Ticket Defends its Position as the Pre-eminent Scandinavian Travel Agency with Magnolia CMS

Ticket Leisure Travel (Ticket) is one of the largest travel agencies in Scandinavia, but in 2007, it was facing stiff competition from emerging price comparison Web sites. To maintain its market position, it needed to differentiate itself from the pack while still offering customers high quality and innovative service.

Zoom

Ticket Leisure Travel

The need of the hour was a technical platform that would enable Ticket to deliver dynamic, real-time ticket pricing and availability through integration with third-party services, and also be scalable and secure enough to handle Ticket’s growing transaction volume.

In 2007, after a detailed evaluation, Ticket migrated their Web properties from OpenCMS to Magnolia CMS Enterprise Edition. This migration enabled them to create dynamic, interactive travel portals with full transactional capabilities, performing more than 250,000 searches per day.

Statistics

Client	Ticket Leisure Travel
URLs	www.ticket.se www.ticket.no www.ticket.dk

About Ticket Leisure Travel

Ticket Leisure Travel is a giant in the Scandinavian travel industry. It is the largest private travel agency in Sweden and the second largest in Norway, with sales of $450m. Offering its customers a combination of great value and unparalleled choice, Ticket Leisure Travel is a multi-channel operation, with over 80 retail stores, telephone sales and the ability for customers to research and book travel services and holidays via its online travel service.

Despite being one of the biggest players in the Scandinavian market, Ticket Leisure Travel was facing stiff competition in 2007 from price comparison sites. These sites were emerging as a viable alternative to “traditional” leisure travel operators, by allowing customers to view and book a wide range of travel options entirely online, without the need to visit a retail store.

Although customers still valued the retail stores for the chance to gain personal service and expert advice, the easy availability of pricing and availability information on the Web was gradually shifting the purchase process online.

As a result, Ticket Leisure Travel was facing a dual challenge:

• On the one hand, it needed to maintain its existing store presence and high customer service levels to serve as a unique marketplace differentiator.
• On the other hand, it had to raise the bar for its Web properties, ensuring that they matched and surpassed those of its competitors’ in the online arena.

It was clear to all of us that the Internet was a game-changer for the entire industry. With easy broadband access, customers were beginning to do more and more of their travel research and purchasing online.

Although we already had a significant real-world presence, our Web site was falling behind that of our online competitors and we weren’t able to market ourselves effectively to the new generation of travellers. We desperately needed to migrate to a new solution that could better meet our needs.

Anders Embring, Director of Marketing, Ticket Leisure Travel

Online Travel Purchases vs. Retail Stores

By providing real-time pricing information across a wide range of airlines, hotel suppliers and rental car suppliers, price-comparison Web sites were giving customers an unprecedented degree of visibility into a previously-opaque system and changing the game for the entire industry.

As one of the leading players in the travel industry, Ticket Leisure Travel was already seeing high and increasing levels of usage on its Web properties across its key markets of Norway, Denmark and Sweden. The entry of new price comparison Web sites and their “100% online” purchase process was creating a trend of more and more users performing purchases online, without ever visiting a retail store.

Surprisingly, the Web sites were also proving to be critical to the seemingly traditional retail channel: of those customers booking in-store, 80% had already visited the website to research prices and availability.

Collaboration and Time to Market

As ticket prices and promotions in the leisure travel industry change frequently, it was important for authors to have an intuitive and easy-to-use system that enabled them to update their different Web properties (ticket.se, ticket.dk and ticket.no) with new information in a timely manner. When creating special travel packages (for example, all-inclusive packages containing airline tickets, hotel accommodation, tours and rentals), it was also necessary for teams of authors to work together to define the various package attributes and pricing options.

With this in mind, it was important that the selected CMS solution provide an intuitive, easy-to-use editing interface, so that authors could update the various Web properties without needing specialized training or guidance. Built-in collaboration tools and workflows were also important, as these would save valuable man-hours when working in close cooperation with other teams within the organization.

Integration with Third-Party Services

The online booking sites were tightly integrated with different services, and as a result were able to offer customers up-to-the-minute deals and prices. They were also integrated with payment gateways, allowing customers to complete their transactions entirely online, without needing to visit a brick-and-mortar store.

To avoid losing customers, it was critical for Ticket’s Web properties to be able to offer similar real-time pricing and availability information, and to offer customers the ability to pay for their purchases online via bank account or credit card. However, Ticket’s development team was not able to easily integrate the existing CMS with third-party data and payment services.

Zoom

Ticket Leisure Travel

Today, Ticket Leisure Travel’s Web properties are one of the most popular choices for customers looking to travel in to or out of Scandinavia on leisure. The Web properties are highly dynamic, allowing travellers to search for flights, hotels, cruises, charters and last-minute deals, obtain real-time pricing and availability information and purchase tickets online. The sites also host special hotel and destination guides, FAQs, traveller tips and press releases.

More Efficient Content Publishing

With Magnolia’s well thought out authoring interface, content authors are able to easily update the different Web properties with new information daily. Authors now need only a few hours training to understand the basics of content publishing with Magnolia, and are able to create and publish content independently, without assistance from the specialized technical team.

This enables Ticket Leisure Travel to stay ahead of its competitors by proving up-to-date, timely information and local promotions for cheap tickets or last-minute fares, with its authors often updating each Web site multiple times in the same day with new information.

Third-Party Data Integration with Spring Framework

A vital attribute of the Ticket Web sites' functionality is their ability to deliver dynamic content through numerous integrations with third party services and partner organisations. This integration is mainly performed with Blossom, Magnolia’s Spring Framework integration module, and it is used to enable price and availability search, payment processing, exchange rate conversion and many other dynamic features. Magnolia CMS’ support for standard XML formats, such as Atom and RSS, have also enabled integration with services such as Google Maps for hotel listings.

Service Innovation at Lower Cost

By offering customers a feature-rich suite of tools to research, plan and purchase their travel online, Ticket Leisure Travel is able to reduce the time per customer spent by its agents at its physical stores. Because customers are now able to find all the information they want online, they need to only visit the physical stores if they have specific questions, or for exceptional situations (for example, last minute cancellations) that cannot be handled through the standard online process. This reduces training cost and time for agents, and speeds up customer handling at the stores.

Scalability

Magnolia CMS’ support for multiple instances is of critical importance to Ticket Leisure Travel, as it allows them to ensure optimum availability for customers. The Ticket Leisure Travel Web properties currently run two public instances, behind which there are multiple backends performing searches in response to user queries. This infrastructure currently supports more than 250,000 searches every day and is “future proof”: it can be easily scaled up to meet future needs.

With Magnolia CMS Enterprise Edition, we have the foundation we need to deliver innovative solutions to our leisure travel clients.

Magnolia’s ease of use has enabled our staff to quickly bring new promotions and products to market, while its ease of integration has allowed us to take our online competitors on and match them, feature for feature, while beating them on price and variety due to our industry network.

We’re now able to satisfy all our target customer groups: our independent and techno-savvy travellers have the self-service tools they need to search, plan and purchase their holidays online, while those who are still unsure about online transactions can visit our physical stores for expert advice and assistance in planning their vacations.

Katarina Sjögren Petrini, Vice President, Ticket Leisure Travel

Conclusion

Ticket Leisure Travel’s Web properties, powered by Magnolia CMS Enterprise Edition, have enabled the company to effectively defend its position as the pre-eminent Scandinavian leisure travel agency.

With Magnolia CMS, Ticket Leisure Travel was able to upgrade its Web site to become more dynamic and engaging, offering its users the tools they need to plan and purchase their vacations online.

It has helped Ticket Leisure Travel reduce the time to market for new travel products and services, differentiate itself effectively from its competitors and offer innovative new services at a lower cost. For the public too, the sites are a success: since 2007 ticket.se, ticket.no, and ticket.dk are receiving 250,000 holiday searches on a daily basis.