FCm Travel Solutions (I) Pvt. Ltd has recently introduced our Online Booking Engine into Indian corporate market and it has a few new features as compared to the conventional booking engines. As it is shaping up to cruise smoothly, Pratima H gets a quick chat with Vishwajeet Singh, National Manager, IT, of the travel solutions company on the why, how and when of it all. Hop on.

An online booking engine. How right are you on the timing part of introducing this technology?

To be fair, we have been kind of latecomers here. There are people who have introduced it long back. But since the beginning, our focus has been on B2B and corporate segment. India now is burgeoning like never before in travel business and frequent flier is no more a niche segment.

Though economy class is a focus area, that too is divided into various classes when it comes to booking. So far, the manual intervention and human touch was important. But as market evolves, people have started moving to online behaviour. Hence, we decided to develop something additional on those lines. And that's how the booking engine idea developed.

How will this engine impact the business goals?

The engine won't just search and book tickets. But on top of it, keeping our segment in mind, we are putting in a key element of 'travel authorization'. In a corporate set-up, travel approvals are as required as a process as a leave approval system.

So how is this engine shaping up?

We are definitely targeting a bigger market. But we would like the customers to experience it first, help us with some feedback, so that we learn and improve and then go in full gear with the engine. A trial project is currently on.

Would it in any way be possibly disruptive to the existing customer behavior models?

We could have automated it completely but we have kept the back-end and front-end still separate. There is a small call centre set-up in the trial unit too, where our people monitor transactions at the back-end.

Its features are new but they are very helpful, especially in case of corporate bookings. When any employee makes a reservation, the screen snapshots of all the options available at that time are saved. And these are available to the approval authority for checks and authorized grading approvals.

When would it go live across the market?

By the end of October, we will be able to sell it to different customers in India. Our aim is not to be just another travel agent or transaction-based system but a consultation-oriented travel partner.

Is it a sign that the so far hibernating IT investments are waking up as recession concludes?

Wherever possible, we as IT in-charge are trying to fill the gaps that have come up. We just replaced a legacy system with a .Net Oracle-based database system and eighteen months has been the window to justify that investment.

Also, our paper-based invoicing has come down phenomenally with the new system. Every transaction taking about five pages and every day amounting to about 6000 transactions meant a lot of paper every year. Those savings are visible.

Besides, we also have virtualization on the cards next.

So is the current scenario a 'right' or 'wrong' time to look beyond legacy systems?

I would say this is the perfect time for anyone to switch, if they have a need. Vendors are trying their best to grab opportunities and they can extend huge benefits to the corporate to get associated.

We all know that the situations are not going to be as bad as today; it will change and then the market will not give room for larger negotiations. Also the approach at this stage is focused and bounded by strict SLAs, the same will also get changed.