Travel and Tourism - Overview

Customer and industry demands are changing the way travel suppliers, travel agents & intermediaries deliver their products and services to market. Their approach to their customers post sales also creates a business impact. Business processes face similar striking development and modification as cost reduction and operational efficiency add to the dynamics of competition. The challenge is to embrace these changes and developments, integrate, deliver and administer travel services through multiple channels and do it without spending an earth.

Key focus:

	Online travel is the largest and most successful e-commerce category on the Web
	Online travel is causing a major restructuring for all travel market segments and hospitality industry (please read our section on Hospitality Industry). The lines distinguishing online, traditional offline and corporate agencies from each other are distinctly merging and blurring as the online segment creates and deploys technology to capture additional market share.

Emerging Technologies:

	Personalization Engines – The internet is all about getting the results you want by personalising your online marketing strategies to accommodate customer needs and requirements. Personalization software and techniques will continue to dominate the online travel market as the entire industry seeks to develop a more "one-to-one" approach to travel marketing.
	Merchandizing Systems -One of the most successful growth areas on the Internet is capitalising on the use of technology to merchandize products, services and company profile. This ability to mark-up products and services and with reduced operating expenses generates a favourable return and protects profit margins and allows basic packaging of travel components.
	Dynamic Packaging - Dynamic packaging can be defined as the combination of different travel components, bundled and priced in real time at the point of sale in response to the consumer or booking agent’s requests. The packaging process is as per the business rules. True dynamic packaging can be understood as a “real time” price and packaging created based on consumer request and responses thus shaping the response of the packaging system, the behaviour of the component products, and the final price and component set of the package.
	Web services and Interoperability -The travel industry has always been plagued by disparate, closed systems and networks that do not communicate and share information. This lack of connectivity leads to "one-off" integration solutions that simply upload and download information between systems in a batch mode.
	Content Management Travel companies require a content management system that provides administrative structure and granular control of content across networks and websites; especially to manage rapidly growing and large sites.
	Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems
	End-to-end e-travel solutions
	Wi-Fi networks
	Expense management systems
	Global travel management reporting systems

Companies need to create a single view of travel management information and proactively deliver it to department and financial managers.