Background
Citalia has been arranging specialist holidays to Italy for over 75 years, and is the UK's leading Italian holiday specialist. Citalia is based in the UK and has over 80 staff, a third of whom work in the company’s central reservation call centre.
Today, Citalia is part of First Choice, the leading European leisure travel company comprising mainstream and specialist tour operations, travel retail and aviation businesses.
As an Italian holiday specialist, Citalia has an in-depth understanding of the country, the people and the culture. Many of its holidays feature destinations which offer a particularly Italian flavour, being off the beaten tourist track and popular with Italian holidaymakers.
The company has built its reputation on its solid experience as well as the meticulous care, attention to detail and personal touch it provides to its customers. However, in order to meet increasing competition, Citalia needed to modernise its operations and exploit the power of the internet.
The Challenge
Citalia did not have a fully functional online booking facility. Most holidays were sold directly through the central reservations call centre, or via a booking request form available on the company’s website.
Call centre staff relied on a time-consuming legacy system running on the company’s AS/400 mainframe to search availability and book holidays.
To enhance the usability of its systems for the customer and travel agents and to create a new route to market via the internet, Citalia needed to integrate its systems with the web and enable customers to easily search, check availability and book holidays online and in real-time.
The Solution
Citalia’s head of IT, Severino Traetto, had worked with Modcomp before and was confident that Modcomp had the necessary skills and commitment to integrate the company’s legacy systems to the web.
Using its middleware technology, ViewMax, Modcomp was able to integrate Citalia’s existing back-office systems with a new web interface, designed to reflect the company’s reputation as a specialist in quality Italian holidays.
To enable customers to search for holidays, Modcomp built several special features into the application such as roll-forward, which automatically searches availability within a set parameter of days should the user’s preferred dates be unavailable. By building an administration interface into the technology, Modcomp has enabled Citalia to easily change or update these parameters as and when required.
Similarly, Modcomp built in an automatic email alert system in the event that a customer encounters difficulty when booking online. For example, if a credit card booking is not authorised an email is automatically sent to Citalia allowing booking staff to follow up the enquiry and complete the sale.
Conclusion
Citalia employed Modcomp and within 8 months the website was up and running. Just an hour after going live Citalia was receiving online holiday bookings.
With Modcomp’s application, Citalia has already realised cost savings within the business. Citalia’s reservation call centre staff now manage a higher volume of calls because the application has made it possible for them to take bookings more quickly and efficiently. Additionally, bookings made via the company’s new website have a lower cost margin, increasing Citalia’s profitability.
“We were very pleased with Modcomp’s application and we wouldn’t hesitate to work with them again,” said Citalia’s head of IT, Severino Traetto. “The team went beyond delivering what we asked for and brought new ideas to the table, so it has been a very good partnership.”
Citalia had a very clear idea of how the website should look to reflect its reputation as a specialist operator, enabling Modcomp to focus on developing and delivering the application on time and to budget.
Citalia’s new online presence will enable it to increase sales on a day-to-day basis. Its expectation is that internet bookings will eventually make up 30 per cent of its business.
About Modcomp
Modcomp is a systems integrator with over 30 year’s experience of building software solutions. It was one of the first systems integrators to help holiday companies take advantage of the web and has worked with Hoseasons, Inghams, Kuoni VJV and GforGo.com amongst others.
The travel industry relies heavily on technology. But many travel companies have back-office systems which were developed over 10 years or more ago. While continuing to do the job, such systems restrict the drive to modernise and develop new channels to market, such as the internet. Modcomp provides the technology to rapidly build online booking solutions which are fully integrated with a company’s existing back-office systems.
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