Your Guide to What to Consider When Looking for a New Technology System

Traveltek has over 20 years experience of working in partnership with travel agents, tour operators, consortia, cruise specialists and airlines in providing them with the best travel technology solution for their business. Based on that experience, we have pulled together a guide that includes the top five items to consider when looking for a new technology solution.

1) Why are you looking to invest in a new travel technology solution?

• Is it to consolidate your current technology stack from multiple technology solutions into one?
• Is it to improve productivity and profitability?
• Is it for efficiency savings and to reduce resource-heavy tasks?
• Will you outsource all your technology or will you decide to take an API and do some of the build in-house, it’s worth discussing your options with your prospective technology partner.

2) Have you considered what connectivity you will require within your new technology solution? 

• Who are your key suppliers? Can your tech provider assist you with recommendations here as to who would be most suitable to help you achieve your business goals?
• What supplier types do you need to have connectivity with? Can you start small and build up this portfolio of suppliers? 
• What distribution capabilities are you looking for? For example, are you looking to sell B2B, multi-channel (B2B & B2C), also are you looking to distribute your own product market-wide?

3) What are the scalability capabilities of the technology provider?

• If you are planning to grow your business, you need to ensure the partner you choose will have the resource to support you through that journey? For example, are they a product-driven technology company? If yes, you should ask to see their roadmap of development.      
• It’s also worth looking at what reporting capabilities and tools the technology company has to help you grow and scale.

4) Budget & Approval Process

• When deciding on the budget for your project, this has to be weighed against the commercials. It should be scaled against the productivity, profitability, and efficiency gains that the project will deliver.
• Make sure you have buy-in from your senior management team with regards to your preferred option. This will then ensure a smoother rollout of the project.     
• It may be worth considering your investment in stages if you are a start-up, starting with crucial models and investing more in technology as you scale your business.

5) Market Legalities and Tax Requirements

• Something that is often overlooked, and should be discussed at the start of a project is any specific requirements around market legalities or specific market tax requirements that would be required. Also, are you looking to push any connectivity through to your finance system?

 Additional points to note….

• Ensure you secure client references
• Training approach
  • How simple is the system to use? What resources do they have to support you post-live? Will it be easy to train new members of staff, can the training be delivered online, or is it face-to-face?
• Workshops
  • Throughout the sales process, there should be workshops of key workflows for sales and admin teams to ensure the technology is adding value and improving efficiency.
• Does your technology partner have a partnership approach and understand the travel industry?

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