BACKGROUND
Holidays are a great way for international airlines to promote their brand and boost customer loyalty. As another, lucrative revenue stream, more and more airlines are now developing their own holiday brands. Ancillary services, such as seat assignment and baggage check-in, generate revenues due to volumes, but holidays can deliver significantly greater revenues at much greater margins, where empty seats can be sold with lower rates hidden within the overall package price.
Typically, airlines will outsource its holiday brand to specialist partners, and one of the busiest in the industry today is holidays.ch.
holidays.ch is a medium-sized tour operator based in Büsingen, Germany, and Basel, Switzerland. Specialized in combining flights and hotels in real-time to offer dynamically packaged holidays, holidays.ch is the power behind the major tour operator, HLX, and operates the holiday brands for Eurowings, Lufthansa, SWISS, and Condor airlines. Holidays.ch also supports various well-known travel brands, such as Secret Escapes, Urlaubsguru and Urlaubspiraten with their white label products.
CHALLENGE
Holidays.ch aggregates inventory from its airline partners and combines it with hotel inventory. Around 70% of the accommodation inventory is directly contracted, which gives holidays.ch greater control over the holiday package pricing.
As the number of partners increased, holidays.ch needed a more powerful solution to handle the different requirements of each individual airline customer, in order to support them in delivering a superior service to their own customers.