The Advantage Travel Partnership is replacing its 20-year-old supplier payments system with a new settlement platform using the latest technology, developed by Travel Ledger.
At its conference in Madeira today, the consortium announced it is migrating CAPS (the Central Advantage Payments System), which has been used for the past two decades to facilitate payments between Advantage agent members and suppliers, to the Travel Ledger platform.
The new system will go live on May 6 and will gradually on-board members and preferred suppliers over the course of the year.
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Paul Nunn, operations director of Advantage, said: “Delivering business efficiencies and process improvements to our members is central to our proposition as a group and this initiative will help drive significant benefits to our agent partners.
“Moving CAPS from its legacy platform to modern tech will add no end of value in speeding up members’ supplier payments and reconciliation processes and ultimately free up valuable time for them to focus more on sales and customer service.”
The new system will allow member agents, suppliers and the Advantage organisation to “take advantage of the adaptable, flexible and responsive processes” the platform supports.
It will also allow Advantage members to have all their suppliers on the same, single-view platform which, Advantage hopes, will improve operational efficiency by removing the need for agents to reconcile multiple supplier statements and generate multiple payments.
To coincide with the launch of the new platform, Travel Ledger is releasing additional functionality to make it easier for Agents to integrate with back office systems and third-party software such as Excel.
Roberto Da Re, chief executive of Travel Ledger, said: “The partnership with Advantage validates the work we have put in over the years to provide the travel industry with a fit-for-purpose and future-proofed payments platform.
“It will make life easier for travel agents at a time when their focus needs to be on serving customers rather than dealing with inefficient supplier payment processes.”
Travel Ledger, which is owned and run by a team of travel technology veterans, has a participating network of more than 1,800 travel buyers working with more than 30 suppliers, processing over £15m in travel payments a week.
Travel Ledger will start working with European buyers and sellers later this year, building on its strong UK customer base.