Alpha Travel

The challenge

Alpha Travel runs a 24/7 customer service based on personalization, which creates strong loyalty. Unfortunately, the team came to have a hard time focusing on customers and delivering the best possible experience due to slow processes, and more particularly, manual reconciliation. Whenever employees took holidays or sick leaves, the team struggled to keep all invoices up to date, leading to delays in their deliveries. Delays transferred from one week to another and manual reconciliation became rapidly problematic as it took too much of employees’ time, preventing them from attending to customers on time. 

Reporting was another area that required many hours of manual work. With their previous management software, Alpha Travel dealt with obsolete systems that made it slow and complicated to build data reports. Being unable to properly react to their customers’ requests for data was hurting their customer service both in terms of time and quality of response. Manual reporting was also an internal issue as the finance department could not provide efficient and impactful reports to management, affecting corporate communication and preventing data-driven decision-making. 

It was hard to find an accounting system for the travel industry that was not so manual. Everything takes so much time!

Oydis Sigurdsdóttir Djurhuus, Alpha Travel

The solution

To keep up with the competition and thrive in the travel market, it was crucial for Alpha Travel to find more efficient ways to deal with processes. They decided to implement TravelOperations ERP/mid & back-office, our solution for small and mid-sized travel agencies.  

For the team, it was important to automate all the processes that could be, while tasks that only humans can do should be easier and less time-consuming to accomplish. By opting for an integrated solution, Alpha Travel’s employees decreased the time spent on manual processes thanks to several automation features, such as BSP reconciliation, bank reconciliation, and reporting dashboards.  

By having all their data in one standard system, the team can now rely on a system that automates everything that can be automated and make information available and easy to handle, so that they can respond quickly to their customers and provide them with better insight. “Today we work smarter, not harder,” Oydis says.

The impact

Alpha Travel expects that this move to the Cloud will help their salespersons spend less time on formalities and be able to focus more on qualitative tasks to provide the best possible customer service. As an example, Alpha Travel is hoping to reduce BSP reconciliation from 3 days to just 1 hour, bank reconciliation from an entire day to just a few minutes – as many hours that will be put toward increasing customer satisfaction. 

This gain in time and efficiency will also come as great support for their expansion in Scandinavia and to position themselves as a Nordic corporate leader. Having a cloud-based centralized management system means that the employees in their new remote locations will be able to access the same data in real data and work with the same system, with no additional effort from Alpha Travel.   

Being able to easily create and share impactful and self-explanatory data reports for both internal and external use will naturally help improve corporate communication, resource management, data-driven decision making, but also customer response and insight.  

What does the future hold?

At Alpha Travel, the team expects the travel industry to continue shifting toward digitalization. Along with this will come the need for faster, easier, and better service. Nothing to worry about though: Alpha Travel has been actively responding to this trend. They know that the implementation of the new solution will help them increase their margins, optimize their work processes and thrive on the travel market, achieving a strong and sustainable competitive position against both smaller travel agencies and travel corporations.