ATAL BIHARI VAJPAYEE

INDIAN INSTITUTE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

& MANAGEMENT
(Gwalior)

CASE STUDY OF CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT

IN
TRAVEL & TOURISM INDUSTRY

SUBMITTED TO: SUBMITTED BY:

Dr. Deepali Singh Ankita Maheshwari (MBA -10)
Megha Gupta (MBA – 27)
 CONTENTS

CASE NO. CASE NAME PAGE NO.

1. TORRANCE MARRIOT, CALIFORNIA 3

2. VIRGIN TRAINS 4

3. ASSAM TOURISM DEPARTMENT 6

4. INTREPID TRAVEL 7

5. COPA AIRLINES 8

6. KUMARAKOM LAKE RESORT 9

7. TRAVELOCITY Inc 10

8. BENZ TRAVELS 11

9. VIRGIN ALTANTIC AIRLINES 12

10. OBEROI UDAIVILAS, UDAIPUR 13

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COMPANY 1: TORRANCE MARRIOT, CALIFORNIA

PROFILE:
It is located in the renowned South Bay in LA County, the Torrance Marriott is minutes from Pacific
Coast Highway and miles of pristine beaches, breathtaking golf, the Home Depot Center and steps
from the Del Amo Fashion Center with over 300 shops. Indulge in one of 487 spacious guest rooms
with the luxurious Revive bedding collection and all the comforts of home. Savor in the hotel's
dining experiences, from Starbucks and Garden Court Restaurant, to the signature Rain Wine Bar
and Lounge featuring 40 specialty wines by the glass. With over 30,000 square feet of flexible
meeting space, the Torrance Marriott South Bay is the perfect venue for your next event. Convenient
to LAX and Long Beach Airports, the Torrance Marriott South Bay defines where style and comfort
meet.

CHALLEGES:
• Guest calls were not centralized but handled by the individual department that leads to the
customer dissatisfaction.
• There were no tracking systems for the Guest request.
• Before installing the Guest Ware their was no loyalty program management capabilities
(tiring of levels, preference management, online profiles, reward management, contact
management, integration with their e-mail marketing system, and guest survey vendors.

SOLUTION: GUESTWARE CRM SOFTWARE:

GuestWare is a unique Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Guest Experience
Management (GEM) software solution designed specifically for the lodging industry to build
customer loyalty. Leading hotel management companies use GuestWare at the property and
enterprise level to manage guest loyalty, guest recognition, service delivery and the facility.

BENEFITS:
By implementing the Guestware CRM software into the Marriott hotel of California it increases the
1. Guest loyalty
2. Guest recognition.
3. it improves the service delivery and facilities to the guests.
4. It improves guest satisfaction.
5. lowers operating costs
6. Increases revenues.

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COMPANY 2: VIRGIN TRAINS

PROFILE :
‘Return of the Train’ has been a Virgin Trains’ is the promotional theme of VIRGIN TRAINS.
Virgin Trains (VT) operates express trains on the West Coast main railway line from London Euston to
Birmingham, Manchester, North Wales, Liverpool and Scotland. Virgin Trains began operating rail passenger
services in 1997 on the Cross Country network and on the West Coast Main Line. Virgin replaced existing
rolling stock with new Voyager trains on the former in 2001 and with high-speed, electric Pendolino tilting
trains on the latter in 2003 . Electric trains like Pendolinos draw their power from over overhead electricity
cables. They tilt as the train goes around corners at high speed.

AIM:
• Meet the needs of customers with disabilities;
• To ease the ticket purchase;
• To run trains at new routes and change with technology to provide customer with better services;
• To ensure a safe journey.

SOLUTIONS:
• To ease ticket purchase, and therefore increase train use and Virgin Trains’ turnover, The Trainline
online and telephone booking service was launched in 1999 and FastTicket self-service ticket
machines introduced at stations in 2000
• It has always been company policy for Virgin Trains to acquire and run new trains– Pendolinos and
Voyagers, including Super Voyagers. All the rolling stock Virgin Trains operates is new, completely
replacing the old trains that the company inherited from British Rail when the rail industry was
privatized.
• Virgin Trains’ policy has been to operate new trains equipped with modern safety features. Examples
of safety features incorporated into the Virgin Trains’ fleet are:
 Train crumple zones, designed to absorb energy in collisions;
 Strengthened fuel tanks (to minimize the risk of puncturing and consequent fire);
 The TPWS (Train Protection Warning System) signal safety system.
• The Virgin Group of companies hold key brand values including innovation and fun. The company
has made use of the viral marketing technique.
• In 2007, Virgin Trains commissioned a comedy video clip about global warming issues Content was
pitched so that the commercial would be a discussion point among young, environmentally conscious
potential customers
• Staff training and development programmes are intended to ensure the delivery of high quality
customer service as well as the safe operation of Virgin trains

Virgin’s trains incorporate a variety of special features:

• At least one dedicated accommodation space for a wheelchair with a call-for-aid button to contact
train staff;
• Wider doors to ease access to trains from platforms, although the inevitable step up to the train and
gap between it and the platform continue to present obstacles that can be overcome by the use of
wheelchair ramps;
• Wheelchair-accessible toilets, with enhanced specifications including a larger floor area than standard
conveniences;
• Brail signage to assist visually-impaired customers;
• Audible and visual information systems, for example voice announcements alerting passengers that
the train is approaching a station are backed up by a digital display in each coach.

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BENEFITS:
• Handicap people were highly fascinated towards the facilities and convenience in travel provided by
virgin trains.
• The train quickly gained a big name in the market place and gave good competition to the existing
ones.
• In one year its market share almost doubled and it started more new electric trains.

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COMPANY 3: ASSAM TOURISM DEPARTMENT

PROFILE:
North-East India is a paradise for tourists. The tourism department government of Assam which works for the
tourism development in the state of Assam.,Tourism in Assam is essentially nature based, therefore, natural
parks and sanctuaries, rivers, lakes, warm water springs, forests, wild life, are the principal components of
tourist attraction. These places can be grouped together under four categories: (a) nature-related, (b) historical,
(c) religious and (d) others.
Assam tourism department mainly deals in recognizing the value of tourism as an economic development tool
and supports in developing adventure toursim in Assam.

CHALLENGES:
• Low market awareness.
• Little existing tourism infrastructure.
• The local people of Assam don’t have multiple linguistic capabilities.
• As the state of Assam is having wide scope of adventure tourism that includes For catering the natural
tourism the government of Assam don’t have the proper safety measures.
• Due to all these lacuna in tourism infrastructure the major tour operators enlisted Assam in the bottom
of their proposal charts so the brand are required to encourage the tour operators to promote trips to
Assam.

SOLUTION:
The Assam tourism department officials selected XOLA from the pools of consulting firms as its
partner in this important initiative as XOLA consultant have extensive experience with adventure
tourism operators in this area and can support tour operators and NGOs with program design, partner
selection, and marketing and public relations strategies.

BENEFITS:
After the collaboration between XOLA consulting firm and Assam tourism department there was
tremendous change in tourist inflow to the state. A responsible tourism development philosophy for
the state was recommended
• Seven adventure tourism zones or “Hotspots” were defined
• A structure for organizing specific activities relative to product development, human resources
development, infrastructure improvement, marketing, and impact monitoring was created
• Highlights of the research showcasing Assam’s unique assets will be revealed to more than
450 international adventure tour operators & adventure and mainstream travel media in a
special report released through the Adventure Travel Trade Association
(www.adventuretravel.biz), the largest trade organization for adventure tourism companies .
• It ultimately increases the revenue of the Assam tourism and the wealth of the state.

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COMPANY 4: INTREPID TRAVEL

PROFILE:
Intrepid Travel is a small group adventure travel company of Australia . Intrepid offers over 450 trips to
around 100 destinations in Asia, Latin America, Europe, The Middle East, Africa, Australasia and The
Pacific. Intrepid trips are designed to let travelers experience the world at the grassroots level: traveling
largely on public transport, trying local food and staying in locally owned accommodation or even with local
families. Intrepid has 7 different styles of travel: Original, Basix, Comfort, Family, Active, Overland and
Independent.
Intrepid Travels ‘Real Life Experience’ was a multi-channeled, global campaign, driving prospects online to
enter the ‘Win 30 trips in 30 days’ competition. The campaign was a global success in generating web hits
and competition entry.Intrepid worked with 30 global partners in total with Avant Card ranking 4th highest in
driving response, working well to highlight the effectiveness of postcard media when part of an integrated
campaign.

CAMPAIGN NAME:
Real Life Experiences

CAMPAIGN OBJECTIVES:
To raise the profile of Intrepid Travel and enable consumers to build stronger touch points with the brand.
Increase requests for 2008 brochures and build up a prospects database.

CAMPAIGN STRATEGY:
The “Win 30 trips in 30 days” online competition was created. Driving prospects to the website to request
travel brochures and enter the competition, the activity allowed Intrepid Travel to build up a database of
prospects to target. The campaign involved a multi channeled, global strategy using press, online, DM,
newsletter and in-store promotions, plus Avant Cards within Australia. 40,000 Avant Cards were distributed
nationally over 3-4 weeks in cafes and restaurants, cinemas, galleries/museums and retail sites.

TARGET AUDIENCE:
18-45 year old purchasers and decision makers, slightly female skew

POSTCARD DESCRIPTION:
A 100% recycled Avant Card was produced, using campaign artwork specifically adapted for the postcard
medium. Bright and colorful, it visually communicated the whole essence of the competition. The reverse
directed prospects to the unique Avant Card URL, allowing response and success of the Avant Card campaign
to be directly monitored.

RESULTS:
• The campaign was a global success with 190,765 unique website visitors, representing a 17% uplift
during the campaign period.
• 90,000 competition entries were received in total. 41% of global entries originated from Australia.
The Avant Card campaign was very popular, experiencing high pick up across all venue types.
• Intrepid Travel worked with 30 global partners on the campaign, and Avant Card was the 4th highest
ranked partner in generating unique web hits, receiving 980 hits to the designated
www.intrepidtravel.com/avant URL, 496 (51%) of these converted into competition entries.
• Intrepid Travel’s Avant Card campaign once again played an important role in terms of overall
advertising strategy. Intrepid’s multichannelled, global campaign led prospects to a micro site, which
attracted 190,765 unique web visitors during the 4 week campaign. Impressively, the Australian Avant
Card URL featured as the 4th highest partner globally in terms of web traffic.

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COMPANY 5: COPA AIRLINES

PROFILE:
COPA Airlines began operations in 1947 with domestic flights to three cities within the Republic of Panama,
with a fleet of 3 Douglas C-47. It got “Developing Airline of the Year” Award, AirFinance Journal(2003) and
“Best Airline in Central America”, Mexico and the Caribbean Award, SkyTrax, based on a worldwide
passenger survey (2004)
Excellent customer service is the foundation of its winning strategy.

CHALLENGES:
• In recent years, the airline industry has seen declining passenger traffic, rising costs, and lower
margins.
• Many carriers have had to discount ticket prices in order to keep planes full. Yet a leading airline
based in Latin America continues to attract and retain passengers who pay full fares.
• The airline needed to consistently deliver an outstanding customer experience, improve processes, and
boost business

SOLUTIONS:
• Originally, it had relied on an internal customer care solution but as business grew, the airline was
unable to handle the increasing volume of calls. TeleTech’s customer management centers (CMCs) in
Mexico City and Leon, Mexico offered a solution for delivering care in both English and Spanish.
• The airline needed customer care for two programs: frequent flyer and reservations. The frequent flyer
program, designed to reward repeat travelers, began in September 2001. Today 150 agents in our
Mexico City CMC handle 130,000 calls a month regarding bonus travel points, benefits, and seasonal
promotions which have been an important business driver.
• Seasonal promotions for the frequent flyer program have generated a steady 3% to 4% annual
increase each year.
• Despite an increase in the number of calls, they are able to deliver a high level of service while
keeping the costs per hour consistent for the last three years.
• The airline’s reservations program is larger, staffed by 330 agents who handle 300,000 calls,
depending on seasonal fluctuations. The program is located in both Mexico City and Leon, creating
the redundancy needed to respond to contingencies. It was launched in January 2004. Agents handle
inbound care plus fax and email/web interactions regarding reservations, promotions, ticketing, and
other travel-related issues.
• The airline’s initial goals for the reservations program were to reduce operational costs and increase
ticket sales. The first goal was reached immediately; the second is ongoing.

RESULTS:
• TeleTech has had a positive impact on the airline’s bottom line from both revenue generation and
expense reduction.
• For the first nine months of the program, sales exceeded the original goal by 11%. We improved
operations as well as ticket sales by reducing agent training time from six weeks to three and
decreasing complaint calls by 20%.
• They provide the care that has established the airline as the leader in customer service and facilitated
increased sales without slashing ticket prices.
• They reduced training time from six to three weeks and decreased customer complaints by 20 percent.
• Also, they were able to deliver a solution that addresses multiple language and cultural issues. The
combination of excellent care and operating efficiencies translates into increased profitability – in any
language.

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COMPANY 6: KUMARAKOM LAKE RESORT

PROFILE:
Kumarakom Lake Resort is a 5 star deluxe/luxury heritage resort situated on the banks of the Lake Vembanad
in Kerala, India. Sprawling across 25 acres of lush greenery, set in soul-stirring ambience, Kumarakom Lake
Resort exudes the charm of Kerala's true heritage. The villas and suites of the resort are a careful
reconstruction of manas, the 16th century traditional homesteads of God's Own Country. Most of them have
been transplanted from their original locations across the State and reassembled painstakingly by hand, plank
by plank, tile by tile.

CHALLENGES:
As with most Hospitality related websites, Kumarakom website was built heavily on Flash platform. While
this helped the website showcase the beauty of the resort, it creates problems for SEO because search engines
have difficult time with flash based websites. The project brief was that it could not do away with Flash and
changes to the site had to be minimal.

SOLUTIONS:
• After doing some brainstorming with client, eBrandz (search engine marketing firm) came up with a
solution to make sure the Flash website had unique page name for all important pages.
• Also eBrandz asked Kumarakom to add more content on the website. This helped in making search
engines understand that the website targeted visitors looking for 5 star luxury resorts in Kerala.
• eBrandz team has been extremely responsive and immediate with their reports and communications.

RESULTS:
• After initial first 3 to 4 months of work, results began to show.
• Enquiries over website have seen an increase. There has been 94 % increase in room nights from the
website and 110% increase in room revenue.
• The visibility of Kumarakom Lake Resort has definitely increased with SEO

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COMPANY 7: TRAVELOCITY Inc.

PROFILE:
Travelocity has more than 36 million members and has been named the World's Leading Travel Internet Site
for five consecutive years at the World Travel Awards. Travelocity members can access reservations and
information for more than 700 airlines, 55,000 hotels, 50 car rental companies and 6,500 cruise and vacation
packages, all backed by more than 1,000 customer service representatives who offer 24-hour assistance.
Travelocity has more than 36 million members and has been named the World's Leading Travel Internet Site
for five consecutive years at the World Travel Awards. A partner of AOL US for over five years, Travelocity
launched in the UK in 1998, and AOL are their primary online UK partner.

PROBLEM:
It is already an established online brand in the US, but wants to expand its business in UK.So there main
problems are as follows:
• Travelocity wished to build their online presence,
• Increase brand awareness,
• Expand their customer base, and
• Boost their sales in the UK.
• Also, they wanted to partner with a media company who could provide access to experienced Internet
users who had a thirst for travel.

SOLUTION:
• AOL was chosen because of its significant reach – having more than two million subscribers, with
over 1.8m going online every day - AOL can provide a mass-market demographic1.
• Secondly, and of equal importance, was AOL members’ enthusiasm for travel; over half visit the
Travel channel at least once a week, and two-thirds of those surveyed go on three or more holidays a
year.
• Travelocity members can access reservations and information for more than 700 airlines, 55,000
hotels, 50 car rental companies and 6,500 cruise and vacation packages, all backed by more than
1,000 customer service representatives who offer 24-hour assistance.. A partner of AOL US for over
five years, Travelocity launched in the UK in 1998, and AOL are their primary online UK partner.

IMPACT:
• Ability to share a single comprehensive database of leads and buyers simplifies the sales, email
marketing, data collection an analysis process.
• Flexibility to extract data for reporting and analysis.
• Easy to use and works well for invoice and experienced users anytime and anywhere.

ADVANTAGES TO THE COMPANY IN CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT:

Advance forecasting of customer needs so that effective and customized solutions were provide to the
customer in time.
• Provide a true 360 degree of all customer data and customer interactions.
• Allowed the company to manage both the present and prospects effectively at the same time
• Increased customer management helped in increasing the overall customer strength, customer loyalty
and hence increased revenue..

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COMPANY 8: BENZ TRAVELS

PROFILE:
In a highly competitive marketplace, every retailer needs to stand out to get noticed and when it comes to the
high street, it doesn’t get much more competitive than the travel industry. Based in the heart of London, Benz
Travel has built a strong reputation as an outstanding travel agency. This status is founded on providing highly
responsive customer service, using industry-leading expertise to deliver travel packages tailored to suit its
clients. To consolidate this success and meet the growing demand for its travel services,

CHALLENGES:
• Benz Travel needed to increase its call handling capability. The company wanted to increase its call
capacity through tactically outsourcing to India.
• At the same time, facing the tight margins that prevail in the travel sector, Benz Travel needed to
adopt an incremental approach that would minimize its exposure to risk.
• To prevent customer from irritation by busy phone lines.

SOLUTION:
To enable Benz Travel to handle increasing numbers of calls, whilst maintaining high service levels, Nortel
partner Datasharp recommended a solution based on Nortel’s Business Communications Manager (BCM) 400
with Nortel Professional Call Center, in conjunction with Nortel IP Softphone 2050s.

The Nortel solution delivers:

• Full contact centre functionality with skills-based routing for swift connection of customers to the
appropriate resource, using the Nortel Professional Call Center application.
• Scalability as the company grows, with straightforward addition of further end us Remote working
with full support for Virtual Private Network (VPN) connectivity over a public or private network.
• Real-time online reporting providing secure, web-based access to call centre performance statistics for
local and India-based call agents.

RESULTS:
Installing the BCM 400 in its UK headquarters gave Benz Travel the ability to establish a virtual call centre.
• This allowed the company to easily and cost-effectively expand its operations to include a number of
offshore agents in New Delhi, India.Using Nortel IP Softphone 2050s installed on the agents’ PCs, the
Indian operation was initially manned by a team of eight.
• The company’s continuing success has seen this figure grow to 40 –with Benz Travel planning to
double its offshore call handling operation within the next 12 months.
• The Nortel BCM solution has been central to the company’s expansion, Benz Travel also unlocked the
BCM’s built-in Multimedia Call Center feature, enabling clients to contact travel representatives
through Internet chat sessions and web call backs.

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COMPANY 9 : VIRGIN ALTANTIC AIRLINES

PROFILE:
Virgin Atlantic Airways is the second largest airline in the United Kingdom.
• Founded in 1984, Virgin Atlantic serves 22 destinations, owns a fleet of 29 aircraft, and has won many
of the world’s top business, consumer and trade awards.
• Originating 20 years ago from the seed of an idea to start up a new airline service in 90 days or less,
Virgin Atlantic today is recognized as a leading, multinational air services corporation.
• 120 of Virgin’s total 140 IT employees are based out of Virgin’s Gatwick headquarters in the U.K.’s
West Sussex region.

CHALLENGES:
Virgin Atlantic airways wanted to ensure the customer satisfaction. So they wanted to:
• Ensure adequate backup across multiple offices across the globe
• Reduce time spent “fire-fighting” and tracking backup performance
• Optimize use of current IT assets
• Forecast future data protection needs
• One of the main data protection challenges was tracking backups or performing restores on data
housed at Virgin’s remote offices, based in airports around the world.

SOLUTIONS: BackupReport SOFTWARE

A BackupReport software solution was used as a means to give both high-level visibility of all their current
backup operations as well as more granular reports that could demonstrate obvious backup gaps and ways to
improve asset utilization.

BENEFITS:
• Within the first few days, as they reviewed the data produced by BackupReport, they realized that
many of their backup processes were not backing up data successfully.
• The airline industry has always been a high expense, low-margin business so this type of tool saved
Virgin Atlantic’s considerable time and money.
• Reduced backup monitoring time, reallocated staff to higher level work
• Achieved 25 percent improvement in backup success rates
• Gained visibility of overall backup system’s health and welfare
• Increased utilization, throughput of current servers and tape drives

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COMPANY 10: OBEROI UDAIVILAS, UDAIPUR

PROFILE:
Today Oberoi Udaivilas is ranked as the fourth best hotel in the world. Situated on the banks of the Lake
Pichola in Udaipur, it is the ultimate in luxury in a majestic setting. In the city of palaces and beautiful lakes,
the Oberoi Udaivilas reflects the splendour of a royal era. All the rooms have amenities like an LCD TV,
satellite television connection, wired and wireless broadband Internet access, electronic safe, personal mini-
bar and Rajput-inspired decoration and marble bathrooms to offer a luxurious stay to guests. According to a
survey (2008) of the World’s best ten hotels, it scored 95.00 out of 100

PROBLEM:
After taking over from heritage department an historical monument and converting it to the worlds best hotel
in the world in a short span of time of just 10 years. Conversion from dump to most sought after hotel in the
world.

SOLUTION:
They first reconstructed the whole infra and for this they took the help of old school of thoughts architects.
They designed the hotel as old rajputana palace and the interior was like old palaces. Then the hired the best
cooks and other staff. Next were customer readiness activities so they started to collect the information about
all the customers and their preferences. With the passes of time they had the bunch of data about the pool of
customers and they stared to cater each customer as special one so their customer awareness and promotion
through word of mouth intensified. Now they are among best in the business

IMPACT:
• Among best in the business
• Huge revenue
• Care of monument
• Tourist inflow and increase in reputation

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