TUI Travel proudly announced yesterday that its UK division will be getting a brand new reservation system courtesy of Anite – but didn’t explain why it is perhaps so urgent.
UK-based travel technology company Anite will be charged with implementing its @comRes reservation platform across the mainsteam holidays business in the UK and Ireland.
Anite’s system was introduced to the same division in Germany, part of a wider move being touted by TUI as a shift away from “legacy systems to seamless integrated reservation platforms”.
But how “legacy” are these legacy systems?
Well it turns out that the UK mainstream business’s reservation system which is about to be upgraded is currently run on a platform called Tracs, built in-house around 40 years ago.
Yes, one of Europe’s busiest booking platforms for one of the most high profile package holiday companies in Europe was built in the early 1970s.
This nugget of information will no doubt see supposed agile-focussed startups raising their eyes to the skies – but this has actually been the way of the (travel) world for generations.
On the one hand these giants of the European travel industry (Thomas Cook has been trying to upgrade its own platform with varying degrees of success for over two years) have run huge volume businesses on ancient systems for decades with very little problems, at least that they are willing to admit to.
But change is coming to these types of businesses, as systems covering reporting, payments, back-office, CRM, social, customer service and mobile have evolved massively in recent years.
Such evolution doesn’t happen quickly – a TUIÂ official confirms the UK implementation of @comRes platform will be up and running by the Spring of 2014.
The German transition to @comRes took around four years to implement. TUI systems in Austria and Switzerland have now also been changed.
Tour op’s need to really do their due diligence when they’re planning a switch from a legacy system to a new res and back office suite of tools. In my experience working with companies doing this switch, particularly on the online side, the older systems are actually often more flexible.
Many of the new systems have very defined use cases for booking, which can mean that the UX and customer journey online is rigid and defined with little room for change (without major development/customisation to the system or outside it in the web tier). This means you can actually end up with a worse booking experience for your consumers after your multi-million investment in a new res system (unless you’re prepared to throw more cash at it for customisation).
I’ve seen this happen, seen conversion rates drop after multi-million £ investments, and only recover after further huge investments.
The lesson? Change your res system for the right reasons (improved back-office, future proofing, new biz opportunities, better rev mgmt etc) but don’t expect a spanking new res system to improve your UX and conversion rate without additional work and insight.
Some new res systems are built with users in mind and can deliver improvements out the box. But they are few and far between and generally small companies that the big players won’t want to take a risk with.
Personally, I would recommend a res system with open, flexible API’s that allow for full customisation of the booking path and options in the web UI. Sadly a lot of the established res system software companies just don’t offer this (although in pitches they’ll often claim they do). Due diligence and customer insight/UX input is key in these decisions!
ps. Some ‘new breed’ res systems are really just the old versions, with some new features and an XML gateway on top…
Perhaps one of the reasons the TUI CFO resigned under pressure last year. After the revelation of $185 million USD of write-offs.