TravelMole eWire Q&A: Andrew Owen Jones, Traveltainment managing director international

Andrew Owen-Jones heads Amadeus’ TravelTainment – The Amadeus Leisure Group division, which operates a distribution system for leisure agents. Amadeus bought German online pioneer Traveltainment back in 2006 and clients include Expedia, Thomas Cook, TUI, Travelchannel, Opodo and Avigo. It allows access to hundreds of destinations, package deals, hotels, charter flights, LCCs and cruises.

Q: TravelTainment was a big player in Germany but there is little recognition of it over here. Why did you acquire it?

A: Because we were watching what the company was doing with its search tools and booking engines and when we tried to compete with it we couldn’t because it was doing such a great job. It had a unique product that we wanted to offer. They were managing the data they had so well. The growth projections were scarily good too because their technology was so powerful as a patented search mechanism for selling packages and travel. The technology meets the needs of leisure travellers so well – they don’t give up when searching like they do with so many other technologies.

Q: What problems do you think exist with searching for leisure travel?

A: You have to specify too much when searching. Sites want a destination, a specific day of travel and all manner of other details and they often give a limited result from the search. But if you go shopping in a normal retail environment, people are not forced to make so many choices so early.

Q: What sets the Traveltainment technology apart?

A: Our patented “fuzzy logic” search. This means that we make trade-offs between multiple criteria selected by the end user and we try and present the options that most closely meet the total needs of that end customer. Some of these criteria are hard (does the hotel have a pool, is it 100% recommended by customers who have visited?) and some are soft (is it suitable for families). We create multiple probability distributions for each attribute and we assemble these together very quickly once a query has been posted to our core system. So we can answer queries such as I need four star accommodation for two adults and two children which is directly at the beach, is full board, with sailing and costs less than 1000 euros. We present back the offers that match 100% and then those that are 95 or 90%, depending on how the site is set up.

In its full deployment (in Germany, for example), we blend our five billion holiday offers with huge calculations of dynamically built packages and give the user the best fit to their total requirements in less than 50/1000s of a second. This cannot be done through a linear of tabular search and most dynamic packaging systems cannot do this at all. But because of the algorithms we apply, we are able to produce a “best fit”.

Q: What sites can you go on that use this technology?

A: In Germany and France, Thomas Cook and Weg use the technology. In the UK, though not yet with full product range, you can see the technology at work on www.perfect-trip.co.uk, www.24holidays.co.uk and www.anatoliansky.co.uk

Q: Does social networking play a part?

A: Absolutely. You can search by many variables including user comments and these reviews are categorised so you can search by all sorts of criteria such as age of reviewer or when they went. We email out questionnaires to people who have booked through the technology and input their response so that users know that every review is written by someone who has really been there. The result is that the standard deviation of responses is quite tight. Its crucial to categorise the reviews because what an older person would think of a destination or hotel compared to what a younger person might think is bound to be different.

Q: How do you see this technology evolving?

A: We can currently do queries on our core system like “find the hotels where customers have rated the waterslides very highly” or which hotels are suitable for handicapped guests. We envisage this type of search growing in the next years and making it much easier for customers to find exactly what they want. This raises dilemmas for the sellers, because the end customer may end up with more data than the travel agent.

Q: What’s next for travel?

A:  Well, there has been a lot of talk about package holidays disappearing but this isn’t happening in other markets (look at Tesco, which packages up all sorts of things) and it won’t happen in ours. Any good retailer is packaging because you can add value when you package.

I do not see an end to package holidays – they just need to be more flexible and retailers need to package better, faster and more efficiently. This is a new paradigm of packaging we are offering where no actual package exists before you click the button. Who cares how the package is made? We don’t see an end to packaging, we see a resurgence.

by Dinah Hatch