Shane Hammond, Executive Vice President- Sales & Client Services - TRX speaks to Chitra Padmanabhan about the developments in the travel technology area. He also talks about how critical it is to provide a 24/7 service to customers and how travel remains the lynchpin of the company's strategy also touching on how the company is going about tapping the Indian travel segment.

1) Please do explain in detail your transition from Maritz travel company and Carson Wagonlit XTS into TRX?

I joined TRX in October 2002. Before I came on board, I have been the customer of the company for the past eight years. Prior to TRX, I assisted Maritz Travel Company as an Account Executive for four years. I later went on to serve as Vice President for Carlson Wagonlit XTS, overseeing operations and marketing and then served as President and Partner at Carlson for six years managing all operational, marketing, and personnel activities with an emphasis on new business development and strategic planning. Being a part of the travel industry for a long time, it was fairly easy for me to see how a company like TRX can create a breakthrough in this sector. Additionally, being their customer and user I had an inkling of the working culture here.

Carson Lignite Wagonlit was a 70 employee company and I had the experience of dealing with the customers on a one-on-one basis. That's where my expertise came handy. I have played a technology role as well as a business development role with equal ease.

2) Can you give us an insight into the latest trend in the travel industry?

The trend is clearly towards self-automation which is by the effect of bi-polar customer shopping habits. First, there is the demand for low cost travel, which requires travel organisations to reduce their operational costs in order to compete. Then, there is the popularity of travel websites, which the latest research suggests attract a wealthy demographic likely to book three or more holidays a year, posing the challenge of how to make sites 'sticker' and move customers from "looking to booking." Put the customer in control. Give access to an individual 'customer portal'/'travel manager' area where they can see all booking information, e-tickets and any question and answer sets that's the trend today.

As such, we're seeing all types of travel organisations, from airlines to rental car and train ticket vendors embrace our technology and travel industry expertise, clearly indicating that automated service capability is the future of customer relations. In the travel industry we have about five brands and within these brands we have about 18 products, so there is no one who can offer these kind of end-to-end services from booking to reporting.

3) What kind of SLAs do you sign in a hosted model?

We offer our processing capabilities and extensive process reengineering expertise through a comprehensive service offering of five-hosted technology applications: RESX (Online Booking), SELEX (Agent Technology), CORREX (Automated Processing), TRANXACT (Settlement & Exceptions), and DATATRAX (Data Integration). We provide each of our technology applications independently or as a comprehensive, integrated end-to-end processing solution. Travel managers are increasingly relying on service-level agreements (SLAs) to monitor and manage relationships with travel management companies, technology providers and other suppliers.

One of the benefits of SLAs is that they provide a clear understanding of what both parties value. For example, if a client expects their TMC to be measured on how well they implement the company's preferred supplier agreements that would be in the SLA. While technology SLAs can run from 20 to more than 100 pages, most travel-related SLAs are just a couple pages, with seven to 10 metrics. For example, we have to put measurable service criterias like 99% of the emails will be sent in 20 minutes etc. However, even IT-driven SLAs are evolving to rely less on IT-only issues such as uptime and outages and more business relevance such as transaction volume, productivity etc.

4) Can you define your overall marketing strategy for the coming year?

We primarily work on a resell, cross-sell and up-sell model. That said, 90% of our business in the coming year would be reselling opportunities. We have about 150 clients in our kitty. We have a bigger strategy for India. At present, we are working with Siemens Information Systems for transaction processing work through a build, operate, and transfer model (BOT). We started with 40-50 people and have scaled up to 280 people. As far as revenue generation is concerned in 2007 and beyond, we would like to see about 5% of our new revenue come from the Indian market.

On the data front, the increasing complexity of the travel environment is motivating corporate accounts, suppliers, agencies, and payment providers to expand their use of travel data reporting software and analytics. TRX is a global leader in travel data reporting, positioning us to grow our revenues and broaden our client base through new sales, acquisitions, and product innovation.

To support our data consolidation and reporting offering, we use a reporting platform called MicroStrategy, heavily customizing it to be able to use it in a desired manner. We're emphasizing and developing dashboards and more visual means of displaying predictive information. In the coming year, we will see a lot of activity with our TRX Travel Analytics team as well. As businesses move into analytics, it will provide additional opportunities for us.