Dolphin Dynamics is to offer Traveltainment’s ‘extreme search’ Travel Office system, introducing the technology to the UK market for the first time
WTM 2010: Dolphin-Traveltainment tie could be ‘Viewdata killer’
Dolphin Dynamics is to offer Traveltainment’s ‘extreme search’ Travel Office system, introducing the technology to the UK market for the first time.
The system has been integrated into Dolphin’s booking management solution, giving its customers traditional package holiday and dynamic packaging search functionality.
The downloadable web-based desktop system is expected to become a viable alternative to the traditional Videotex-based Viewdata, still used by many travel agents in the UK.
The demise of Viewdata has been long predicted, but hampered by the lack of connectivity of many agents to the web.
Roberto Da Re, president of Dolphin said: “The package part of the market is something we did not have an offering for before.
“Traditionally it was not a sector we were interested in. It’s been a gap in our armoury for some time and we are very excited about it.
“We have always said Viewdata is going to die and we have never done anything because we have waited for something else to come out.
“What Traveltainment has done is it has taken the bull by the horns and we had the opportunity to put the two things together and there is an integrated end-to-end solution.”
Speaking at World Travel Market this week, Da Re said final testing was taking place and the system was ready to go live with the first customers any day.
“We have done a soft launch to our customers and we have other interested parties line up already,” he said.
Dolphin customers either in call centres, shops or homeworkers using Travel Office will conduct their search and the results before porting the into the Dolphin system.
Here they can add mark-ups, discounts and ancillary product like car hire, insurance and transfers and produce itineraries before invoicing and completing the booking.
Travel Office gives access to Traveltainment’s content that includes its own hotel reviews from a closed user group and ratings based on many factors like how family friendly a property is.
The search results also show a percentage indicating how close they are to the original search criteria and offers a map so the agent can choose the geographical range of a search.
It also offers the ability to limit the search to specified preferred suppliers and narrow down specifications like room type and other hotel features.
These are displayed graphically in bar charts giving the agent an overview of the property.
Christy Roxburgh, sales manager for Traveltainment, said: “At any one time we have around 300 million package holiday offers.”
She added Traveltainment was planning to add city hotels and scheduled airlines into the system to create an “all encompassing” front end.
- More from World Travel Market at travelweekly.co.uk/wtm2010
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