TravelCRMGrid - Key Story

The key story is the basis of the TravelCRMGrid demo. You can download the full key story as a PDF document. A summary is given below.

Travel agencies most affected by these changes are the Independent Travel Agencies (ITAs): small travel agencies with a reduced number of offices and employees. ITAs with similar interests usually join together and form a Travel Agency Group (TAG) with the purpose of representing themselves with a stronger voice when negotiating contracting conditions with service providers.

ITAs know their customers. They have basic contact information needed for customer identification. However ITAs could collect more customer data and use it to their benefit if they had customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence (BI) tools, but these tools are expensive, and ITAs lack the financial assets and capability to invest in these new technologies that could help them expand their sales channels and increase their customers’ satisfaction; moreover, these tools are of limited use if only used with the small quantities of customer information that a single agency typically owns. Nonetheless, as ITAs form TAGs to unify their negotiating force, they could also consolidate their data. Thus providing a critical mass from which to produce valuable analytical reports.

TravelCRMGrid is an e-commerce travel solution that will offer BI tools, capable of generating business intelligence reports within the travel sector. This will help individual travel agencies understand better the needs of their customers, improve their services, and increase customer loyalty. TravelCRMGrid is based on a Grid platform, comprising Fura, GRIA, OGSA-DAI, and the SLA Monitoring and Evaluation BEinGRID component. It is capable of integrating and pooling CRM and BI applications in order to achieve massive and secure processing of CRM and BI data across different domains, leading to BI reports. This solution, based upon the analysis of federated data, will be marketed following a Software-as-a-Service model.

The resulting BI reports will help managers better understand their business and make more intelligent business decisions, such as, what to buy from wholesalers or how to create effective and focused marketing campaigns. By focusing on more profitable strategies, ITAs will be able to offer high-value personalized travel services to their customers at reasonable prices and effectively compete in an arena currently reserved to large companies – who can afford CRM and BI in-house solutions and have enough data to make their use worthwhile.

There are no direct competitors for TravelCRMGrid. Those big corporations that have their own CRM solution would not gain any business advantage in selling it as a service to other smaller players, mainly seen as competitors.

The commercial team of TravelCRMGrid will target TAGs whose members are in need of developing efficient marketing and promotional activities, but lack the knowledge or information to do so. The first target markets will be those where the TravelCRMGrid business partners have marketing and commercial resources, starting in Europe with Spain, Italy and Portugal and then later India, the Persian Gulf, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Mexico.

ITAs usually pay monthly fees to their TAGs for services. The costs of these services vary between 80 and 150 € per month. The initial estimate is that in Europe a monthly quote of 100 € will be accepted by independent travel agencies for TAG services with the enhancements offered by TravelCRMGrid. Considering the market presence and the commercial and marketing resources of the business partners in each country, TravelCRMGrid should break even within the first year, and achieve about 4,000 subscribed ITAs in three years with a profit close to one million euros.