Today, travel companies looking to retain clientele and ensure customers’ loyalty have to go through several challenges.

One of the hardest is to offer a unified experience to their customers, a new holistic approach when planning their journey. This represents a strategic point in order to be successful.

At Portaltech Reply, a consulting company offering a set of end-to-end product services of products and services for multi-channel commerce, we have understood the importance of customer experience and engagement. In light of this concept, we have developed a multichannel system solution to capture customers’ information, make their data available for subsequent visits and suggest new destinations along with additional services.

One of the most important experiences concerning this business matter was when TUI, the integrated tourism group, requested Portaltech Reply’s expertise to develop an e-commerce solution that could deliver a revolutionary customer experience, while enabling an integrated, scalable architecture. TUI is one of the world’s leading leisure travel companies operating in more than 180 countries and 240 brands, to over 30 million customers. The platform had to support their entire online channel vision and provide a transformational change to customer experience across all touch points.
The main goals were to offer an easy way to search destinations, prices, categories and transports, whilst engaging the customer at the same time.

The solution was achieved through two different stages: the first was identifying a new technology platform supporting the omnichannel vision. It was possible through hybris multichannel platform, which allows companies to access to a large amount of product information and ability to search the information in quickest possible way through Searching technologies such as Solr.

Tomorrow’s travel ecosystem will include partners in areas including retail, network provision, transport, media and entertainment. Viewing the customer from a context-driven standpoint opens the opportunity to sell additional services that will provide a truly inspiring and personalised customer experience. This ecosystem doesn’t just have to start at the airport, but exists from the moment the customer links with the travel provider, right up until the reviews of their travel experience weeks later.

So the solutions that Airline and travel industries need to build should consider Customer as a primary focus and then create a foundational platform that supports Retail mind-set within the travel vertical.

As a result of the adoption of the new online architecture, TUI’s new website registered an increase in searches for particular travel products and clients booking between 12 and 20 percent.
