2Paths Solution Brief
Customer: Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT)
Industry: Travel
Solution: 2Paths Unifies Carlson Wagonlit Travel Portals
THE ORGANIZATION
Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) is a global leader specializing in business travel management. In Canada, CWT is a leading travel company serving corporate, leisure, and meetings & events clients in almost 200 locations coast to coast. By leveraging both the expertise of its people and leading-edge technology, CWT helps clients derive the greatest value from their travel program in terms of savings, service and security, and provides best-in-class service and assistance to travellers. CWT runs several travel rewards programs on behalf of larger corporations including Royal Bank of Canada and British Petroleum Canada. Associate agencies access CWT’s travel products directly through the web and customers can book through their online service.
THE CHALLENGE
CWT’s leisure travel division wanted to allow their customers to book trips and vacations online through their websites. “Our vision was to provide customers with a seamless online search, booking and billing experience,” describes Erin Lowe, project manager for CWT. “ Our previous system could handle online bookings; however, it was difficult to maintain, expand, and update the design. The travel business is highly competitive and we wanted to provide the level of service that customers have come to expect of CWT. Known for our leading-edge technology, CWT’s goal was to provide an online solution for our tech-savvy customers.”
Travel Rewards Sites
Carlson Wagonlit Travel provides large corporations with a travel rewards program, which members can use to book vacation travel using reward points. For example, if a customer of the Royal Bank of Canada is a member of the RBC rewards program, they can book travel through Carlson Wagonlit Travel, by redeeming RBC Rewards points. With many companies adopting this system, Carlson Wagonlit Travel wanted to co-brand the user interface with each individual brand. “With our old web system, we would have to make a copy of a site each time we built a new brand presence,” says Lowe. This was inefficient, caused a lot of confusion and we just did not have the manpower in-house to keep up with changes to ten different sites each time a new offer came along.
With only one dedicated IT resource for their leisure division, Carlson Wagonlit Travel sent out a request for proposal to four companies. “We decided to work with 2Paths because of their local presence and they asked the best questions during the presale phase,” said Lowe. “They clearly understood our core business and quickly identified how we could solve our problems.”
THE SOLUTION
Together, 2Paths and Carlson Wagonlit Travel worked on the vacation portal through which customers could find, book and pay for a trip online. The team had to plan the site to accommodate the constantly evolving travel business. A potential customer comes to the site, finds their affiliate agency first via name, city, or province and gains access to the online offers. This solution allows the booking to be tracked and feeds that information to agents who can then follow up with other services.
Agile development flexibility
“We followed 2Paths iterative agile development process, working in two-week blocks. Every two weeks we would decide on next steps and accomplishments we should concentrate on,” says Lowe. “The benefit of the Agile development process was that we could continuously refine our requirements. Sometimes it is not evident what you want until you see a prototype. 2Paths was disciplined and at the same time flexible.”
“I could see right away that Carlson Wagonlit Travel needed to build a middle layer between their backend SQL database and their presentation layer. The new layer would direct communications and generate multiple sites by calling on a single application,” said Geoff Webb, technical architect, 2Paths. “They also needed to integrate their portals with third-party travel aggregator, SoftVoyage, to allow online reservations and billing.”
One application, many sites
2Paths developed a single application, which is presented to end users differently based on the domain name used to access the site and membership information associated with their visit. If a member of the CWT Vacation Club browses the Carlson Wagonlit Travel site via their own specific URL, the application will display the site branded specially for them.
2Paths built a system with clear separation between business application logic and site presentation. This clear separation of presentation from the business layer, database and third party integration components allows for easy extensibility and ensures maintenance is streamlined and focused. Changes to any single component do not affect other components.
“2Paths was patient with us and helped us non-technical people to really understand how to express user requirements and to make decisions around site updates in a more orderly way than we had in the past,” says Lowe.
THE REWARDS
“The best thing about the new system is that customers – no matter who they are – can book online,” says Lowe. “This allows CWT to offer Click, Walk and Talk options to our customers. At the same time our affiliates receive new customer information for follow-up.”
Carlson Wagonlit Travel is now able to manage their multiple sites more easily, by only making changes to content in one place and at one time. Today, Carlson Wagonlit Travel works with 2Paths to perform these regular updates, but shortly company marketing managers should be able to update content using a self-serve interface, similar to editing a word document.
Branding Consistency
The company now presents a consistent branding experience for both consumer and travel reward sites and maintenance is more orderly and timely. “The new application has forced us to create better processes from a business perspective, said Lowe. We would have had to invest in a full time programming team and since that is not our core competence, we outsourced. The small hit team from 2Paths understood our business challenges right away.”
THE FUTURE
Next phases of the project will include the ability for marketing managers to make content changes themselves after an internal content review. Plus, the company would like to better target products to their varying audiences. “We would also like to take advantage of the technology to create more targeted selling for the member sites based on demographics, said Lowe. “For example if we know that RBC Rewards travelers have a tendency to choose one type of travel over another, say cruises over vacation stay packages, we will be able to customize their site with content that are specific to that membership type.”
“We’ve learned a lot from 2Paths who have kept us on track and on-budget throughout this last year. We look forward to refining and reviewing the system with them over the long run,” says Lowe.
