Thomas Cook in £20m GLOBE booking system investment
Thomas Cook is to have a £20 million new multi-channel reservation system across Europe.
It will enable all of the group’s tour operating brands to sell and distribute via multiple channels including websites, television, call-centres and travel agents.
The development and introduction of the reservation system, under the code name GLOBE, will be phased in brand by brand over two years.
The solution will allow any combination of Thomas Cook owned inventory and third party inventory via links to external systems.
The new system will enable Thomas Cook to distribute traditional package holidays, dynamically packaged and priced holidays and trips made up of individual components.
Manchester-based BlueSky Travel Systems has won the contract to replace the group’s existing booking systems throughout Europe. BlueSky beat competition from traditional system suppliers during an intense evaluation process.
BlueSky’s itour reservations system and its functionality was crucial to winning the contract, according to the company
BlueSky managing director Stephen Driscoll said: “Winning this contract is the culmination of our vision to create a ‘new world’ tour operator reservation system to support both new and existing business models. Thomas Cook has recognised the superiority of our technology and its flexibility enabling them to take their business to the next generation.”
Thomas Cook AG chief information officer Reinhard Eschbach: “BlueSky offers a pioneering core system that will meet and exceed the challenges of the future. Consumer demand dictates we must offer new types of holidays, product and services in an efficient manner and the only way to do that was to develop a new pan European reservation system.
“The new solution will enable us to align our production processes more closely to our customers’ evolving booking behaviour and allow us to distribute our product how and where we want to and through as many channels as we choose.”
Report by Phil Davies
Phil Davies
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