Pushing The Frontiers Of Innovation In Travel Commerce
For decades airlines were almost locked-in with their GDS (global distribution system) providers. A GDS is a transaction-platform for the travel industry, equivalent to a Master or Visa for cards industry.
Air India recently did a complete shift to Travelport Smartpoint GDS (formerly known as Galileo) in partnership with InterGlobe Technology Quotient (official technology distributor and developer of Travelport). For airlines, migrating from one GDS to another is a mammoth task fraught with the risk of financial loss and business disruption. It is like changing regular home to smart-tech home while residing in it. ITQ has migrated over 3500 agencies- 100 large and about 100 midsize, rest being the long tail for Air India.
Sandeep Dwivedi, COO at ITQ, shared, “Air India migration was overall a successful and learning project in the GDS history worldwide since an airline holding 15% market share migrated to a GDS platform so efficiently.”
Meenakshi Malik, ED-Commercial Operations, Air India revealed, “A 22 per cent growth in operational profit and cost cut-down of around Rs300 crore is seen since the change in distribution strategy started.”
She projected 3200 crore of saving in five years.
A combination of astute project management skills and in-house IP of ITQ, along with timely training interventions and tight process management were factors attributed to Air India’s successful migration to Travelport.
Powering up travel technology
ITQ is an official distributor of Travelport in six markets across Asia-Pacific, including India and Sri Lanka. The technology company, Travelport is a leader in airline merchandising, hotel content and distribution, car rental, mobile commerce, and B2B payment solutions.
ITQ provides content, tools, and support to help travel management companies, such as American Express Global Business Travel, and Dnata, and in-house corporate travel departments manage itineraries of the world’s corporate travellers. The company collaborates with travel agencies like EaseMyTrip, Cleartrip, MakeMyTrip, Goibibo, Yatra, amongst others to achieve better search and conversion rates, integrate more travel content, and become more efficient and profitable with automated tools and business insights.
For smaller travel agencies, who sell to the world’s business and leisure travellers, ITQ helps with technology to become more profitable and efficient with essential point-of-sale, middle and back-office solutions.
Having developed a powerful products portfolio on the GDS-platform, the added value is a big differentiator for ITQ. Examples include:
GST Script: An application that works in Smartpoint, capable of picking GST details moved from a client file and transmitting the same against both the airline(s) present in itinerary and the passengers available in the itinerary.
VR3: A consolidated solution for usual customer service requests: reissue, refund, revalidation, and void. Benefits include enabling tickets refund in four clicks, automated updating across multiple screens, and one-click voiding of tickets.
Enhanced HMPR (HelpMeProduceReport): A tool to generate ticket issuance reports in detail, automatically and email the same.
ITQ Mobile: An application for agents in India to access bookings and complete routine tasks from booking to ticketing on the move.
ITQ Financial: A robust Fintech integrated with Tally for agents to automate accounting and manage finance seamlessly.
Adhvan: A web-based travel booking engine and agency management solution.
