Trading in travel

zoom

BANGARA: What we were looking for as a travel management company was an entire GDS package that suits.

Changing core systems is always a delicate affair, even more so when downtime represents major losses and customers are relying on critical information to ensure they reach their destination, which is why the Sharaf Travel IT team were burning the midnight oil to ensure the switch to a new global distribution system went as smoothly as possible.

Holidays are meant to be relaxing, carefree affairs where things like the office and alarm clocks are a distant memory and the most important decision to make is whether to head to the beach or the pool. While it's easy to be distracted by the serene surrounds of your destination of choice, spare a thought for the travel agents and airline companies that operate a complex interconnected network to ensure you reach your destination on time and as cheaply as possible - not to mention in one piece.

For agencies like Sharaf Travel, the booking of flights, car rental and even hotels is handled through a global distribution system (GDS) that allows for the analysis of the cheapest fares, bonus packages and quickest routes to anywhere in the world. In Sharaf Travel's case, the company has just emerged from a major GDS project that saw the Dubai-based company switch from the Sabre GDS across to a competing offering from Amadeus.

Premjit Bangara, travel manager at Sharaf Travel, explains that the concept for the project came about because the contract with Sabre was coming to the end of its three year cycle and the company opened up a tender process to find the best fitting GDS that would serve for the next trio of calendar years.

"Sabre was a good product but Amadeus made the pitch because they were competition and they met the senior management here, made a case and presented their business plan as well as their technical parameters. What we were looking for as a travel management company is an entire package," says Bangara.

The tender process involved pitches from Sabre, Amadeus and also Galileo and was carried out in November of 2008 when the bids were sent in and presentations were viewed. The next step was the evaluation of the technical aspects of the tenders, as well as the commercial values, and then recommendations were submitted to the company's board of directors.

Once the Amadeus offering was given the green light, it was all systems go to plan how the switch could be made with as little interruption to daily trading as possible, as a single minute of downtime represented significant financial losses.

"What happened was from March 1st the training started for every staff member batch by batch. Each batch had around nine people - two batches running at the same time - so by March 25th we were done with the training. It was only those five days that were remaining where people were using Sabre, then from April 1st people then switched onto Amadeus fully and all the bookings which were there on the previous GDS were migrated onto Amadeus," says Husain Lokhandwala, reservations and operations manager at Sharaf Travel.

While the shift to Amadeus was not set to go live until April 1st, the IT team was busy preparing for the change and the hardware pre-bundled with Amadeus software arrived in March, along with consultants who were there to oversee the progress of the implementation.

Print | Email | Discuss this article

| Share |

READERS' COMMENTS

Click here to post a comment

Add your Comment All posts are sent to the administrator for review and are published only after approval. ArabianBusiness.com reserves the right to remove any comment at any time for any reason. Please keep your responses appropriate and on topic. Arabian Business would like to point out that only comments relevant to the story will be published. Any containing personal insults or inappropriate language will not be approved.
Name *
Remember me on this computer
Email *	(Your email address will not be published)
City
Country
Subject *
Comment *
Notify me of further comments
Enter the words above *
Please click post only once - your comment will not be published immediately.

MORE FROM ARABIANBUSINESS.COM