Improvement – Travelyst

May 25th, 2015 | by ViaDataWebAdmin |

This story is about our Travel Industry CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, Travelyst and how we improved the system and delighted the client in the process…

The system provides a mechanism for travel consultants to build a detailed travel itinerary for customers. It supports a fairly generic processing of lines on the travel itinerary (accommodation, flights, transfers etc.), so each segment of the itinerary is added individually.

Flights are added as an ad-hoc service as there is no standard pricing and the consultants capture the descriptions manually, for example “Flights on EY (EY 430) | Depart: Abu Dhabi @ 09h00 | Arrive: HKT @ 18h40”.

In order to get a flight quote, travel consultants capture the flight requirements into a GDS (Global Distribution System) and receive a text based PNR (Passenger Name Record) that has a standard format, for example:

 

1.TRAVELLER/A

2  SQ6104 Y 21DEC 1 PLZJNB HK1          0820 1000   319 E 0 B

OPERATED BY SOUTH AFRICAN AIRWAYS

SEE RTSVC – TRAFFIC RESTRICTION EXISTS

3  SQ 479 Y 21DEC 1 JNBSIN HK1       A  1335 0605+1 772 E 0 M

SEE RTSVC

4  SQ5050 Y 22DEC 2 SINHKT HK1       2  0655 0750   319 E 0 M

OPERATED BY SILKAIR

SEE RTSVC

5  SQ5057 Y 01JAN 5 HKTSIN HK1       1  2010 2255   320 E 0 M

OPERATED BY SILKAIR

SEE RTSVC

6  SQ 478 Y 02JAN 6 SINJNB HK1       2  0210 0650   772 E 0 M

SEE RTSVC

7  SQ6105 Y 02JAN 6 JNBPLZ HK1       B  1045 1225   738 E 0 S

OPERATED BY SOUTH AFRICAN AIRWAYS

 

They then capture these details again into Travelyst, manually building the description.

One of our Tour Operators was finding that their consultants were constrained by how many enquiries they could handle per day as the manual capture / re-capture process was too tedious.

A thorough solution would be to engage with the GDS supplier (Amadeus or Galileo) and work out a way to import the PNR document directly into Travelyst – but this method can be cumbersome and take months to deliver.

We wanted to improve Travelyst and the time it took to implement the solution in a big way. This issue was raised in May of 2015 when the client asked for a way to speed up the capture of the flight segments.

We looked at the requirement, and the format of the PNR, thought a little bit out of the box and settled on the Consultant copying the PNR to the Clipboard and then pasting it into Travelyst. The system then validates the PNR, splits up the lines and uses Airline and Airport codes to create meaningful descriptions, and adds all the necessary lines to the itinerary.

We released the functionality to the system one week after the initial request and the response to the system’s improvement has been extremely positive:

“Wow!! The flights add on is absolutely magic!! And going to make a massive difference, really outstanding, thank you so very much!

Shona Pittaway

Managing Director, Perfect Destinations”

ViaData – Improving Every Day