Summary:
We setup consolidated reporting for a global travel agency group consisting of multiple divisions and a diverse set of domestic and international network agents which enabled them to negotiate better deals.
The Problem:
The Head of Business Operations based out of the head office of a large multinational travel consortia/group was pondering on the problem of collating timely and accurate data for its diverse set of wholly owned and independent network of agents. They had various divisions within their business – a TMC division, an OTA, retail stores that they owned as well as independent agents affiliated to their business, a consolidation division, a network of home-based consultants and a tour operator business operating independently that they had bought a few years ago. Each business division ran their own programs and data services and even though over the years they had rolled out systems to integrate their diverse businesses it was still a challenge to collate all required information regularly and distribute it in a timely manner to all stakeholders.
The Solution:
The business rolled out Airline Metrics across its network that completely changed the dynamics of managing air sales. Within six weeks of launching the project the first set of analytics were accessible from the Airline Metrics application. It brought a huge amount of clarity in terms of airline sales and revenue information across every division. Each division head and their teams were delighted to get weekly updates on their performance and also be able to view the information down to the individual agency and consultant level. The head office team were also empowered that they could slice and dice the data as per their needs across the entire company and across multiple point-of-sale countries. Not only that they were able to layer the divisions and the IATA numbers as per the business unit to provide a tree level drop down version the customer module added clarity on what each consultant was selling and what each account manager was generating at a client level.
The Result:
The ability to view consolidated information had some amazing outcomes. For the first time the consolidated views showed that the group did not have agreements with some key airlines for whom on a group basis they generated millions of dollars in revenue each year. Not only were they able to approach these airlines for lucrative incentive contracts or renegotiate them, they were also able to negotiate a global deal with some of the carriers that made management of these targets much easier using weekly forward revenue estimates from Airline Metrics. The introduction of this tool also boosted productivity within the business and they setup a data feed to their Business Intelligence solution from Airline Metrics to have their internal dashboards updated automatically as well.
