16-06-2009: TravelCRM Concluded with Successful Remarks

TravelCRM, an independent business experiment carried out within the larger BEinGRID project, finished last March and passed its final review in front of the European Commission in June of 2009.

This pilot run by GridSystems, IT Innovation, Valadis, Versys Travel and Avantours is an e-commerce travel solution that specifically targets small, independent travel agencies (ITAs) that have joined together to form a corporation (also known as travel agency group --or TAG) in order to have better leverage when negotiating contracting conditions with service providers and wholesalers.

There are applications in the market that can help businesses analyze their processes, improve their decision making, help maximize their profits, and offer an in-depth understanding of their business operations; these are known as Business Intelligence (BI) applications. BI is an in-depth business-data analysis.

TravelCRM offers a platform that allows the secure integration of heterogeneous data from several independent travel agencies, but maintaining the current data ownership. TravelCRM, then, performs massive and secure processing of the pooled CRM data to generate valuable BI for the TAG managers who pass the learned lessons and other benefits to the agencies. This CRM BI solution, based on federated data is marketed following an affordable Software-as-a-Service model.

Small and medium sized travel agencies will be able to profit from the competitive advantage of BI reports, which will help managers decide, for instance, what or how to buy from wholesalers as well as run intelligent marketing campaigns, announcing offers in accordance with the expected upcoming behavior based on customer preferences, seasonal periods, or any other business cycles in the sector. TravelCRM offers optimized distributed and secure processing at an affordable price, requiring no investment in licensing, equipment, or the technical know-how.

TravelCRM was reviewed positively by the Commission. It was selected as one of the pilots to use as a show-case by the rest of the project, and the solution was featured in an article of The 451 Group--TravelCRM: CRM, BI and traveling served on a grid plate. The Demo Design and Development team from BEinGrid has created modular demonstrator of the solution which includes a technical overview, the business case, a live-demo, and a video-demo.