Tour operator IT systems need to become faster, more flexible and better able to display different products, leading experts said at the fvw Travel Technology Day in Cologne yesterday.

TUI Travel IT chief Mittu Sridhara gave the keynote speech at the fvw Travel Technology Day in Cologne. Foto: http://www.TobiasVollmer.de

International tourism groups are extremely complex organisations in technology terms as they have to integrate airlines, hotels, tour operators and sales channels, TUI Travels Chief Information Officer, Mittu Sridhara, told delegates. This meant that systems had to be coordinated so that the entire travel cycle can be presented to customers on websites or mobile apps.

TUI Travel has already developed solutions such as the My TUI app for all European markets while the @comRes reservations system used in Germany is now being introduced in the UK as well. But this is just a start. We have to display what differentiates our products and become much faster, Sridhara said. Instead of large IT projects, many small modules that can be quickly developed and tested are needed today. Customers tell us today whether a system works well or not, he commented.

DER Touristik Frankfurt, which offers a large number of travel products and services that can be booked individually or as combinations, is about to update its 16-year-old Phoenix system with the new Phoenix Unlimited system. The objective, according to IT director Gudrun Schn, is to bring products to market faster and improve how the broad product range is displayed in order to get away from the focus on price comparisons and also to produce more cheaply and flexibly.

Phoenix Unlimited is not only a new system but a travel factory that can combine every single content form, such as hotels, flights, hire cars or cruises, and deliver them to travel agents together with plenty of information. Travel agents must know more than customers who have researched online about a product, she explained. Automatic rules would define whether, for example, hotels could be booked individually or only as part of a package holiday. This would automate production more strongly and enable more flexible production for all sales channels, she pointed out.

The tourism industry must respond faster to the rise of mobile technology, urged Stefan Spiegel, head of travel and tourism for internet agency Ray Sono. Smartphones will become the central device for digital communications in future, he predicted. As a result, tourism products must be modernised so that consumers can first obtain travel information on a smartphone and then continue the booking process later on a tablet or PC without having to re-enter all the data, he said.

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Travel factories for a mobile world