Flee – a travel recommendation application designed to deliver five-star shopping experiences and restore ‘art and exploration’ to travel – is using Vayant’s tailor-made Pricing Cache to power its flexible airfare search, which will provide Flee customers destination recommendations based on their available budget and preferred travel dates.

Pricing Cache’s accuracy (typically, over 80 per cent) and frequency of updates is key to delivering the quality of streamlined experience promised by the Flee brand. The Flee cache currently includes around 136,000 bookable air combinations and is updated four times a day. Flights are then booked using a US OTA’s Private Label Program. Hotels’ content and booking is provided by the Mr & Mrs Smith boutique hotels company.

“We are delighted to welcome Flee as a customer in North America. We share the same focus on delivering truly inspirational travel shopping experiences and, with Pricing Cache, we are helping Flee to give its customers those unique experiences,” said Eric Dumas, CEO Vayant Travel Technologies. He added: “It is also great to see Pricing Cache work just as well for a travel startup as it does for huge businesses, like Hotelplan, another recent Vayant customer.”

“Vayant’s flexible Pricing Cache product has definitely reduced the barriers to entry for travel startups. Their product is fully customizable and scalable so that we can both grow with one another’s success,” commented Zeïna Belouizdad, co-founder at Flee.

Vayant Pricing Cache was first launched in September 2012, and an enhanced version (Pricing Cache V2.0) was released in February 2013, used by OTAs and airlines worldwide. New features of Pricing Cache V2.0 include support for multiple passenger types and different fare classes in a single cache for each O&D combination. Travel retailers can also specify maximum connection times, airports, airlines, routes, and define the number and type of search results in their respective cache. Cache data updates are available up to twenty-four times per day.

###

About Vayant Travel Technologies (www.vayant.com)

Vayant, a world leader in airfare search innovation, provides the global travel industry with airfare search solutions that enable truly inspirational shopping experiences.

Other providers talk about inspirational travel shopping, but only Vayant delivers it with cost-effective, efficient and fast-to-deploy solutions that enable airlines and online travel sellers to get closer to their customers with targeted offers and promotions, presented intuitively across every online channel.

Vayant products are deployed by airlines and online travel sellers and run millions of searches daily.

Vayant Travel Technologies is headquartered in Sofia, Bulgaria. The company is incorporated in Delaware, United States of America.

About Flee (www.setmeflee.com)

Flee is a Toronto-based travel recommendation application that combines a streamlined booking process with highly curated original content. Flee cuts through the convoluted online travel booking process, allowing users to spend less time researching, and more time experiencing. Users can book flights directly inside the application, as well as book hotels through our partner Mr & Mrs Smith. Flee’s elegant and intuitive interface inspires discovery and encourages adventure.

Media Contacts

Vayant

Iskra Rasheva, Marketing Manager, pr@vayant.com

Sophy Norris, sophy.norris@flagshipconsulting.co.uk

Flee

Zeina Belouizdad, Co-­Founder, zeina@setmeflee.com

Byron Hawes, Co-­‐Founder, byron@setmeflee.com

The post Vayant Pricing Cache helps Flee add inspiration to travel shopping appeared first on Vayant.

Like Maverick from 80s classic Top Gun, today’s flight shoppers have a strong sense of entitlement when it comes to the choices they make.

They think they can do it all, fly harder and faster, keep everyone guessing till the last minute, and, at risk of pushing the analogy too far, get the girl, or in other words the best price.

Also, like Maverick, today’s demanding customers always want more.

Keeping them happy – across every connected platform – makes bigger and bigger demands on travel providers. Speed and accuracy have always been the key to putting smiles on shoppers’ faces but technology has not always been up to the job.

The online travel shopping experience is, only now, evolving into something that truly merits the term ‘inspirational’.

Fare search has had to become more ‘human-shaped’, with map and affinity-based searches for example giving shoppers increased choice and flexibility to keep pace with expectations.

Airlines – perhaps because they are in the habit of thinking about end-to-end customer experiences – have been at the forefront of this shift in the shopping experience.

Just a few weeks ago, for example, Emirates launched Inspire Me to give its online shoppers new ways to search for flights, based on what kind of holiday there were looking for.

Dynamic packaging is another leap forward for the customer experience.

Talked about for over a decade, today dynamic packaging is a reality and means travel sellers can make it easy for customers to tailor-make their perfect holiday.

More and more, travel sellers are taking advantage of new platforms to promote their offers.

But these new possibilities to excite and delight online shoppers come with a cost: human-shaped shopping is extremely data-greedy.

Truly dynamic shopping demands lots of data, fast. And using traditional technology translates into lots of hits on the GDS, which can quickly drive up cost to prohibitive levels.

Even with traditional fares caching – a technology designed to reduce contact with the host – there can still be unproductive hits on the GDS.

But more damagingly, in terms of the shopping experience, traditional caching could mean poor accuracy, with shoppers frustrated to find that the fare they wanted to buy was already out of date.

Fewer than 50% of fares could be available to book.

At the front-end customers want a seamless service that gives them choice and flexibility. But at the back-end the traditional architecture struggles to keep up with the need for speed and accuracy.

Clearly a whole new approach is needed: one that enables travel sellers to stay a step ahead, and build their offering around the needs of their customers rather than the requirements of IT systems.

The key thing is to re-imagine what search would look like if you built it from scratch and designed it around customers rather than IT systems.

With second generation caching – for example Vayant Pricing Cache – the entire architecture and logic of search has been re-engineered to deliver speed and accuracy (typically in the range of 80% plus).

And this speed and accuracy is delivering new possibilities for human-shaped shopping.

Swiss tour operator Hotelplan is using pricing cache to bring the choice and flexibility of dynamic packaging to its customers.

And Lufthansa has just built a custom-made second generation cache to push its fares to a number of German tour operators, who use the data in their dynamic packaging solutions.

Beyond dynamic packaging, speed and accuracy is giving travel sellers the confidence to exploit new channels, like email and social media, to promote their offers.

It means more ways to reach out to customers and inspire them with fares that are relevant and up to date.

Good service has always been about speed and accuracy. But, in the realm of online shopping, technology lagged behind travel sellers’ ambitions.

Now that the industry is re-thinking the fundamentals of search and shopping technology, and delivering solutions that meet the need for speed and accuracy, travel sellers can reach for the skies.

Posted on Travolution.co.uk on May 8, 2013

The post Next gen caching can help you be top gun appeared first on Vayant.

By Boyan Manev, director of business development and product marketing at Vayant Travel Technologies.

First generation caches were about cutting cost – and travel sellers tolerated low levels of accuracy to make savings.

But caching now offers much more: it’s a powerful tool that travel sellers – whatever their size – can use to turbocharge their customer offering.

When we go to industry events one of the topics people want to talk about most is fares caching.

In today’s competitive travel industry, everyone’s dealing with tight margins and trying to find new ways to stand out from the crowd.

On the cost reduction front, first generation caching offered clear benefits. By reducing hits on the GDS – or, indeed, the airline host – it could deliver significant savings.

But traditional caching came with compromises. Because first generation caches basically delivered a product built on travel shopper searches they could contain old or out-of-date information.

These caches were retroactive, not proactive, and this impacted bookability: fewer than 50% of search results were available to book.

Traditional caching could also prevent travel sellers from creating the kind of innovative and eye-catching promotions they need to compete in today’s market.

How it (currently) works

Say an online travel agency wanted to offer its customers trips from London to New York, available over the next 90 days, and for 15 different lengths of stay.

Altogether that adds up to 1,350 possible combinations. If the cache is updated once an hour, with a live search request to the GDS, that could mean 32,400 hits per day.

That’s just one Origin and Destination (O&D): if a travel seller wanted to offer 1,000 O&Ds, the number of hits per day could reach 32 million.

In a month, the travel seller could be generating close to one billion “unproductive” hits on the GDS.

Clearly, the traditional caching model was not fit-for-purpose. Caching needed to be re-built around the needs of today’s travel sellers, rather than the limitations of existing technologies.

And, in today’s diverse online environment, caching needed to be democratized to embrace niche and specialist players.

In other words, caching had to be re-invented for the age of the proactive travel seller: entrepreneurial, customer-focused travel businesses who are really serious about selling.

How it should work

So what do proactive travel sellers need? Speed is critical, of course, in terms of delivering answers in sub-second time.

Volume is important too: to deliver rich customer shopping experiences, travel sellers need the ability to access and manage huge amounts of data.

The old model might return just a few results (which were not always relevant to the travel seller’s business). But to offer exciting customer-shaped promotions, for example with dynamic packaging, travel sellers can require tens if not hundreds of results, and all the data has to be relevant.

That’s why second generation caching lets travel sellers access and use all the data they need to delight customers.

Last, but not least, next generation caching had to offer unprecedented levels of accuracy, above 80%.

Typically, customers use next generation caching to power dynamic offerings. Swiss tour operator Hotelplan, for example, is using our system to bring the choice and flexibility of dynamic packaging to its customers, while Lufthansa has just built a custom-made second generation cache to push its fares to a number of German tour operators, who use the data in their dynamic packaging solutions.

But this is just the beginning. There are so many ways for proactive agents to get close to their customers today: social media and email provide rich channels for interacting with customers.

But only with the arrival of next-generation caching have travel sellers gained the ability to exploit that data to promote and sell their destinations.

Forget what you thought you knew about fares caching. Today’s caching is about empowering proactive travel agents to deliver for the customer.

Successful retailers have always known the customer is king: with second generation caching, travel sellers have the speed, relevant data and accuracy they need to deliver a royal standard of travel shopping experience.

Published on Tnooz.com on 30 April, 2013

The post In travel shopping, caching is the new monarch appeared first on Vayant.

Launched in February 2012, the first generation of FastSearch brought unprecedented levels of accuracy to air fares search (typically, around 80 per cent) and delivered flexibility and sub-second results on a worldwide basis. A wide range of parameters allowed travel sellers to customize air search for their customers.

The second generation FastSearch offers travel sellers even more flexibility to fine-tune the travel shopping experience. New features include multiple cabins, white or black listing of carriers as well as enhanced private fares support. Low cost carriers are now available on FastSearch plus the ability to search for one-way trips. Improved scalability means FastSearch v2.0 can handle even larger customer specific markets.

Boyan Manev, Vayant’s Director Business Development and Product Marketing, said: “FastSearch is a key component of the Vayant offering and brings to life the difference we make to travel sellers and the travel shopping experience. With this upgrade, FastSearch gives travel sellers even more ways to delight and inspire their customers.”

Vayant FastSearch is the platform for Vayant solutions including Pricing Cache and Live Fare Emails.

FastSearch V2.0 is the third Vayant product major release or upgrade this year. In March Vayant released an enhanced version of its custom cache solution Pricing Cache. In January, the company launched Fare Alert, its 24/7 global airfares monitoring tool.

Go to FastSearch product page>

The post Vayant upgrades FastSearch to enable even richer travel shopping experiences appeared first on Vayant.

Vayant has created a custom-made cache for Lufthansa, using its Pricing Cache solution to open up the airline’s fares for dynamic packaging by tour operators. Built to Lufthansa’s specific business requirements, and enabled by Vayant’s fares and-pricing engine, the cache encompasses currently about 30 departure cities in the German-speaking market and 100 destinations, of which 70 in Europe.

Vayant refreshes and pushes updated cache data six times per day for Lufthansa, guaranteeing bookability of over 90 per cent. Tour operators already getting Lufthansa fares data pushed to them include L’TUR, Bucher Reisen, Hotelplan Suisse and TUI 4U.

Lufthansa, the largest airline in Europe and the fifth largest in the world, joins Vayant’s Pricing Cache customer list that includes Hotelplan, travel.at, HLX and Binoli.

“We were impressed by the quality and flexibility of Vayant and its products and services. Using the Pricing Cache solution will help us significantly to sell Lufthansa flights in the leisure market” said Christian Tillmans, VP Global Online & Leisure Sales at Lufthansa.

Eric Dumas, CEO of Vayant Travel Technologies said: “This is a significant deal for Vayant and for the industry. Signing a global travel brand like Lufthansa underlines the success of our unique technology in the marketplace, and signals a shift towards more human-shaped travel shopping. Pricing Cache delivers the fast accurate data travel sellers need to deliver richer customer experiences.”

Vayant Pricing Cache was first launched in September 2012, and an enhanced version (Pricing Cache V2.0) was released earlier this month. New features of Pricing Cache V2.0 include support for multiple passenger types and different fare classes in a single cache for each O&D combination. Travel retailers can also specify maximum connection times, airports, airlines, routes, and define the number and type of search results in their respective cache. Cache date updates are available up to twenty-four times per day.

The post Lufthansa selects Vayant Travel Technologies for its custom-cache solution appeared first on Vayant.

Hotelplan – one of Switzerland’s best-known travel brands – wanted to inspire their customers with dynamic packaging.  To enable the quality experience their customers expect, Hotelplan chose Vayant’s Pricing Cache for airfares data with unrivalled accuracy, speed and comprehensiveness.

Hotelplan is Switzerland’s second largest tour operator.  For decades the company has sold leisure travel packages, along the way becoming one of the best-known travel brands in the country.  The company operated a traditional tour operator model, making its own agreements with hotels and chartering aircraft.  It marketed and sold its holidays through brochures, high street shops and, latterly, through the hotelplan.ch website.

“Our customers trust the Hotelplan brand.  But the classic tour operator model was under pressure.  It was not flexible enough to keep up with the customer.  If we wanted to be around in five years’ time, we had to find a new business model,” explained Christian Kiser, Senior Project Manager at Hotelplan.

Over the last decade the Internet, the arrival of new web players and the emergence of hybrid charter airlines, had transformed the travel market.  “Today, people can easily compare prices and create their own packages.  To give our customers this kind of choice and flexibility we needed to add dynamic packaging to our website,” said Christian.

As a business built around customers, Hotelplan was determined to build a dynamic packaging solution that delivered the quality its customers expected. “Customers have confidence in our brand.  Our website needs to live up to that confidence.  If people get frustrated by their online experience they will go elsewhere.  Quality is key,” said Christian.

Speed, accuracy and comprehensive results are critical to delivering high quality online shopping experiences.  That’s why Hotelplan chose Vayant Pricing Cache to power its dynamic packaging solution.   Pricing Cache – Vayant’s custom cache export solution – combines the sub-second speed of caching with market-beating accuracy.  While traditional caching delivers 40 to 50 per cent bookability, travel sellers using Pricing Cache achieve bookability levels of about 80 per cent.

Critically, Vayant Pricing Cache delivers the volumes of accurate data that travel sellers need to bring dynamic packaging to life – without the costs associated with GDS-based models. Boyan Manev, Vayant’s Director, Business Development & Product Marketing, explained:  “Pricing Cache transforms the economics of air search, and delivers millions of bookable air search combinations without hitting the GDS or airline host.”

For Hotelplan, Pricing Cache delivers about 290,000 combinations on 231 city pairs, including short and long haul flights from Switzerland’s main airports.  This data is refreshed every two hours, and feeds into Hotelplan’s PLAYER-HUB dynamic packaging solution from tourism software specialist Peakwork.

Hotelplan began its dynamic packaging programme in 2012, launching the dynamic packaging technology on its Austrian website (travel.at) in July, with the hotelplan.ch solution going live in September.

Christian said: “We’re getting good bookability today but we believe we can do even better.  This is a dynamic process: we can see patterns in how our customers search and buy, and we’re using this information to continually improve performance.” When a combination does not work – for example, because of a change in airline schedules or interlining issues – Hotelplan can de-activate the relevant city pair until the problem is fixed.  “We believe we can get non-bookable searches below 20 per cent.”

Vayant worked with Hotelplan to help the company achieve this continual improvement.  Vayant’s Boyan Manev explained: “Our business is about enabling great shopping experiences.  We worked hand in hand with Hotelplan to fine tune their solution, progressively enabling more combinations and more frequent cache updates.”   Initially, Hotelplan requested their cache to be updated three times a day: with Vayant’s support, fares and availability it is now updated every two hours.  If required, Pricing Cache can be updated twenty-four times a day.

Dynamic packaging, powered by Vayant Pricing Cache, is helping Hotelplan keep its offer compelling in the Internet age.  “When you’re dynamic it’s fast and simple to give our customers new destinations and choices.  We can continually enhance our offer, and keep it fresh and interesting.”

That said, many customers still want to take advantage of Hotelplan’s more traditional pre-packaged holidays, so the company continues to offer these.  “It’s all about giving customers what they want,” concluded Christian.  “The customer doesn’t care about whether what they’re buying is pre-packaged or dynamic.  That’s the stuff we worry about.  The customer wants a great holiday at a great price.”

Go to Pricing Cache product page

The post Case Study: Hotelplan chooses Vayant Pricing Cache appeared first on Vayant.

Announced on the eve of ITB Berlin 2013, Pricing Cache V2.0 makes Vayant’s custom cache solution even more flexible. Travel retailers have the ability to fine tune their customer’s travel shopping experience through a comprehensive set of parameters that consistently deliver accurate air search results.

Pricing Cache can support any market cache on a world-wide basis, such as market-driven cache, country, cross-country and continent-scale cache.

New features of Pricing Cache V2.0 include for each origin and destination combination support for multiple passenger types and different fare classes in a single cache. Travel retailers can also specify maximum connection times, airports, airlines, routes, and define the number and type of search results in their respective cache.

Pricing Cache’s unique and proven technology now enables updates up to 24 times a day. The ability to refresh the cache through the day means travel retailers benefit from the cost effectiveness of caching without compromising on accuracy. The solution delivers, on average, 75 per cent or greater bookability (versus a maximum of 40 to 60 per cent for rival offers).

Boyan Manev, Director Business Development and Product Marketing at Vayant, said: “We are constantly working to enhance our solutions and stay ahead of the competition. We must ensure travel retailers have fast, cost-effective ways to provide their customers with the most relevant offers available. With Pricing Cache V2.0, travel retailers can define search around their customer’s needs more tightly than ever before. It all adds up to a better customer experience.”

First launched in July 2012, Vayant Pricing Cache is being used by travel retailers including Hotelplan, travel.at, HLX and Binoli.

If you are interested in Pricing Cache, please contact us at info@vayant.com.

The post Vayant upgrades market-beating Pricing Cache solution to give travel retailers more flexibility appeared first on Vayant.

The management team of Vayant Travel Technologies, a world leader in B2B airfare search innovations, will attend ITB Berlin 6-8 March, 2013. Vayant will be represented at the leading travel trade show in Berlin by CEO Eric Dumas, CCO Brannon Winn and Director Business Development Boyan Manev.

Book a meeting with Vayant’s management team and discuss:

• Democratization of airfare search
• Inspirational shopping
• How to solve the four pain points of online travel retailers:
  • attracting new customers
  • converting more lookers into bookers
  • retaining loyal customers
  • reducing distribution costs while improving customers’ shopping experience

Book a meeting with Vayant here > http://www.vayant.com/book-a-meeting/

About Vayant

Vayant, a world leader in airfare search innovation, provides the global travel industry with airfare search solutions that enable truly inspirational shopping experiences.

Other providers talk about inspirational travel shopping, but only Vayant delivers it with cost-effective, efficient and fast-to-deploy solutions that enable airlines, Tour Operators (TOs), Online Travel Agents (OTAs) and Internet Booking Engines (IBEs) to get closer to their customers with targeted offers and promotions, presented intuitively across every online channel.

Vayant products are deployed by airlines, TOs, OTAs and IBE providers and run millions of searches daily.

About ITB Berlin

ITB Berlin is THE B2B-Platform for the travel industry – an excellent opportunity to meet business partners and to do business. The whole variety of travelling is present at ITB Berlin: Destinations, tour operators, booking systems, carriers, hotels and all other travel suppliers.

Go to the event’s home page

The post Meet Vayant’s management team at ITB Berlin, 6-8 March, 2013 appeared first on Vayant.

Using the latest technology to pioneer services which consumers want but which no one else is proving will be the focus for air fare search specialist Vayant Travel Technologies.

Speaking to Travolution at Travel Technology Europe where Vayant unveiled new Fare Alert product, Brannon Winn, chief commercial officer, said it was now time travel firms applied the technology in the marketplace.

Fare Alert was designed to take the hassle out of shopping online by allowing customers to set the parameters of their search, like price and destination, and then leave the system to alert them when something appropriate is available.

“These are the sort of cool things we are coming up with – 2013 is all about finding these niche-type offerings that are impossible in traditional models because the technology does not allow it but we know customers are looking for,” said Winn.

Vayant is a Europe-based business-to-business only player in the air fare shopping sector, an equivalent to ITA Software which Google bought for $700 million and which it now powering its Flight Search service in the US.

Winn said, having spent the last five years building its technology, Vayant was now very much on the customer acquisition trail this year.

“We are looking to get the traction on the consumer side of the product so the focus is maybe not necessarily on building new product but I think it’s about bringing forward to the market business uses of our product.

“How does one translate this technology into something that our customers can use in their businesses every day? Sometimes people need to be inspired in how they can use it so we give them a real live example [like Fare Alert].

“The whole start-up community is probably one of the best sources of that for us because they are searching for the cool new thing that’s going to drive traffic to their site. They are not weighed down with a traditional thought mentality which says ‘we have to do it this way because this is the way it’s always been done’.

“That’s the other thing about 2013 – it’s about challenging the status quo, thinking outside the box.”

One example of how Vayant’s approach is helping tour operators with their business is how they are helping them tackle BA’s decision to stop issuing hard copy paper fares at the end of March.

Some firms still take these to load the data into their systems by hand, but Vayant has come up with a solution to mechanise this process and save on the cost of having to query a GDS to access the data.

Vayant’s core product has been designed to reduce the costs of accessing and downloading live data from the GDSs and it is working with Peakwork in Germany, the firm set up by former Traveltainment founder Ralph Usbeck, which is fast establishing itself in the growing dynamic packaging sector in the region.

Winn said this tie-up is being used by OTA Hotelplan in Switzerland and Austria to put together millions of holiday combinations, with updates 12 times a day that would otherwise be economically unfeasible using the traditional GDS system.

Vayant is poised to go live with a top five global OTA with its Live Fare email technology, first unveiled to coincide with World Travel Market last November, which allows travel firms to send emails to its database which include fares that are accurate as and when the email is opened and are constantly updated.

Winn said live air fare shopping in emails to this client’s database would require 48 million ‘transactions’, or queries, on the GDS a month, something that would not be viable. However, Vayant can provide this without having to go via a GDS and says, at the same time, this will help the client improve its conversion rate because fares are accurate.

Source: Travolution

The post TTE 2013: Vayant uses latest technology to pioneer services which consumers want appeared first on Vayant.

Travel was the first engine of the e-commerce revolution. For many people, searching and buying travel online for great value fares was their first experience of e-commerce.

But online travel shopping has not kept pace with the expectations of Web-savvy consumers. Online retailers in other sectors have re-engineered the shopping experience to reflect how people want to shop. Amazon and Apple’s iTunes store are leaders: using their knowledge of individual customers and insights into shopping behaviour to deliver ‘human-shaped’ shopping.

The contrast with traditional online travel shopping is striking. Picture Christine. She wants to book a long weekend with her boyfriend. The couple wants to escape winter – and they don’t really mind where they go. The Maldives, Corfu, the Canaries… As long as there’s sun! They live near London so they have a choice of airports to fly from. They are not that tied to any particular date – but they know how much they can spend.

Christine and her boyfriend fit the pattern of many travellers. Research tells us that around 50% of leisure shoppers have no specific destination in mind when they go online, and 40% are flexible about when they go (The Future of Travel Search, 2012, PhoCusWright and Amadeus). They face a bewildering range of travel choices from thousands of online travel sellers.

Christine is looking for inspiration. But instead traditional air search gives her forms to fill, based on specific city pairs and dates. The majority of travellers visit anything from six to 20 websites to find the right flights (WAYN, Frommer’s Budget Travel Survey). This just doesn’t make sense: shopping should be part of the fun of finding a holiday. Instead, it is often hard work.

At Vayant, we saw an opportunity to re-invent air search to help our customers –OTAs, airlines and meta-search engines – deliver a more human-shaped shopping experience. Something that matches the expectations of an Apple/Amazon generation, but also recognises the complexity of buying travel.

The key was to optimise data, and make it faster, easier and cheaper for travel sellers to push the right travel offers and choices to their customers.

We asked: “What would air search look like if you designed it around shoppers, and not computers?” Starting with this insight, we built a suite of inspirational air-search tools, designed around the way people actually shop. We created tools that allowed people to search using theme and price affinity, calendar, map and distance-based radius. We tackled the frustration that shoppers experience from searches that return out-of-date fare options by pioneering sub-second search. And we did this in a way that would make economic sense for our travel seller customers. Our analysis told us that 80% of searches are carried out on 20% of available destinations. So we built a search environment that only pushed the products our customers actually sell. By enabling travel sellers to fine-tune search around their customers, we eliminated unproductive (and costly) hits on the GDS or airline host.

This is what we mean by ‘human-shaped’ shopping, and already our customers see the benefit in lower look-to-book ratios. Across the industry we’re seeing the ‘human-shaped’ shopping concept gain momentum, as travel sellers strive to inspire their customers with search offers designed around them. One example is easyJet: their InspireMe offering turns a transactional web shop into an engaging environment, designed to entice customers with travel options that match their interests and budget.

But this is just the beginning. At Vayant, we believe we are entering a new era for travel e-commerce, where the customer and inspiration are at the heart of everything. Mobility offers exciting opportunities to deliver even more personalized and compelling retail offerings. Paradoxically, as travel shopping becomes more high-tech, the travel shopping experience will become more human.

Source: Travel Bulletin

The post Eric Dumas, CEO of Vayant Travel Technologies, unveils a new era for travel e-commerce – human-shaped shopping appeared first on Vayant.