Traveltek News Blog

Traveltek are delighted to announce the appointment of former Cruise Factory (Australia) founder and Managing Director, Tim Poulter as Traveltek’s Director of Asia Pacific region with effect from 1st February 2012. The new position has been created after Traveltek’s aggressive expansion of their iSell multi-channel dynamic booking platform within Australia & New Zealand. Tim Poulter has resigned his position within Cruise Factory after months of negotiation between the two parties and joins Traveltek’s International board of directors heading up operations in the APAC region and will also play an active role in Traveltek’s recent expansion into South Africa.

Traveltek’s MD Kenny Picken, commented “We are delighted to welcome Tim to Traveltek where we know Tim’s many years of travel experience and cruise expertise will help us strengthen our position as the leading cruise and dynamic packaging technology provider in the APAC region. Over the last few years, Traveltek has invested heavily in the iSell platform, advancing the technology to become a multi-channel, multi-lingual product and these developments have secured us several new blue chip global clients across the world, including Europe, North America, UAE, South Africa and most notably Australia and new Zealand where we have become the system of choice for all forward thinking agents in the region and Tim’s appointment will be key to advancing our reach even further.”  

Picken added “2010/2011 were two years of massive change within our business. Not only have we developed the platform in to a global product but we have recently upgraded our Midlands offices, secured brand new purpose built head quarter offices in Glasgow and mid way through 2011, we expanded our support services to accommodate all timelines for our international clients who now account for 40% of our total revenues. Perhaps one of the key advantages we have is our early development of the first UK dynamic packaging system together with direct development into the worlds major cruise lines, as opposed to via GDS where we have recently seen the cruise lines move away from this type of distribution. This single strategic decision taken several years ago was undoubtedly the most difficult and troublesome development but has allowed us to attract new clients including a distribution deal with a major GDS, major cruise lines themselves and some key global clients. In the UK our client base has grown by around 600 travel agency branches, employing approximately 2500 travel staff, across multiple clients all going live within our platform.”

But it’s not all good news as Traveltek’s managing director continued “like many UK companies Traveltek continue to experience several client bankruptcies and general consolidation within the industry in each of the last three years. It’s very tough out there but despite everything we have enjoyed year on year growth and we are confident 2012 will see that growth increase again.”

We were excited to hear that Co-operative Travel have just won the 2011 British Travel Award for Travel Agency Website of the Year.

This the third award of the year for the Co-op, and continues to prove the strength of partnership we have with them. Their forward thinking attitude has already allowed them to pioneer Traveltek products like the Deal Finder, their holiday and cruise iPhone Apps, and the introduction of live chat into their booking process.

Congratulations to everyone involved.

Traveltek, the long standing ACE Convention headline sponsor is set to extend its reach in to Dubai and the Middle East Region.  Identifying Dubai departure cruises as a significant growth area in the global  cruise market, Traveltek has already scored some early successes and is now set to officially release its own innovative “iCruise All Inclusive, Middle East version” at next month’s Arabian Travel Market in Dubai. Traveltek’s business development director Peter Whittle comments “Cruising out of Dubai has expanded in significant double digit growth and 65% last year making Dubai the most exciting new cruise home port and destination. Utilising Traveltek’s iCruise Dynamic Packaging Software to dynamically package luxury Dubai hotel inventory with Dubai departures cruises will explode the fantastic wealth of opportunities for the regions many travel agents and tour operators within this region and it’s the right time to invest.”

Leading cruise lines including Costa, Royal Caribbean, Seabourn, MSC, P&O, Compagnie du Ponant, Oceania, Cunard, Silversea, Hapag Lloyd & Regency have cruises departing from Dubai during this time and the Traveltek platform has all this inventory within its Multi lingual, Multi Currency platform. Whittle continued “Traveltek’s iCruise is currently the only truly global cruise offering and our strategy of only dealing directly with cruise operators ensures that we deliver highly attractive low cost distribution to the cruise lines whilst the agents can be assured they will still reach their best deals and tacticals in the Traveltek iCruise platform.”

For Dubai, the cruise sector is becoming an important vein of visitor numbers, with more than 350,000 cruise passengers passing through the new terminal annually, a figure set to rise again in 2011. Travetek’s iCruise All Inclusive module links the availability of over 45 accommodation providers worldwide, long haul & charter flights with the itineraries of over 60 cruises departing from Dubai over the next 12 months and Traveltek is the only UK based technology company to attend the Arabian Travel Market, Dubai (2^nd -5^th May. Stand TT15) and of course this is in addition to Traveltek being the headline sponsor at the UK Cruise Convention during the same week.

Traveltek have enjoyed significant customer wins worldwide across both West & Eastern Europe & Australia and is looking to further extend its reach in the Middle East Region

Today we announced two major additions to our online cruise booking portfolio, pushing our market leading cruise technology platform even further.

The addition of both Holland America Line and Thomson Cruises to our iCruise platform takes our coverage of ex UK cruise inventory to 95% and surpasses that of any other company. Holland America Line (HAL) will provide even more choice to agents with live pricing and online book-ability.  Holland America Line offer more than 125 itineraries from Alaska to Bermuda and epitomizes the ultimate in worldwide premium travel experiences onboard a fleet of 15 five star ships.  They offer the best in “premium” cruising, onboard stylish modern ships and were recently awarded “Best Cruise Value” for the 18th consecutive year by the World’s Ocean & Cruise line Society.  Holland America Line offers quality, value, excellent service – and innovative ideas to enhance guests’ experience.

The addition of Thomson Cruises, one of the UK’s favourite cruise lines was previously unavailable for agents to book online anywhere until this latest release.

We only develop direct connections to the cruise operators, as opposed to via a GDS, adding true value to our product not only in the UK but also across Europe and the rest of the world. Agents realise by dealing direct with a cruise operator or via their systems on the Traveltek platform that they can take advantage of the best deals and tacticals in real time.

We have been very busy in cruise recently expanding our repertoire to provide a multi lingual solution and have achieved major client wins in Australia, Poland, Germany, France, Portugal, Malta and Brazil. Working in alternative markets has proven a real challenge but one we have relished and will continue to expand our presence across the globe.

Our basic entry level cruise solution helps agents generate enquiries, while our fully integrated, multi-channel, multi-lingual, multi-currency cruise platform, linking not just e-commerce, but call centre and retail cruise sales in one seamless environment is a complete solution for the serious cruise business.

Agents relying on sales of heavily discounted cruises and basic itineraries could lose their business to the internet, Traveltek managing director Kenny Picken has warned.

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Users are always telling us how much they love the sidebar, because it lets them get access to features like CRM customers and enquiries without leaving the page they’re currently on. Taking this on board, we just launched a new sidebar feature - QuickBasket.

Appearing on the black bar at the top of every iSell page, you can click the QuickBasket link to open the sidebar and see exactly what’s currently in your basket without leaving the current page.

Next to each item is a dropdown that also let’s you create a new search based on an item already in the basket. So if you’ve already added a hotel, you can choose Flight from the dropdown underneath it, click the Go button, and be taken to a Flight search form with all the fields already filled in based on the hotel stay. This makes it easier than ever to build up the trip elements for your customer.

The sidebar is also now sticky, meaning it’ll no longer close as you navigate between pages, so no need to keep reopening it any more. Once it’s open, it’ll stay open until you close it.

We’re happy to announce that last night we scooped an award for “Best XML Provider” at the Thomas Cook, “Hotels 4U says Thanks2U” awards held in London’s Hilton Metropole. TV star and leading celebrity Vanessa Feltz presented the award with Hotels4U’s Andy Baker to Traveltek’s deputy MD Kirsty Orr, citing Traveltek’s outstanding support and equally outstanding volume of bookings made via the Traveltek platform in 2010. Traveltek’s Travelshop platform outperformed all other UK technology providers combined in 2010, demonstrating our superior distribution across the UK travel trade and our massive growth in transactional revenue for our trade clients.

Accepting the award, the Traveltek deputy MD commented: “2010 saw a sharp increase in bookings through the Traveltek platform and was a result of the outstanding success achieved by Traveltek’s new revolutionary iSell agency selling system, which is rapidly becoming the system of choice for large call centre, multiple agency businesses in the UK and abroad. We are really looking forward to 2011.”

Just in time for the busy package holiday booking season, we’ve just rolled out an enhancement to our iSell Package Search product. This will appear on your package search form as a radio button simply labelled “Quick Search”.

Quick Search looks through the lead two-adult sharing prices for all the tour operator packages within our database and presents them in a grid format that makes it quick and easy to compare prices.

When you see a price you’re interested in, just click on it and you’ll be shown the hotel, resort and operator who are providing that price. If you click More Options, you’ll start a Full Search for that particular option where you can see all the available properties, their content and go through to booking.

We default to a set of columns we think are going to be the most useful, but if you’d like to compare specific options, such as seeing all the prices for both 3 and 4 star Bed & Breakfast, you can click the blue arrow icon to the left of the column header to change what it shows.

Your column selections will be remembered for next time, so you can set them just as you like them.

We’re rolling this out for free to all our existing iSell Package Search customers, so you should see this on your search forms now. It’s a first release, so there’s bound to be enhancements going forward, but we think you’ll find it useful as we enter the busy selling season.

After six months of planning, preparation and production, our new website is now live.

We’ve included information about all our main products and services, with bullet point feature lists, example websites, and lots of screenshots. All of which is designed to give you an idea of the travel technology we’re producing.

Hopefully this will prove to be a useful resource for both new and existing customers, and we plan to continue adding content over the coming weeks and months.

We added a new tab in our Issue Manager system yesterday - Supplier Stats.

We get a lot of requests for more information about how external suppliers are performing, and we think this should help a lot in that area. It not only shows how successful requests to those suppliers have been throughout the day, including the average response times, but it also shows their average response time within the last 30 minutes.

Hopefully this information will help you make informed decisions about which suppliers you should have switched on when you’re trying to offer the best website experience.