Background
Inghams Travel is one of Europe’s leading specialist winter and outdoor holiday companies, providing winter sports enthusiasts with the best and most innovative packages available.
Since its foundation in 1934, Inghams’ aim has been to set the benchmark for customer care and high levels of service. Today its reach extends to over ninety countries worldwide, including Asia and North America. While still specialising in skiing, mountaineering and walking, Inghams’ holiday range now also encompasses snowboarding, sailing, chalet and villa holidays and city breaks to more than fifty European destinations.
Inghams was one of the first tour operators to recognise the need to be available online, enabling customers to search and book holidays over the internet. Inghams had been selling holidays mainly through high street agents and via their call centres but took a decision to establish a web presence as quickly as possible. The company identified the need to take advantage of this growing sector and to satisfy the increasing demand from customers using the internet. Employing Modcomp, which used its flagship ViewMax application integration system, a website was launched, linking directly to the Inghams’ reservation system (TIP). This enabled customers to search for holidays and book online, in real-time, through their web browsers.
Over the next 6 years, Inghams sold many holidays through the web. However, by 2006, as the web became increasingly important as a channel to sell holidays, the company recognised that the site needed to be faster and easier to use, and to provide a more exciting and rewarding experience for customers. Inghams again turned to Modcomp for a solution.
The Challenge
At the time of its launch, Inghams’ online search and booking service was innovative and well liked by customers. Now, the challenge was to make the site even more user-friendly.
The search criteria had been modelled on the way a customer might book through a call centre, starting with the date of travel, followed by destination and length of stay, not providing price information or availability until the end of the search. If the chosen holiday was unavailable, or the cost unsatisfactory, the customer would have to start at the beginning again.
In a highly competitive market Inghams needed an advanced website to provide holidaymakers with a quick and efficient way of searching for and booking their ideal holiday online. Inghams liked the idea of a single search panel within one web page, which would allow customers to make several choices before submitting their requests. The company turned to Modcomp to provide the technical solution and to make it work.
The Solution
Modcomp chose Microsoft’s ASP .NET 2.0 technology for the web application because it was both flexible and powerful. In order to maximise speed, Modcomp proposed warehousing holiday data away from the reservation system, in an SQL Server 2005 database. Using SQL Server’s inherent Data Transformation Service (DTS), with ViewMax providing the integration with the reservation system, Modcomp was able to build the data extraction, load and transformation routines to populate the warehouse quickly and efficiently. With this done, Modcomp could concentrate on getting the user experience right.
Modcomp deployed a new Web 2.0 technology called AJAX. Standing for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, AJAX is a web development technique used to create very fast, interactive web applications. The key to this technique is that only small elements of the web page are refreshed at a time. Modcomp was able to develop an availability search panel which repopulated itself according to the criteria selected by the customer, without having to load a new web page after each selection. Modcomp also developed a logic which allows Inghams to prioritise the way holidays are presented to the customer, depending on special deals or last minute offers relevant at the time: a valuable selling point in such a competitive market.
Today, this means that the customer hardly notices the web page changing, making the wait while the web page refreshes, a thing of the past. Now, if a customer selects to fly to Austria, only the flights, dates and destinations relevant to Austria are shown in the drop-down boxes within the search panel. Additionally, if a customer changes his or her mind during the search, one or all of the search criteria can be changed. The search panel will automatically repopulate itself, without the customer having to start from the beginning or refresh the page.
Conclusion
Inghams recognised that, if a website doesn’t react quickly enough to their demands, internet users soon get bored and move on. The new website is fresh and dynamic, using the latest technology to make it quick and easy for customers to search and view holidays online.
Inghams’ Head of IT, Richard Crowell, is delighted with the project; “We had a business target to reach a certain percentage of online bookings within five years, and we’ve managed to meet that target three years early. Since the beginning of January 2007 we’ve seen the number of online users almost double and we’ve had to upgrade our hardware and software to cope with the ever-increasing traffic.”
“I am very happy with the support we have had from Modcomp, they have a very flexible and professional approach and, most importantly for us, have used the latest Microsoft technology to give us a completely up to date, competitive search facility. We’re now looking forward to the next phase of our web improvement, working with Modcomp to bring the same level of development expertise to the online booking facility.”
About Modcomp
Modcomp is a Microsoft Gold Certified software development and consultancy company with over 25 years’ experience of building IT solutions. It was one of the first systems integrators to help holiday companies get on the web and has worked with Hoseasons, Citalia, Sunsail, WA Shearings and GforGo.com amongst others.