With travel disruption on the rise, travel agents are more essential than ever.
Free Independent travellers like to make their own plans, build and book their own itineraries. With lots of offers available its tempting to book that AirBNB, some flights, transfers and excursions (all on separate bookings) Since covid, tourism is restarting but with staff issues, IT challenges, and increasing inflation globally, the risks of holiday disasters […]
Unlock the potential in your existing database with a customer data platform and rebalance your google ad spend.
Google Ads is an effective way of acquiring customers, but businesses often forget that they have great potential in the data they already have. Google has become the Amazon of marketing, it’s the go to place to capture leads and increase sales. More Ads = More leads = More conversions = More Sales. Where this […]
Conversational vs traditional customer experiences.
I’ve been working on a project with Pat.ai/EC.ai for several months, and what those guys can do with linguistic understanding (and context) is pretty amazing. Looking at a traditional customer experience in travel. A traditional UI for example google’s multi-itinerary flight search form, has prescribed inputs The customer enters data, select dates, and builds their […]
Digital transformation: more human than digital.
Us humans are a funny lot! We’re quite stuck in our ways. We like to do things the way we do, we do not really embrace change even if it’s for the better. Digital transformation is everywhere at the minute as businesses aim to become more efficient. But a digital transformation project isn’t a one […]
Travel agencies use Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to save money
Travel agents often book outside of the corporate booking engine. A good example of this is Ryanair or easyJet flights, and other tour operators or dmcs, who may give negotiated rates over the phone. These manually booked elements, bear risks. Risk of typos, date errors, risk of incorrect costs. If left un-checked these bear a […]
Deliver innovation via micro services orchestration.
Traditional applications can be monolithic beasts with APIs as the final layer These services present a prescribed flow are often inflexible and were built to do a specific purpose. Traditional applications are usually object oriented with a series of services being called internally, and eventually rendered as a soap/rest API. Quite often with all functions […]
Security Design patterns: CIA triad
When reviewing systems, I use this model to provide useful context to ensure that applications/services have sufficient processing to ensure data security is managed and maintained. Confidentiality – what level of secrecy is expected for this product or service, how do we protect it, how do we allow access to the data Integrity – how […]
When SaaS providers hike their prices.
OpenVPN has been my goto appliance for SSL VPN connections for Devops accessing cloud services, especially as AWS doesn’t have its own SSL VPN gateway! Open VPN provides a good UI and client tools. Until recently I’ve been happy to pay for its annual licence fee as it offered good value, but earlier this year […]
How to wifi enable a Zebra USB label printer.
Zebra printers are one of the most popular label printers, also the printer recommended by Royal Mail Click and Drop (which links to Shopify). For new sign ups Royal mail offer a £150 Zebra GK420D printer which is a great deal but it isn’t a wifi printer (it is usb, serial or parallel). Network versions […]
UK or overseas holidays in 2021?
In our current covid landscape, overseas holidays in 2021 feel quite far away. The question is, is a UK holiday significantly different in cost to an overseas holiday. In review; It’s about the same if you book early. For my example I took prices today (1st Feb) for bookings on the 1st August for 7 […]
Could revenue and accounting departments be in for a challenge for 2021 bookings?
At the minute travel companies are releasing sales promoting a low deposit, fully flexible booking to secure their 2021 holiday. With the current terms, your deposit is refundable (cash/voucher), previously this would have been non-refundable. As a result many consumers are willing to potentially book multiple bookings (to different destinations) on the hopes that they […]
With travel businesses tempting consumers with flexible deals. Is travel really going to be possible before July 2021?
I, like many people rebooked my August 2020 booking to 2021 assuming that the world would be back to normal by then. At the time I thought a year for the virus to be under control was realistic. I didn’t expect the subsequent waves of COVID-19 which followed. Before we start, let me say; […]