Travelport
Tailoring Simplified Travel Management Process to meet Customer Needs

Headquartered in Atlanta, GA, Travelport is a travel commerce marketplace providing distribution, technology, payment and other solutions for the global travel and tourism industry. Travelport connects travel providers (airlines, hotels, etc.) with agencies, online and corporate travel channels.

“Travelport is about content aggregation, allowing travel providers to sell the way they want with simplification and speed in serving the end traveler base.Whether it is hotels, car or hotel content via traditional, online travel agencies or corporate booking tools, simplifying the aggregation of this process is our focus,” explains Niklas Andréen, Group Vice President and Managing Director, Global Hospitality, Travelport.

The travel agent’s end goal, whether online or offline, is always to find the right solution for the customer; not least in the fragmented world of hotels. Howeverthat is not always the easiest thing to do as often hotels or flights in a meta search environment, appear to be available but after going through the entire booking process, the agent/traveler finds it is not and the prices are different. Travelport focus on simplification and easy ‘bookability’ focuses on ensuring that the information is available real-timeat the travel agent’s fingertips. “Bookabilityis not just about showing the price but ensuring real availability. In the wider sense, it also clearly shows where the hotel is, what amenities it has, pictures of the hotel, its description and ratings. More importantly it’s the feeling that you got what you were looking for in the way you wanted” addsAndréen.

The company offers a number of cutting-edge solutions including Travelport Rooms and More, which aggregates over 27 providers of hotel content, covering close to all the hotels in the world, in a way which significantly enhancestravel agency workflows. Another leading product, Travelport Smartpoint, supports commands from any traditional cryptic GDS and enhances the way hotels (and flights) are sold, in such a way that eliminates the need for months of training.

"We help our travel providers, give them access to all the travel agencies that we have globally and take away the pain of them having to build the technology themselves"

“Amongst other things, it gives travel agents the capability of combining an air booking with a hotel booking in ways that they have previously never been able to do, and also includes items like Trip Advisor ratings. An agent can be on the same page as the traveler and be able to use maps to help their customer visualize the hotel,” explains Andréen. Another example of the innovation driven by Travelport isTravelport Mobile Agent,an air booking agency, which is an iOS and Android mobile application. It enables interaction with Galileo, Apollo or Worldspan systems anytime through smartphone or tablet. Travelport serves many hotel booking clients across the world, including a UK customer who met staff resistance in changing to the TravelportSmartpointapplication. “Having demonstrated the Travelport Smartpoint solution and how it fundamentally simplifies hotel bookings,not only did we go from staff resistance to staff buy-in but we also saw a significant improvement in the customer’s hotel bookings”explains Andréen.

“For the future the focus remains the same; helping our travel providers by giving them access to all the travel agencies we have globally and taking away the pain of them having to build the technology themselves. For the travel agencies it’s about providing the capability of having all the information at their fingertips,in a way they trust, so they don’t feel like they have to call, check the web or fax the hotel in order to ensure they can service their customer in the best way possible” concludes Andréen.