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Thomson goes dynamic ‘to overtake Expedia and lastminute’
ABTA Convention special report: Thomson aims to become the market leader dynamic packaging portal with a huge upgrade in technology due to go live next year.
The operator is laying down the gauntlet to Expedia and lastminute.com with plans to provide no-frills flights, Thomsonfly and traditional scheduled airline seats coupled with accommodation and other holiday services.
City and beach destination accommodation will become available for dynamically packaging in the first phase of development set to come online in March. This will be followed by low cost airlines by early summer 2006,
Sales and marketing director Miles Morgan said the company would be deploying cutting edge technology to combat Thomson’s online rivals.
In what he described as a “huge change” for Thomson, the group is to build technology which will be better than Expedia and lastminute.com.
“We aim to gain market leadership in dynamic packaging – we will overtake the other guys and leave them out of sight,” he said. “We already have the number one travel retail site so we are already ahead in that game.”
The dynamic packaging initiative will be fuelled by the expansion of low costs flights by in-house carrier Thomsonfly with the addition of six Boeing 737s next year to bring the fleet up to 48 aircraft. This will allow the carrier to offer departures from 26 airports to 87 destinations.
Separately, podcasting has gone live on the www.thomson.co.uk website, with an initial 10 destination guides available to download, rising to 50 by next April.
Meanwhile, Morgan claimed that 100,000 people are viewing Thomson TV programmes on demand via the website.
“This is a major competitive advantage and one we will exploit in the future,” he added.
Report by Phil Davies
Phil Davies
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