking engine. In its new format it presents the entire range of
flights and price availability for any chosen route in one single page. In 2004 82 , 280,000
bookings were made on www.flySN.com which represented an increase by 100%
compared with the previous year. Also, with the steady growth of sales, the percentage of
tickets sold by the airline’s own channels without intermediaries has grown up to 30% in
2005 while in 2004 about 83% of European sales emanate from travel agencies.
Among the SABENA’s assets which were taken over by SN Brussels was the IT
infrastructure, including the e-ticketing system which was developed back in 1999. Similar
to a paper ticket, an e-ticket performs two functions: it confirms to airline staff that the
passenger has paid for travel and it is also a method of documenting sales and managing
inventory. Unlike paper, the e-ticket uses a database to track the sale and use of tickets.
All subsequent ticket transactions, including refunds, exchanges, check-in, void and
settlement, involve this holding database. E-tickets are now available through the SN
Brussels Airlines' web site and call centre on all routes in the network, offering a more
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See www.tridion.com
Since the owner of SN Brussels Airlines, the SN Airholding Group, has acquired ownership of
another airline, Virgin Express, in 2005, the results of each individual airline are no longer
published.
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