Expanding beyond borders
Who is Alpha Travel?
Tommy Næs Djurhuus founded Alpha Travel in 2005 as a 1-person business based on the Faroe Islands. Since then, Tommy has built a successful business that has always focused on quality rather than quantity, and although growing is one of their goals, the now 14-person team works on expanding its geographical span and number of customers while keeping a relatively small team.
As a corporate travel specialist, Alpha Travel needs to keep close contact with their travelers, and loyalty is what characterizes their customer relationships. In a familial ambiance, travelers know they can call their agency any time and always talk to their preferred agent. Alpha Travel has built their success on trust, availability and personalized service.
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’s been hard to find an accounting system for the travel industry that is not so manual. Everything takes so much time!”
Oydis Sigurdsdóttir Djurhuus, Alpha Travel, CFO
The solution
To keep up with competition and thrive on the travel market, it was crucial for Alpha Travel to find more efficient ways to deal with processes. They decided to implement TravelOperations Business, 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 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.
“We are hoping to work smarter, not harder.”
Oydis Sigurdsdóttir Djurhuus, Alpha Travel, CFO
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 a 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 towards 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.
Interested?
Contact us to learn more about our solution and how it can enable you to reach your full potential.
We are Travel Industry experts that have developed a solution based on Microsoft Dynamics 365, with added travel-specific functionality to support travel agents in their daily tasks and empower their entire team.
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