Online marketing and CRM lead TIA’s TravelCom 06 conference

Online customer relation management (CRM) vendors were well represented at the April 11-12 TravelCom 06 conference in NYC, as were pay-for-search and email marketing companies.

2,000 travel industry professionals and 80 exhibitors gathered in New York City for the yearly TravelCom eCommerce conference, under the new ownership of Travel Industry Association of America (TIA)– TravelMole was the online media sponsor.

One of the vendors in attendance was Intrasight, a 5 year old Arizona based ‘relationship marketing services’ company who combines technology with marketing expertise to create effective customer acquisition, growth, and loyalty campaigns, was at the conference. 

“We make our clients’ marketing captivating” Jeff Walters, President of Intrasight told TravelMole.  “We help our clients build brand relationships with their customers by putting the customer in the drivers seat”, Jeff said.  Our system “generates automated responses to serve the end customer whether it is an inquiry, booking or stay.”

The database marketing programs behind the frequent flier loyalty programs of the 80s cost millions of dollars, explained Jeff.  “The internet enabled low cost relationship management” for low six figures per year, he added.  Intrasight’s IRIS platform aggregates and rebuilds the data from their clients reservation systems, web sites, phone systems, etc. for analysis.

While Intrasight delivers technology and consultancy to their clients, Jeff sees Intrasight most and foremost as a service provider, not a tool provider.  Their services includes helping clients develop “strategy and tactics to build loyalty, acquisition, up-sell, down-sell..” says Jeff, who came into the relationship marketing field through the discipline of marketing research.

As a founding management team of Targetbase, where Jeff played a key role in helping clients such as Nestle, IBM, Marriott, RJR, Volkswagen, HP and several others to set the course for profitable relationship marketing and CRM, he knew in 1999, when Targetbase was sold, that the market was ready for the integrated solution of analytically-driven strategy; rapidly deployed, lower-cost technology, and creative on and offline communications to address the challenge of deploying intelligent, accountable relationship marketing.  That’s when Jeff formed Intrasight, as privately funded company.

Typically, Intrasight charges their clients $1,000-$3,000 per month for use of their IRIS database system and $4,000+ per month for account supporting and consultancy, said Jeff.  With a staff of 50, Intrasight is primarily focused on the U.S. market but plans to go international in another 12-18 months.

Reported by Charles Kao