File sharing service Dropbox is touting itself as the answer to delivering a truly connected customer experience in travel having taken on some major clients in the sector.
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Dropbox targets travel with business-ready solution to deliver the truly connected customer
Image via dennizn / Shutterstock.com
File sharing service Dropbox is touting itself as the answer to delivering a truly connected customer experience in travel having taken on some major clients in the sector.
The firm has Expedia, Tui Group and Hyatt as significant travel clients and says it is in talks with Thomas Cook.
With travel identified as a key potential market for the enterprise version of its service, Dropbox has been promoting the advantages it offers at industry trade shows.
Tal Pelta, strategic account executive, said the synching capabilities of Dropbox, enabling information to be accessed easily across locations and devices, is its main selling point.
“We have talked for so long in travel about the connected travellers and we are still so long away from that experience,” he said.
“The industry is good at designing fantastic apps to allow the customer to do things like check-in but the reality is the whole journey the consumer takes is so disconnected.”
Pelta said Tui came to Dropbox initially as a cloud storage solution but increasingly it will work with it on how Dropbox can be used to transform the customer experience.
“We are doing a lot of interesting projects around digital concierge services. People make a booking and you link it up to a Dropbox folder.
“Then you can lots of information can be sent to that folder. We are talking about how you can change businesses that have operated in the same way for decades.
“Brochures are not the greatest retail experience. My vision is I walk into a travel agent and there’s an interactive table or iPad that has a map of the world.
“I click on various destinations and resorts and can click on video content relevant to that resort and underneath that can be driven by Dropbox, synched and the latest available.”
Pelta said the advantage of using Dropbox as opposed to just buying cloud storage is that it handles the management, security and backing up of the data.
Dropbox has recently established its own data centre in Frankfurt having moved from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
With 500 million subscribers, Dropbox has become a part of the business world through the fact that people started using it at work even if it wasn’t officially sanctioned.
It is now in 50 million businesses and it is revenues from licences for its enterprise product that will drive its future growth.
Pelta said the quality of technology people are able to use in their day-to-day lives means employers have to keep up.
“Today, the technology on your phone is better than what you see in businesses. New employees when they come into a businesses are very underwhelmed.”
Pelta added: “We have announced this week we are cashflow positive, so revenues from our existing customers are now funding the business not just investors.
“We have done some major work around our infrastructure, taken it off AWS and the big thing we have done is make our product enterprise ready.”
Dropbox licences average out at £100 per user per year regardless of the size of company, said Pelta.
Paper, a recent enhancement to Dropbox allows collaboration to take place between account holders, like Microsoft’s Office 365, but better, believes Dropbox.
And it is also looking at a new data storage service to allow firms to free up in-house infrastructure from having to huge amounts of information.
