Amadeus launches Amadeus m-Power, the latest mobile solution for travel agencies

VCK Travel (NL) and BTS Travel (BE) first movers in close collaboration with Amadeus. Vilvoorde, Belgium, 24 April, 2012: Imagine being able to offer end travelers search, book and pay functionalities across multiple airlines, hotels and car services, as well as flight notifications, location based services, immediate customer service and social media functionalities all through one mobile application. This is Amadeus’ vision and today, we announce the launch of our new m-Power mobile solution, a revolutionary new technology developed for the mobile platform. Designed with the traveler in mind, Amadeus m-Power offers the solution of search and booking, in-trip and post trip functionalities allowing travel agencies to deliver choices and extra services to end travelers throughout the entire trip straight from the mobile phone. Travelers benefit from the total travel experience straight from their mobile smartphone, a truly differentiating advantage over other mobile travel applications currently available in the Benelux. The mobile application, developed by Sound of Data and Amadeus, will be deployed by two innovative travel agencies: VCK Travel (in The Netherlands) and BTS Travel Experts (in Belgium), both RADIUS members. As from today the app from both agencies can be downloaded from the Apple App Store. Mickey Creyfs, CEO BTS Travel Group: “With m-Power, we are the first travel agency in Belgium that has an answer to the need of our customers to be serviced by us via the mobile channel. Mobile booking with comparison between all airline fares in the Belgian market is now a reality.” Ed Berrevoets, Managing Director from VCK Travel: “m-Power provides a perfect technology to fit in our mobile strategy, as it completes the circle to service our corporate customers via all channels including mobile. Therefore, from the beginning we have been working very closely with Amadeus and Sound of Data to create our mobile booking app, AirGo-M, which we see as state of the art technology for tomorrow’s corporate traveler. ” With the increasing trends of travelers relying on their mobile applications to deliver information, functionalities and services, Amadeus has committed to deliver to travel agencies a unique and ground-breaking new solution to meet this new area of opportunities. Luc Pannecoeck, General Manager Amadeus Benelux to add: “We are very proud to have developed this app for travel agencies. More than ever we can say that Amadeus is one of the most innovative technology partner who turns ideas into reality. We are always searching to the most advanced solution which can provide the appropriate answer to our customer needs.” To find out more about Amadeus’ m-Power solution, contact your Amadeus representative today or visit our website on www.benelux.amadeus.com/mPower

A professional trade show presentation for Sound of Data

In today's information society it is becoming increasingly difficult to convey a certain message in the right way or to find the desired information. A clear, fair presentation is therefore of increasing importance. Nijgh communications developed in collaboration with Laarhoven Design a new trade show presentation for Sound of Data. The result: a stand which is a large contributor to the successful and professional presentation of Sound of Data on Travel Distribution Summit 2012.

Now book flights easily with 'My CheapTickets' iPhone app

From 4 March 2012, you can now find, book and pay for flights with the upgraded iPhone application ‘My CheapTickets’. The application is the product of a partnership between Sound of Data, Gateway and CheapTickets.nl. According to Sound of Data, this is what people currently expect in a mobile application of an online travel agent. In the autumn 2011, CheapTickets.nl was the first online travel agent in theNetherlandsto offer its customers pro-active information about changes in the current status of a booked flight via the iPhone application. With the upgrade, customers can now also use the mobile application to book and pay for flights. ‘It’s amazing how rapidly consumers have embraced the mobile. Not just to communicate with each other, but also to buy goods and services”, says Jeroen van Velzen, CEO Sound of Data. Van Velzen: “It’s in that light that we need to look back at the first steps from ‘bricks’ to ‘clicks’ a few years ago. First of all, the products and services which are already available online will be offered. Using the new iPhone application ‘My CheapTickets’, all flights can therefore also be booked on your mobile. The next step will be to offer products and services associated with travelling mobile phone users. That’s where the real added value of mobile booking will emerge and that’s what we plan to focus on as a company.” About CheapTickets.nl CheapTickets.nl, one of the biggest online airline ticket sellers in theNetherlands, is part of Travix International B.V. Travix is the market leader in theNetherlandsin the field of online airline ticket sales. The organisation operates in 16 countries, has 450 employees and an annual turnover of more than USD 1.1. billion. Travix is part of BCD Holdings N.V. With the Sound of Data solutions, CheapTickets has developed ‘My CheapTickets’ into a real-time booking application. About Sound of Data Sound of Data supplies ‘customer navigation’: large scale, one-to-one contact between a company and its customer. The aim is to provide the fastest route to the required service at the right moment. The mobile phone always plays a key role in this. The platform of Sound of Data is currently used in over 23 countries, with around 350,000 passengers receiving information on their mobile about their journey every month. Besides the travel industry, Sound of Data also supplies smart customer contact solutions to improve customer care and mass interaction solutions for Dutch radio and television broadcasters. The ‘My CheapTickets’ app can be downloaded free at the Apple Store.

Relying on mobile for capturing incremental revenue

Bron:http://www.eyefortravel.com/mobile-and-technology/relying-mobile-capturing-incremental-revenues IN-DEPTH: Mobile provides unique opportunities to improve the traveller experience. It can also be a great mechanism to capture incremental revenues through upsell of ancillary revenues and reduce operating costs through self-service. Mobile should be first and foremost a service channel and can only become a successful sales channel if you get the service part right. So the only sale you’re going make is the sales that is being perceived as a service, says Jeroen Van Velzen, CEO, Sound of Data. By Ritesh Gupta As devices like the iPad, and Android tablets become more popular, there is a significant opportunity to monetise them in future. It is being acknowledged that the focus for mobile has turned and monetisation is pulling ahead as the primary driver. Mobile provides unique opportunities to improve the traveller experience, which can lead to customer loyalty. It can also be a great mechanism to capture incremental revenues through upsell of ancillary revenues and reduce operating costs through self-service. This is the primary lens through which travel companies should view monetisation, says Glenn Gruber, AVP, Market Development, Travel Technologies, Ness Technologies. Revenue Expectations Jeroen Van Velzen, CEO, Sound of Data says mobile will not be a key revenue generator for most travel industry players in 2012. “For online players, we see revenue percentages between 3-6% created for mobile - depending on markets, not including tablets.That might be key revenue for some, others might invest in other distribution technologies that will bring them more revenue,” said Van Velzen, who is scheduled to speak at the forthcoming Travel Distribution Summit Europe 2012, to be held in London (April 17-18) this year. He acknowledged that the overall sentiment is an overhyped expectation of the revenue potential for mobile in travel. “It’s still a fairly immature distribution channel,” he further added. Mobile can be a great channel for generating ancillary revenues. For instance, when it comes to guests staying in a hotel, hoteliers can take advantage of mobile coupons to promote the onsite restaurant, spa, and services. “Our company is built on the fact that mobile will be the primary device for travel suppliers for informing, communicating and transacting with travellers. According to us, mobile should be first and foremost a service channel and can only become a successful sales channel if you get the service part right. So the only sale you’re going make is the sales that is being perceived as a service,” explained Van Velzen. The right approach Travel companies are slowly taking control of how to go ahead with ancillary services selling via mobile phones and tablets. Van Velzen recommend following steps: First, the customer is expecting mobile offerings to be part of a complete mobile experience. A lot has been said about ‘Less is more’ on mobile, but we see customers moving towards expecting a more comprehensive service offering. So we are moving form “Less is more” to “Light; not less”. Meaning the mobile customer expects to get the core functions of you as a supplier. “We launched an Itinerary management app with some additional services with one of our OTA customers and the single biggest question was ”Why can’t I book my flights using the app?”. So if you feel ancillary sales is the low hanging fruit you will have a hard time explaining to your customer why your core offering is not available on mobile. The minimum viable mobile product for most customers is a lightweight offering of the core offerings that you have available on other channels as well,” shared Van Velzen. Van Velzenfurther added: Every mobile ancillary opportunity you feel you have for a customer should be packaged in a service offering. So you will have to find out for what specific customer in which moment in time in which specific context your offering is perceived as a service. Furthermore mobile is generally more attractive for last minute ancillaries. And then the obvious stuff: make sure you transfer personal details to the mobile environment prefill all the booking data you gathered on that same customer. Start with products that do not need credit card confirmations like insurance and restaurant reservations. Key considerations According to Paul Hastings-Gayle, head of distribution, HostelBookers.com, the key considerations while going for ancillary services selling via mobile phones and tablets should be as follows: 1. Make sure detailed and extensive research of your own market is undertaken. 2.Clear objectives for being in the mobile market are established from the outset. It is so easy to follow the crowd or, due to fear or ‘follower pressure’, move into this space without business clarity. “Getting the objectives absolutely clear from the outset allows the rest of the project to be about excellence in execution against the objective. Should a company offer full/partial product/services? An app/simple a mobile friendly site? prioritise existing/new customers? See this as part of an overall marketing/acquisition strategy? Where, when and how is success to be measured? Looking into the mobile and tablet market is the same as moving into any other new channel/territory the same level of analysis and business questions need to be considered,” said Hastings-Gayle. Conclusion Too many companies still try to do too much with mobile. Less is definitely more when it comes to mobile. Of course, you can still do a lot but you have to meter the data flow and focus heavily on efficient user interface. Travel companies believe that consumers are ready and anxious for these types of services to be offered. The hospitality industry is very intrigued with the mobile service opportunity. At the same time, companies are generally unfamiliar with mobile and their organisational structures make it difficult for them to move quickly in the adoption and deployment of new technologies and services. As such, they will require a good amount of education and a strong industry first mover to spur the industry into wholesale adoption.

Development of the new Sound of Data website

By: Supersteil During the development of the new Sound of Data site, we focused on rich user-interaction, new technologies and tried to make people 'wow'. Its base is built in HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript, and extended with jQuery.After completing the base of the website, we had a solid start which challenged us to enrich it with great user-interaction and state-of-the-art animations. We came up with some great ideas of using 3D and multi-depth elements. Since it's still not fully cross-browser supported, we made some simple tests with HTML5 + CSS3, HTML5 Canvas, SVG and a JavaScript 3D Engine. Eventually we made a decision to use HTML5 + CSS3 in order to create the elements with a fallback for older browser which does not support the script.While using both X-, Y- and Z-Axis of an element with multiple layers, we managed to create a fully interactive 3D-element as i.e. it is shown on the homepage, travel-page and media-page. The elements react to your mouse cursor, and turn or flip when hovering.When opening i.e. the travel-page on your iPad, it will detect the device, and you're able to use the accelerometer to interact with the elements. A horizontal skew of your iPad image, and the element will smoothly turn, and you'll experience the 3D-effect of it. Try it out yourself!Other great custom elements are the animating-stats on the homepage, the team-members on the about-page and the archive on the news-page.The stats on the homepage will animate when scrolled and visible for the user, it's built with CSS3 and is variable of length. When changing the numbers and/or text, it will automatically change its behaviour. The team-members are randomly loaded within three different template-layout and interact with the mouse. When hovering, its background will go screen-wide and the image will turn from grayscale to colour using HTML5 Canvas. On iPad it will react using touch-click.On the news-page we implemented an archive which will detect current date and variable build itself. When clicked, the content will refresh in-page using Ajax and the page itself will not have to be refreshed.When browsing the site you'll experience more interactive elements such as drag & drop, filter by category and custom drop-downs. We combined our development-knowledge with great designs, interaction and animations to produce a clean and up-to-date high-standard site with rich user experience. It's optimized for the iPad, fully cross-browser and multi-platform.We built a smart framework which detects your active language and renders the website with the right content using templates and clean functions. The content is loaded from a database which can be managed with our custom CMS. In this CMS we are able to publish projects and news-items per language and manage the team-member. The CMS is built in HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, extended with the newest jQuery and plugins to optimize user experience and daily use.