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Customers
/ Success Stories / Look Voyages
Online reservation: thanks to SCORT, Look Voyages
reservation system can be accessed directly online via a PC.
A well-known professional in the travel business.
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| Presentation... |
A subsidiary
of Canadian group Transat, Look Voyages operates in 2
main areas: "Flight only" reservations (60%
of turnover, mainly charter flights) and, since 1995,
Look has become a respected tour operator (TO).
Look Voyages runs its own airline - Star Airlines. With
a total of 450 employees, Look Voyages achieved a turnover
of around £200m in 2000, flying over 800,000 passenger
to more than 1,000 destinations.
The Tour Operator division offers over 250 products as
well as a large "menu" including Clubs Lookea,
holidays, tours, cruises, etc.
One of the first into online services.
The different products on offer from Look Voyages are
sold only through a network of travel Agents, of which
there are around 3,500, ranging from major chains such
as Havas, etc. to small independents.
Very soon there arose a need to exchange information between
the travel Agents and Look Voyages. An information and
advice service via Minitel, covering availability and
online flight-only reservations began in 1991. Then, in
1996, Look Voyages opened an Internet service allowing
access to its brochures and several other areas, as well
as creating demand for online reservations for the flight-only
and TO divisions. Inevitably, the next market requirement
was instant online confirmation of those reservations.
Real time reservations - a growing necessity.
"Faced with these new requirements,
Look Voyages decided to re-engineer the Minitel system
around 3 main principles:
allow real time booking, at
first, for flight-only (tomorrow for Tour Operations too)
by providing access to our AS/400;
put in place a new 3-tier architecture;
design an evolutionary system
: today, transactional Extranet, tomorrow as WAP, Webtel,
etc."
explained Jean-Luc Fabing, IT Director at Look
Voyages. |
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| Architecture... |
Look Voyages
uses an AS/400 as it central site, equipped with an internal
"flight-only" application, ensuring bookings
as well as back-office management, and used both internally
and externally (travel agencies via GDS). Starting with
this performant platform
- acknowledged by the professionnals - the challenge was
to set up an Internet application for the general public,
simple and welcoming, insuring at the same time a unique
and coherent evolution.
SCORT accesses the applications screens in TN5250 mode,
rebuilds the GUI to take advantage of the Web and publishes
them in HTML format, by allowing the simple integration
of the management rules specific to online sales to
private individuals. The sales keep on being resent
to a travel agency.
The SCORT server is hosted on behalf of Look Voyages
by an outsourcer, which also hosts the Minitel server. |
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| Context... |
"We
looked at 4 options: SQL ODBC (rejected in favour of SQL400),
IBM MQ Series (messaging, but very expensive), Look's
own proprietary interface (messaging) or direct access
in 5250 mode with SCORT. We chose SCORT for the following reasons:
the
ability to access our existing AS/400 system directly
without any modification to it;
no
intermediate database needed;
it
was the best solution on the market;
straightforward
implementation;
the
number of reference sites already in operation;
proximity
and capacity of support on part of the 'provider'."
concluded Jean-Luc Fabing. |
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| The results... |
| The back-office
integration has been particularly successful with the
number of hits to the website now registering over 80,000
per month with over 1 million pages viewed. 85% of online bookings are now made via Internet compared
with 15% by Minitel, on a basis of some 100 files per
day. |
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