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Travel & Hospitality case study

Entrada data hub delivers immediate ROI

Cognizant developed a central data system for Entrada’s disparate legacy sales engines to achieve real-time integration with OTA platforms, achieving complete ROI in one month.

At a glance

Industry
Travel & Hospitality  

Location
New Zealand

Challenge

Entrada’s legacy booking systems could not integrate with major OTA platforms for real-time sales processing.

Success Highlights

  • Sales up 116% year over year in the first month
  • Reduced 24 hours sales stoppage to 12 hours
  • Immediate visibility on impact of specials and discounts

The challenge

Entrada Travel Group took an acquisitive approach to growing its tourism services business. With a range of preexisting businesses brought under its umbrella, Entrada was managing an array of booking engines with varied legacy demands.

Over recent years, online travel agencies (OTAs) have also become the primary method for travelers to find services and experiences to enjoy. From Expedia to TripAdvisor and many more, the OTA quickly reduced the use of direct bookings across the industry.

Entrada found its legacy booking platforms could not integrate with OTAs in real time. A new technology solution was needed to list Entrada services across a range of OTAs in real time from all businesses in the group to maximize sales and marketing opportunities.

Real-time integration with OTA platforms

With its legacy booking platforms incapable of integrating with OTA platform application programming interfaces (APIs), Entrada sales and marketing teams were doing a lot of manual work to make their tours and coach services visible to these booking environments. But manual processing required teams to delist availabilities 24 hours prior to avoid issues with double bookings, cancellations or other scenarios where poor experience can be caused.

For tourism operations, there is a constant balance required between overbooking and leaving empty seats. Double bookings lead to complaints, negative ratings and bad experiences for customers and staff. Empty seats leave money on the table. Only real time integrations across all booking engines offer the best route to achieving maximized booking results.

For the OTA platforms, there are strict requirements on tourist services for access to API integration. Data must be responsive within set millisecond precision, so they deliver the best possible search experiences for users. It was critical that whatever new solution Entrada pursued would meet these OTA specifications to achieve its goals.

Our approach

Cognizant ran a workshop with Entrada to help the company fully understand the challenges it faced with bringing its legacy systems together for efficient integration with OTA platforms. Together, we explored a range of potential solutions, with careful consideration for the internal skills of Entrada’s teams and technical solutions that achieved the best possible outcomes while minimizing cost.

We decided to take a phased approach, beginning with the creation of a product integration hub (PIH) to bring together the data from all Entrada booking systems. The PIH would then act as the gateway to connect with OTA platforms with a single system, ensuring the company would meet all requirements for real-time integration.

our approach

The PIH was developed as a central service built on AWS. Cognizant chose open standards to design a flexible architecture that could be deployed in Kubernetes and virtual machines through continuous improvement/delivery release pipelines and be highly performant on hybrid cloud. No other provider in New Zealand has built a platform that provides API gateway, API management, service mesh and event mesh systems for a tenth of the cost of a traditional enterprise service bus (ESB).

Phased integration with each OTA

Building the PIH was a highly collaborative process. Cognizant worked closely with the Entrada IT team as well as its sales and marketing teams to ensure the PIH would help the company meet its automation objectives as effectively as possible.

Working in Agile sprints, the minimum viable product for the PIH was live within two months of project commencement. From there, specific OTAs were targeted for integration to focus the work into phases and align budgets to specific target outcomes. Through each OTA cycle, the onboarding process became faster and smoother.

"The PIH is now a foundational platform to enable the business to work with third-party agents in a truly digital manner, to increase bookings and reduce operational overheads"

Daniel Rode, General Manager Marketing & Technology, Entrada Travel Group

Business outcomes

The PIH greatly enhanced Entrada’s operations via real time OTA integrations. In the first month alone, Entrada saw overall sales increase by 116% year over year. This delivered complete return on investment (ROI) in less than a month.

Business outcome
OTA integration modernized sales and marketing approach

Beyond the immediate sales success, Entrada unlocked new opportunities and benefits through the real-time OTA integrations. Sales and marketing can now quickly test and explore special offers across OTAs and see near-immediate feedback on price adjustments. And from its previous 24 hours availability stop, Entrada moved to 12 hours as its new standard.

  • Grew sales by 116% year over year in the first month of operation
  • Reduced a previous 24 hours stop on OTA sales to 12 hours
  • Siloed customer services across all platforms now delivered seamlessly as a single service
Entrada sales transformed

The new product integration hub gave Entrada the transformation it needed to fully participate in the modern tourism digital sales ecosystem. With immediate results that saw the company leap to new heights in its sales performance while reducing overall costs, Entrada gave its business a critical reset for the future.    

About Entrada Travel Group

Entrada Travel Group connects people and places across New Zealand and Australia, delivering great journeys and providing amazing experiences. The company helps people go places through top-quality, seamless passenger transport as well as the best tourism experiences on land and water.