During last week’s CAPA conference at the Powerscourt Hotel, Co Wicklow, Travelport’s Northern Europe team briefed international travel media, including Irish Travel Trade News, on ‘The Power of the Platform’. Simon Ferguson, Vice President, highlighted the new campaign’s four aspects of connecting travel choice, driving travel performance, empowering travel experiences, and delivering travel intelligence.
“The new travel experience is connected, immediate, personal, reliable and innovative,” he said. “We live in an experiential world where brands and loyalty are defined by the experiences they deliver.
“Northern Europe, including the UK and Ireland, are mature advanced markets with strong regional OTA and TMC dynamics. Travelport combines the power of a global platform with strong local market and technical expertise – including the Travelport Universal API open platform, Smartpoint’s integration of Rich Content and Branding merchandising capabilities, the use of mobile apps, and increasing use of Chatbots for greater automation.”
Data Insights and Business Insights
Jasmeen Kaur, Regional Product Director, EMEA, introduced Travelport Data Insights, being launched at the end of May, as well as Business Insights.
There are multiple ways to view and consume data that all require data analysis and interpretation. Data Insights helps users to make better decisions to drive their businesses by driving operational excellence and reducing operating costs; injecting data into an agency’s working week to create commercial success; enabling informed conversations with suppliers to negotiate better deals; and enabling travel managers to drive travel policy compliance and minimise traveller risk.
Business Insights is a web-based analytic platform offering “near real-time actionable information so that travel agency owners, managers, corporate clients and stakeholders can spend their time acting on the insights rather than on creating them”.to analyse high-risk travel and provide a dashboard view as well as a detailed itinerary and insights to locate passengers and evacuations.
Smartpoint
Claire Osborne, Solutions Director, showed how Smartpoint accelerates agent efficiency with faster day-to-day processes, for example by pro-actively polling up to 10 queues and eliminating the need to check frequently used quotes throughout the day.
Some 54% of agents at least occasionally book carriers that offer unfamiliar fare families and products, with another 13% doing this frequently. Smartpoint empowers agents by providing such knowledge to sell these, as well as benefits of upgrading from Economy Class, hotels, ground travel, etc, while TripAdvisor and Seat Guru ratings are available at an agent’s fingertips.
Branded Fares
Lars Hulvej, Director of Consulting, then spoke about branded fares and how airlines and hotels could choose their own photos and profile. Over 220 airlines have already signed up.
eNett Automation
Jette Kongensgaard, Head of Development, spoke about the new phase of travel, the flexibility of the Travelport platform, and eNett automation. With the automated use of eNett in ticketing flow, rules are validated and, if eligible for eNett, VANs are automatically issued, thus ensuring the full use of eNett.
