The TravelMole Interview: Ed Spiers, Anite

Sunday, 18 Aug, 2003 0

Anite Travel director Ed Spiers (pictured) believes that brochures – and how to take them out of the distribution process – will prove to be the next big industry challenge for operators.

Mr Spiers told TravelMole that he did not believe operators could increase sales of traditional package holidays by great amounts so they had to look at ways of making more money from what they already have.

He pointed out that current practices still separate out the process of creating a holiday product including holiday components, pricing, brochure publication and internet distribution. But he believes that the future lies in entering information – such as product image, text and cost – just once and then for this to be automatically fed into all the relevant systems be they paper or web-based.

Mr Spiers told TravelMole: “The duplication is unbelievable. Person A types something, person B retypes it and then person C comes and takes the bits they need. You could take that and speed it up.”

He pointed out that this sea-change did not have to apply to only the big players: “It’s just as relevant for small businesses who don’t want to triple their overheads but may want to triple the size of their business.”

Mr Spiers told TravelMole that while travel reservation systems remained the core (80%) of Anite Travel’s business, the company was hoping to also expand this side of its operations. He claims that the benefits for operators could be “tremendous” – including reduced overheads, a faster speed to market as well as “a more cogent distribution offering that does not differentiate between paper brochure, internet brochure, content management and selling system.”

Commenting on the recent bad press that Anite has received following poor financial results and the departure of chief executive John Hawkins Mr Spiers said: “It is annoying. They are not sparkling results but the criticism is a wee bit unwarranted.”

He added that criticisms centring around the number of acquisitions Anite had made in the past – including that of the company he founded FSS – no longer held water as Anite had had a “kitchen sink year” where it had cut back on costs and concentrated on its relationship with its existing client base.

Mr Spiers will speak more on Out of Print, the e-brochure revolution at the next TTI conference on October 7.