Northstar

www.travelweekly-asia.com | 19 • • • • • • TRAVEL AGENTS needed to update its business model to cater for better travel personalisation. To that end, it partnered with data science company lloopp Natural Intelligence Solutions on a prototype that would help the company sharpen its product design of tour packages. "It is crucial to steer away from a fixed demographic approach in crafting tour packages and to focus instead on what is tangible, like data," said Michael A. Tanjangco, general manager, lloopp. The solution is an automated data tracking system where keywords and phrases are constantly being pulled from customer booking history, as well as external sources including hotels and airlines websites, forums and social media sites. These will eventually be presented in a summarised form in a dashboard, allowing travel agents to determine customer trends such as the popularity of certain destinations and travel styles, and therefore better customise their tour packages. Scaling up an inbound business So far, most of the technology solutions on the market have been developed for outbound travel agents that are consumer facing. Inbound travel agents such as SEA Wheel Travel have been feeling the neglect as they struggle to keep up with the manual task of coordinating back-end travel services such as quotations, booking confirmation, invoicing and the issuing of tour vouchers, with staff often managing these across multiple platforms like excel spreadsheets, forms, emails and servers. The agency's managing director, Jeremy Ng, decided he has had enough. To solve the problem, he brought on board a developer from outside the industry to create a single system. After a more-than-year-long development process, the solution now automates all three steps from the moment a quotation is called for to the delivery of travel services by on-ground operators across all its five travel components. Nifty features include a two-tick status indication – much like 'read receipts' in messaging platform WhatsApp – that show updates on the progress of tasks and reminder notifications that prompt staff when rooms in hotel inventory are expiring. SEA Wheel Travel's API-enabled system can also 'talk' to other systems to facilitate the transfer and updating of information, reducing the often manpower-intensive processes of updating inventory and booking confirmation. The main takeaway from this process? Reduced human error, faster customer replies and the ability to transfer case files across staff teams, which are all necessary steps in scaling one's business. "It's not about cutting down on manpower, but boosting efficiency. With my present team on the new integrated system, I can perhaps do 50% more work. This is how we can grow quickly," said Ng. 70-80% of queries can be addressed without human intervention, said Josh Ziegler, CEO and co-founder, Zumata. Josh Ziegler, CEO, Zumata. Jeremy Ng, managing director, SEA Wheel Travel.

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