Travelpartner automates and cuts costs
Cost-cutting efforts and increased automation are clear trends in the travel industry. Travel agency Travelpartner uses the new tool Amadeus Schedule Change Script and Amadeus Automation Script. This helps them save a great deal of time and money.
Travelpartner is one of the largest Internet travel agencies in Sweden and has positioned itself as a challenging price-cutter.
“Being able to offer the market’s lowest prices requires a constant battle against costs. That’s why we are working to streamline our work and to automate as much as possible,” says Camilla Carlsson, in charge of the internal development of the booking process at Travelpartner.
Manual administration
Airline schedule changes is an area that has always entailed a great deal of manual administration for travel agencies.
“We considered building our own system to simplify administration, but realized that this would demand too much in the way of time and resources. When we found out that Amadeus had already developed a solution, we decided to try it out.”
In February, Amadeus Schedule Change Script was implemented. At the same time, Travelpartner also participated in a pilot project to evaluate the tool.
“When we started up the pilot, we had hundreds of bookings with changes in our internal queues. The script was able to handle about 85 percent of the changes in just a few seconds. These sorts of changes used to take 45 – 90 seconds to handle – each,” says Camilla Carlsson.
“The script is a real trouper”
The tool picks up all of the changes that the airlines make. Simple changes in timetables and flight numbers are handled automatically and travellers receive an email with their new travel schedules.
More complicated changes, such as cancelled connections, situations involving other airlines and when there is not enough time between connections, still require human input.
“Some manual administration we just have to live with. The point is that we save a lot of time with the tool. Some days we can have almost 100 changes that affect our customers, and then the script is a real trouper,” says Camilla Carlsson, who estimates that the time-savings correspond to a half-time position.
During the pilot study at Travelpartner, a number of suggestions also emerged for improvements to the tool, which Amadeus is now evaluating. There are plans to launch a new version of the script in the autumn.
“I think, for example, that the tool should differentiate between private and business activities, since certain changes will be of greater significance for business travellers. In those instances where manual administration is required, it would be nice if the original travel schedule situation was made clearer. That would speed up the administration.”
Security in automatic ticketing
Since February, Travelpartner has also been using Amadeus Automation Script to streamline and automate the ticketing process.
Camilla Carlsson has made suggestions for improvements surrounding this service as well. For example, the system has not been able to handle tickets under special agency agreements.
“But on the whole, the script functions amazingly well – we don’t even need to look at the bookings that are managed in the tool. There is a great feeling of security and relief in that. We’ve been able to reduce the manual administration in this area enormously.”
