Technology provider Traveltek is set to expand beyond its cruise industry stronghold as part of a worldwide growth plan.
Having been boosted by a private equity injection of more than 5 million ($8.25 million) last October, the Scottish-based company has opened new offices in Singapore and Hong Kong in recent months and plans further offices in Latin America, North America, Europe and mainland China.
At the same time in Australia, Traveltek’s Asia-Pacific regional director Paul Millan is preparing to raise the profile of the company’s products beyond cruise to include a new focus on other retailers, wholesalers and consortia — areas the company already operates in, though with a lesser profile.
“For the last few years we’ve been known as the cruise tech guys, so as we expand the product range in this market that’s my focus — to really get out there among the non-cruise businesses,” he said, adding that the Traveltek platform was equally suited to all areas of leisure travel, retail and wholesale.
“Essentially what we have is a platform that allows travel agents to search and book a variety of travel suppliers, pulling in content from GDS, hotel bed banks, car providers, attractions — anything that can be searched and dynamically built up in a basket to give them a single item for the consumer,” Millan said. “That can be done on a desktop, in an agency or online on a consumer website.”
Traveltek’s key offerings include its iSell point-of-sale product and the iTour product which allows agents and wholesalers to manage their own stock and contracts.
Both are used by the Flight Centre Travel Group which recently re-signed Traveltek for a second five-year term, allowing its Infinity wholesale arm to utilise them under the names Onboard for cruise and Ontrack for rail.
Other new products are planned, including a significant renewal of the Traveltek platform which will provide a next-generation web sales tool.
“We’ve got a fairly busy product road map,” Millan said. “In the next couple of months we will be rolling out Traveltek NX and it’s a rebuild of our online offering.
“We are really bringing together the three key pillars of acquisition, booking and loyalty,” he said. “We’re enabling travel agents and consumers to communicate much better during the enquiry through to booking and post-booking stage.”
Millan said Traveltek NX would include new communication features such as messaging capabilities on services like Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp, allowing agents to communicate with consumers throughout the sales process as well as during and after the holiday.
The first phase of Traveltek NX will be a consumer facing booking process for release in the third quarter of this year, followed soon after by second-phase enhanced CMS tools and a third phase of enhanced customer features.
