Leveraging Information Technology of Escape Travel - Case Study Example

Report on Escape Travel and Information Technology XXXX XXXX of XXXXX XXXX Submitted By: XXXX Student Number: XXXX Number of Words: 2550 (excluding Bibliography) Abstract Escape Travel, an Australian company opened in 1993 is one of the best in the industry. The company has been able to provide the customers with the best fares for travel and tariffs for rooms all across the world. They provide the best holiday packages. However the company has not ventured into utilizing the various different technologies for the business. The management of Escape Travel needs to make a few business decisions to help improve the current standing of the business. The business is doing very well all across Australia for a long time now however there are a number of opportunities for this company to expand its market presence and awareness by a great deal. The report emphasis on this and there are recommendations that are drawn out that could help Escape Travel to improve the business. The company requires paying attention to the website and needs to make it more interactive and allow online booking for the customers rather than having the customers to come to the store to buy the tickets. Also the benefits of entering into ebusiness completely are discussed in detail within this report. Recommendations are made to improve the business by creating a fully functional website and by introducing a toll free number for direct orders for customers who would prefer to book their holidays sitting at home with their families at their own convenient time. Escape Travel Introduction: Technological developments have been immense over the years in all sectors. The travel industry is an ever green industry for people all over the world. The technological developments over the past few years have been immense in almost every field. However it is to be noted some of the companies within the travel industry have not been able to keep up with the growing technology. The technological developments have been seen in a few aspects of the business however there have been a number of businesses which have incorporated a lot of the technologies into the business however most of the companies have not utilized technology to the full extent. There are a number of benefits that a business can get from incorporating latest technologies within the business. Escape travels with the good history in the industry and great expertise are lacking only in this aspect which once incorporated into the business will provide the business with excellent results. There are a number of opportunities that are opened up for businesses with introduction of information technology to the business (Sean, 2004). There are a number of benefits that the business can gain out of using the information technology. Management decisions play a very important role in every business and it is essential that the management understand the various benefits that the growing information technology can bring to a business. This report focuses on the week areas of Escape Travel in respect to utilization of the information technology within the business model and there is an analysis of the possible improvements that the business can make and the success the business can face using information technology. It has been proved in numerous businesses how information technology has helped the business grow to greater heights and with the new importance that is given to the internet over the past few years, the importance of the business to ensure the website development and use of different technologies that can be inherited from the field of information technology. This report aims at understanding how information technology can act as a leveraging factor for Escape Travel. The main aim of this report is to highlight what Escape Travel can do to utilize the information technology available to improve their business and understand to what extent IT can influence a businesses growth. The next section aims at understanding a little more about Escape Travel following which an analysis of their current situation is made to be able to include IT into the business. Introduction to Escape Travel: Escape Travel is Flight Centre Limited’s second largest retail brand. The company aims at providing customers with the best air fares, tours, cruises and accommodations options to ensure the customer receives the best out of all holidays. The company was started way back in 1993, under the name of Great Holiday Escapes brand. The company provides customers with a number of different services like air line ticket bookings, cruises, tours, holiday packages, insurances, etc. The company has been in the industry for almost fifteen years providing customers with the best fares possible. The company pays a lot of attention to ensure that the consultants that are hired have a sound knowledge of the market and access to all resources to provide customers with best fares possible to ensure all the customers have unforgettable holidays. Information Technology and Escape Travel: Technology has been playing a very role in almost every business nowadays. Technological developments within the travel industry however do have variations apart from the websites and scripts. The industry requires customers to experience the feeling of the golden beaches and beautiful holidays to make the holidays appealing to the customer. The travel industry is one which requires very careful choice while implementing any technology. It is essential to understand that the right choice of technology can help the business in a number of ways and can help steer the business to greater heights. It is necessary to understand that the business requires making the customer experience the feeling of the holiday. To do so it is essential that the Escape travel incorporate the global distribution system and a technological partner. By starting a partnership with a technology partner Escape travels will not only be able to spread their operations to greater levels but will also be able to increase the customers and the customer satisfaction overall. Escape travels even though is one of the best in the industry in Australia it does lack in a few simple things that might help improve the business. The technological development has increased a lot over the past few years. As for Escape travels, the business could improve the website to a great extent. The company’s website is well developed however it does lack in a lot of functionalities. The website can be developed with better functionalities like online booking facilities, interactive websites, etc (O’Brien, 2001). Since the website falls under a business to customer website it is essential that the company focus on all the possible improvements that can be made to ensure the customers receive the best from the website. The website currently has emphasized on only providing information to customers for all the different costs for travel, hotels, insurance etc. There are a number of facilities to be provided in the website as it is a customer facing website. There are extensions for customer facing information systems these can be divided into a) Information seeking and communication, b) Marketing presence, c) Online catalogue, d) Online ordering, e) Online payment, f) online delivery, g) Customer profiling and preferencing (Davies, 2004). The current position of the website focuses on only providing information to customers. A Classic example is the case of ‘Carphone Warehouse Plc’ (CPW), which was started in 1984 with an initial investment of 6000 GBP and operated in the then niche market of mobile phones, with a single physical store. As the market for mobile phones started to increase, CPW entered into eBusiness. But still it did not stop the expansion of the physical stores. Currently, CPW has over 650 stores all across UK and totally 1700 stores across Europe, in addition to the website generating a high percentage of the sales (Carphone Warehouse, 2007). Consider the case, if Carphone has not invested in eBusiness when the market started to grow, now with the huge customer base, it will be very costly to switch over to eBusiness and also, it would have lost its place in the market long time ago, though it was started very early when compared to the other mobile phone sellers. Myths and Facts: There is a common misconception that every small business can enter into eCommerce and be successful. In order to make the key decision of whether or not Escape Travel should opt for B2C eCommerce, it is essential to compute the potential returns and the additional business that will be generated. These will be substantial only if the eBusiness strategy assists in acquiring stronger marketing presence and also delivering satisfactory levels of performance to the customers. It can be accepted that ‘going online’ results in stronger marketing presence, but the strategy should also facilitate the effective execution of ‘straightforward business activities such as distributing goods quickly and efficiently to customers’ (Beynon-Davies, 2004, p319). Also, as Escape Travel is a small business, this investment in eCommerce has a very restricted pay back period. Objectives of eBusiness Strategy: Prior to developing the strategy, it is essential to identify the key objectives that are to be accomplished. Functionality: Integration of the Information systems and building a customer database. Alternate ways of access to customers who are not comfortable with Internet usage. Electronic Inventory Management System should be developed along with the website. This should be in line with the business strategy and has to function very effectively to meet the customer demands quickly. Business & Customers: More focused and personalized marketing and all the market segments interested in the Musicals have to be effectively targeted. A better Proposition (Jobber, 2004) – value based offers to the targeted customers. An efficient strategy for up-selling and cross-selling products to the customers through the electronic media. Effective Customer Acquisition and Customer Retention strategies using the electronic media. Future Prospects: Flexible, so that future innovations in technology can be easily adopted and incorporated into the new system. The backend applications and the database should be designed and developed with the consideration of possible expansion of the physical stores to other parts of Australia and globally. The system should be compatible to integrate into PIE (electronic Point-of-sale Integrated Environment) at the high street stores, in the future. Business Strategy: The introduction of eCommerce will enable Escape Travel to change its business strategy. A range of new services and also a range of new features on the existing services can easily be implemented by Escape Travel by exploiting the power of the electronic media and the ability to store and process customer data efficiently. Major Reasons for entering into eBusiness: Escape Travel currently has the advantage of operating in a niche market where competition is comparatively lesser. Though it takes up the place of ‘Focused Differentiation’ in the Strategy Clock (Johnson et al, 2006), in terms of its services and customers, it faces competition on the Internet, from large establishments such as the airline companies which provide the tickets, also from companies which are more global who also provide the customers with a choice of booking online tickets and making payments over the phone rather than having to go to the outlets to book holidays. Also, as the companies in this industry experience a threat of many small organizations entering into this business and providing services across the web and other electronic media. The customers might prefer using the electronic media for transactions, as it is more convenient and they can place orders and make payments from their home. Hence Escape Travel should make innovative use of the technology to gain the first mover advantage (Sloman & Sutcliffe, 2004) in this niche market, in terms of providing customer comfort and satisfaction. This indicates that if Escape Travel does not incorporate an effective and efficient eBusiness strategy, it will lose its place in the future competitive environment. Hence, in order to retain its existing customer base and also to acquire new customers, it is essential for Escape travel to enter into eBusiness. Customer Database: The customer and prospect databases represent the most important asset in a company’s immediate and longer-term development. All the internal records about the current customers of Escape Travel have to be integrated into a single database. The database should include the entire transactional history of the customers. All future transactions done via electronic media as well as high street store should be entered into this database so that Escape Travel will be able to create different communication strategies to target specific groups of individual customers (Wood, 2003). This enables Escape Travel to base its operations around the customers, rather than products and services (Benyon-Davies, 2004) Front-Office Application at the Store: In addition to using the customer database for customized marketing, targeted at specific individuals, Escape travel should make the customer databases easily accessible to the front-end operator (Fisk et al, 2000). When the front end service provider, at the time of billing gets to view the past transactions and preferences of the customer, he/she can advice the customer about the offers available on the other products, such as insurances, etc.., if the database reflects that the customer has bought similar items in the past. The front-end service provider should be trained to turn every service encounter as an opportunity to collect more information and the front office application of the sales representative should have provisions for storing them directly on to the customer database. Remote Access: The basic idea of eBusiness strategy is to provide remote access to the products. The Access Channels for the eBusiness strategy include: A full functional eCommerce website: With the rise in the usage of Internet, expectations of customers have increased. Hence the website should be fully functional with all the elements of eCommerce incorporated in it. As soon as the website is developed, the first task to be done is to register with all the popular engines. This is, by far, the most effective and cheapest way to create awareness among the potential customer base. A Toll-Free telephone number (Direct Orders): Direct orders are to be taken by phone call. Toll free numbers can be purchased at a very low rate and should be advertised along with the website. A certain number of staff should be recruited initially to handle the phone calls. This part of the service is entirely focused to cover the ‘Need Inhibitors’ explained in the target market segments section. The front end for these staff can be the same as that of the store sales representative. The call handling staff should act as agents for customers, who are not comfortable with using the Internet. Once the order has been placed, the sales staff can inform the customers about current and upcoming offers. Summary: After having discussed the possible opportunities for Escape travels it is quite evident that venturing into the e business model to a deeper extent will help them improve the business to a great extent. It is quite evident how much information technology can help a business grow. All the above mentioned benefits and the arguments simply make it clear as to how much Escape Travel could benefit from utilizing the technology available and improving the website to make the business technology savvy. It is very clear that the company will benefit a great deal out of improving their website and entering into e business. References Carphone Warehouse: Company Information, 2007 http://www.cpwplc.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=123964&p=irol-compInfo Beynon-Davies, P., 2004, e-Business, Palgrave Macmillan, NewYork Fisk, R. P., Grove, S. J. and John, J., 2000, Interactive Services Marketing, Houghton Mifflin, Boston Jobber, D., 2004, Principles and Practice of Marketing, 4th edn, McGraw-Hill International, Berkshire Johnson, G., Scholes, K. and Whittington, R., 2006, Exploring Corporate Strategy, 7th edn, Prentice Hall, Essex O’Brien, J. (2001) Introduction to Information Systems: Essential for the Internet Worked E-Business, McGraw Hill Irwin, Upper Saddle River Senn, J. (2004) Information Technology: Principles, Practices, Opportunities, Pearson - Prentice Hall, Melbourne Sloman, J. and Sutcliffe, M., 2004, Economics for Business, 3rd edn, Prentice Hall, Essex Wood, A., 2003, ‘The Value of Customer and Prospect Databases as a Corporate Asset’, International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, Nov 12, 2003, Vol. 31, p638-643 Read More