Transforming the Business of Travel Distribution for High Performance

The worldwide trend to online travel distribution is inexorable—and moving rapidly toward a direct-to-customer model.

Today, US airlines’ website bookings account for close to 70 percent of sales and forecasts predict 65 percent of online hotel bookings will be direct to consumers by 2010. Much of Europe is going in the same direction. Online sales will account for 41 percent of all European travel bookings in 2008 up from 32 percent in 2007. Australians book 90 percent of all domestic airline tickets online. Additionally, Internet penetration in the fast-emerging markets of India and China is steadily turning those countries’ middle-class consumers into well-informed, online buyers.

Many of these customers are cost conscious and want to save time. They seek swift, one-stop access to airlines, hotels, car rentals and other offerings at the best possible price—just the sort of low-cost, one-stop shopping that nimble new entrants such as online travel agencies and Internet search engines are providing.

By focusing on price, the new entrants’ search engines may appear to offer best value for money. However, they are not yet delivering the full customer-centric experience that today’s travelers seek. Today’s dynamic travel markets demand a totally different sort of distribution strategy—one that allows you to maximize margin by pushing the right product at the right price and in the right packaging to customers as individuals.

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Related Research and Insights

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Today’s dynamic travel markets demand a totally different sort of distribution strategy—one that allows you to maximize margin by pushing the right product at the right price and in the right packaging to customers as individuals. Giving providers the power to innovate is exactly what the Accenture Travel Distribution Solution is designed to do. Unlike the item-by-item shopping basket approach offered by most search engines, the Accenture Travel Distribution Solution provides:

• True dynamic packaging and pricing in a fully flexible and scalable solution.
  
  
• The ability to enhance customer experience with innovative search and trip planning features.

Architected to provide a complete travel distribution solution, the Accenture Travel Distribution Solution retains the flexibility to allow you to pick and mix discrete components, depending on your individual requirements. Among other capabilities, the Accenture Travel Distribution Solution platform gives you the customer visibility to deliver:

• Dynamic packaging that shows the customer the best available products and services within a particular search range.
  
  
• Dynamic pricing that provides a pricing rules engine to optimize the price of a particular product or service, or bundles thereof, according to criteria such as customer attributes and selections made, as well as booking media.
  
  
• Procurement manager connects directly to the external inventory systems of different providers and rich-media content, delivering a single, centralized record of booked travel inventory and other travel-related information that has been aggregated from multiple supplier sales systems.
  
  
• Search capabilities that include criteria like key words and provisions for “fuzzy” searches. These capabilities also allow for scoring rules and features that build alternate, up-sale offers. To control compatibility and sequence, trip planner functionalities then orchestrate all components of the customer’s choice.
  
  
• Booking engine and interfaces including a call center, as well as the Web and Web services, which provide a single repository for all booking rules and allow the customer to switch among media.
  
  
• Travel content management that collects, stores, structures and shares relevant travel content across all components and environments and in multiple languages.
  
  
• Distribution contract manager that handles all contracts, enabling detailed sale and payment conditions as well as specific allotments.
  
  
• Business intelligence that collects data about all the Accenture Travel Distribution Solution components, proposes reports on them and can connect with external business intelligence tools to track the rules that are affected.
  
  
• Customer profile and data management that can connect with external CRM tools, gather data that allow you to analyze customer segments and identify opportunities to enhance customer relationships—the keys to customer loyalty.

By empowering you to change the rules of the travel distribution game in your favor, building innovation, operational excellence and customer-centricity, the Accenture Travel Distribution Solution can create significant business value for your company—the ultimate measure of high performance for all industries. Coupled with Accenture’s unique insights into your particular industry, it provides a solution that can transform your business.

Contact us for more information on achieving high performance through Accenture Travel Distribution Solution.