Background
Destinology is a market-leading tour operator in the UK travel industry, selling tailor-made luxury holidays to a wide variety of destinations around the globe. Their portfolio of luxury holidays is marketed to consumers online and backed up by a dedicated team of travel experts providing the very best in personal service. In the back office, this is supported by an in-house content management system (CMS).
Like many tour operators in the UK, Destinology deals with the everyday demands of contracting and its associated quality control issues. These include frequent contract amendments, stop sales and special offers that constantly need to be loaded. This requires flexible staffing over weekends and peak periods, as well as additional resources for staff management and training. Their ultimate challenge is to find experienced staff at a competitive price.
Destinology chose Open Destinations to provide a new outsourcing solution for contract loading. Prior to any loading, an in-depth consultation evaluated back office systems and processes.
Solution
A new procedure manual was created, documenting the process for loading and checking contracts, escalation procedures and reporting structure.
Flexible staffing was introduced. As loading demands increased, the size of team and targets also grew.
Targets and priorities were agreed. Destinology wanted an improved quality score of 99% accuracy, as well as loading of contracts, amendments, special offers and stop sales. A priority list was introduced in to address the urgent priorities that were arising – ie. special offers to get to market.
A bespoke training plan was developed. New staff were trained over a 3-week period, combining new procedures with the existing CMS training manual. A workflow was tailored to the specific requirements with a pre-defined, detailed checklist for each activity.
Result
“Open Destinations are a valuable extension of our team in the UK, offering us a high quality service that helps is manage our processes and speed to market” – Deborah Windle, Managing Director, Destinology
Targets achieved
By predicting trends, Open Destinations ensured that Destinology was prepared to cope with last minute demands and peak booking seasons, by planning staffing levels up to three months in advance. The high level of accuracy eliminated data integrity risk, minimising losses to the company.
Timely reporting
Destinology receives a daily email with a work update, as well as weekly and monthly summaries outlining key business challenges and productivity.
A cost-effective solution
The new system freed up the time of the Destinology product team, allowing them to take on more critical tasks and support the company’s growth strategy.
Speed to market
Open Destinations provided an experienced team, who was familiar with complex product and able to react quickly to changing priorities. For example, in the month of October, Destinology needed to get special offers for the Caribbean into the marketplace with less than one week’s notice. The Open Destinations team loaded 100 special offers in five working days, achieving 99.7% accuracy.
