Technology can give retailers the Advantage, says O’Neill

ATC seminar

Technology can give retailers the Advantage, says O’Neill

Report by JOHNLAVABRE

ADVANTAGE Travel Centre’s retailers must learn to exploit the full benefits of new technology, according to sales and marketing director Colin O’Neill.

Speaking at the fourth annual CIMTIG-Telewest Seminar in London, O’Neill said there had to be changes in culture within the organisation to embrace new technological developments.

“There must be a change in the way we do things,” he said. “We need to get to the stage where an agent treats an e-mail from a customer in the same way as a customer walking into the shop.”

O’Neill said the Advantage website, www.advantage4travel.com, featured an extranet facility specifically to help train agents.

“The website features a range of educational and training aids that will help agents with this. They must get into the habit of looking at the website each morning,” he said.

Delegates also heard from Lawrence Hunt, chief executive officer of technology company Rapid Travel.

Hunt, former CEO of failed travel website dreamticket.com, said he still has complete faith in the Internet as a distribution channel.

“Customers have been slow to book on the web because of pricing concerns and fears over security.

“But when dreamticket.com was set up I predicted that about 10% of the total travel market would be booked on-line by 2003 and I still believe that will be the case,” he told delegates at the seminar.

“There is a lot of evidence people will be booking on-line, but one of the biggest problems is supply.”

Referring to his time spent at dreamticket, Hunt said he had a difficulty encouraging tour operators to let him sell their products, despite the company bringing in total revenues of $4.2 million in just seven months.

O’Neill: there must be a change in agents’ attitude to the Internet