Technology in Travel - Potential and Reality Date:   Wednesday , October 08, 2014 With its Headquarter in Mumbai, Thomas Cook India (NSE:THOMASCOOK; BSE:500413) is one of the largest integrated travel and travel related financial services company. Travel is probably the most complex service in the entire gamut of services industry. There are multiple stakeholders involved in every travel process like airlines, hotels, car rentals, and land arrangements and others to mention a few. Even though these services are interconnected and part of one process for an end traveller, they operate quite independently. The process of booking, pricing, terms and conditions, cancellation policy, validity including others varies drastically across each stakeholder. Mixing and matching these components and offering one single package that suits the dynamic requirements of business travellers still poses a challenge to all the Travel Management Company (TMCs). In this backdrop, the expectation from technology is quite high. As TMCs, we want our systems to talk to various vendors, do the bookings as per customer requirements, generate the invoice, track the payment and close the transaction. Over and above this basic expectation, we also expect our systems to have intelligence about customers\' specific requirements, corporate preferences, security checks against possible frauds and others. We also expect our systems to keep in line with the new trends. The days of calling up the customer care and giving the requirements over the phone or mail is approaching an end. Today, the tech savvy customer needs information at the place he is, at the time he wants and has no patience to wait for a third party to fulfil his requirements with a quicker turnaround time. The solution lies in the mobility - today with the advent of smart phones there is a strong reason for a traveller to be impatient. Information is available any time & anywhere and the fulfilment is just a few clicks away. Similarly, the customer today leaves his digital footprint and gives an opportunity for the businesses to learn about his preferences/interests. Social media is emerging as a new platform to understand your customers better. Through the intelligence gathered from various digital mediums, we want our systems to say what the customer needs even before he articulates it. After all, we are here to delight our customers and today the big data analytics has opened up a new gateway of opportunity. The above specifications were farfetched a few years back. But today, that is how the customer services industry function. If you ask me how many TMCs in the world have reached this level of sophistication, my answer would be unfortunately, \'none\'. \"Why is the percolation of technology so slow in the industry that is most complicated?\" is a question that needs to be addressed, immediately. Most of the IT companies we have interacted with have sophisticated solutions for industries like BFSI, Telecom, healthcare etc. but none for TMCs. This is most likely due to the financial viability as the roadblock for most of the players in the industry to embrace technology in its fullest form. Following are the priorities with respect to technology investments for Thomas Cook India Limited: Intelligent Self booking tool - The impatient tech savvy new age customer wants to fulfil transactions by himself. We enable it by integrating our booking tool with the corporate\'s internal HRM systems to add to the customer convenience. The trend is already underway and we are in the process of quick learning to refine the offering to best suit the customer needs. How do we match the erstwhile manually driven personalized services on this impersonal medium is the challenge for which we are looking out a solution for. CRM - Though Thomas Cook India is into various travel related businesses, the customer looks at us as one entity. We are into foreign exchange, leisure outbound, domestic, MICE, insurance & visa services besides corporate travel. We want to give a reason for the customer to be loyal to us, no matter which requirement he interacts with us for. For a travel conglomerate like Thomas Cook India, the opportunity to cross-sell travel products is immense and the CRM is its enabler. Mobility - The interface with the world of web has definitely shifted from desktops/laptops to mobiles. We are increasingly getting used to fulfil all our requirements through mobile. In this backdrop, it\'s anything but natural to expect the travel management to have a mobile interface. The development is already on-going and we will be launching an app from our business travellers shortly. Analytics - The information stored has value beyond summary statistics and reports. Efficient information architecture should give us the pulse of the business at every point in the system in real time. We are gradually moving in the direction of information driven decision making and big data analytics plays a big role here.