Setting up a travel agency online, travel portal and back office system or setting up an online hotel booking engine web site channel manager in a conventional way would take tens of days. This will also require lots of good work, investments and a good labor work in all the convenient way. But with a cloud system solution provided by TravelAps, a travel agency or a hotel can start online travel portal in seconds, and the process is quick. Since it is cloud, all of the definitions and integrations with payment gateways or other XML providers are readied by them.
Founded in 2013, ERS’s (Electronic Reservation Systems) main product TravelAps aims to provide digital marketing and sales solutions to the Travel, Tourism and Hospitality industry. In a very short time TravelAps became a leading travel software development company specialized in travel portal development, XML connectivity and booking engines. With a team composed of travel industry professionals, academicians and specialized IT developers, TravelAps has its offices located in Antalya, Istanbul and Ankara, with their overseas offices in Texas, USA.
A Dynamic Package
TravelAps offers websites with central reservation systems, customer database, payment processing, marketing management and other integration features. With this one-stop application, a travel company can immediately start selling travel services and receive payments online. A travel product is generally composed of many services like hotel, flight, transfer, tour, and entertainment. Since a company itself can not provide all of them, TravelAps’s system helps travel agencies put their services and integrate them dynamically with other external services and sell as a dynamic package.
- TravelAps’ XML integration is one of the standout features, with which tour organizers can configure a number of XML add-ons, including hotels and airliners.
- Built on top of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, the TravelAps portals are designed to be setup within marginal timeframes, making it an affordable option for customers.
- With functionalities such as marketing campaign, mass mailing, content management system (CMS), customer relationship management (CRM), and 24/7 support, TravelAps also helps promote marketing, sales conversions, customer engagement, and customer retention.
Contributing to evolve
Kemal Oral, the Founder and CEO of TravelAps is an IT engineer who has been working in the Information Systems branch of Travel, Tourism and Hospitality industry for more than 20 years. He founded several start-up companies and organized technical teams to develop IT products in this field. ERS, being the most recent company he founded, entered the Cloud Sector in the last few years while the cloud based reservation systems started to be very popular and effective in the sales activities of the travel agencies and hotels. He aimed to develop a product that would let hotels, tour operators and travel agencies make online sales integrated with all of the payment gateways and connected to all of the XML resources in the world.
Boasting of quality clients
TravelAps provide not only a great ERP/Backoffice system for their customers, but also an integrated, user-friendly front-end sales system. Initially customers received online reservations from internet by front-end sales system and put them into the ERP system manually. Firstly, they provide a system to make sales and back office operations integrated to each other. Secondly, they help considerably decrease their operating costs. Thirdly, they let them reach more clients than before, their systems are fast in all of the points in the world running in multi-currency and multi-language so instead of, for example serving a certain area, they started to serve many areas at the same time. TravelAps has integrated with more than 25 biggest providers of the travel industry, like Booking.com, Expedia, Amadeus, etc. in a very short time. They updated their database by their Channel Manager functionality and used their XML sources to provide their services to travel agents. In other words, TravelAps made a two-way integrations to them both by supplying products from the market to them and also their solution became a tool from providing their products to other travel agencies to SA of those companies.
Challenges down the road
As one of the first cloud developers in the world, TravelAps was also one of the first cloud developers of Microsoft as a Microsoft solution provider. They had many difficulties in the beginning. The most important one was about the performance problems. “In the cloud environment you may not exactly know how many clients at a time reach the system. If you can not guess it, you have to make isolation from the performance point of view so that when the number of clients increases the performance shouldn’t decrease.” This is very difficult in programming field. Therefore, you have to use your shared sources and the algorithms as independent as possible for not to get crashed. Secondly, in the cloud environment as you are open to the whole world, you are vulnerable to many attacks, fraught operations and other bad intentionally defeats. Some of the TravelAps customers went on to become market leaders, who also started receiving cyber attacks from all over the world. There were many times in the development stage that the company had to stop portal development and start developing cloud protection systems against virus attacks for several weeks of time.
Plans to widen their services
Although Travelaps is a new product in the market, they have clients from all over the world and have very important clients migrating to their systems. They think that the travel network travel agencies and hotel network, they are setting up will be quite big and globally enlarged which makes their position and functionality very important from the e-commerce point of travel industry.TravelAps focus is to enable travel agents to connect across the globe for buying and selling a broad spectrum of travel services, right from their own website. Having already bagged some of the leading travel providers like Expedia, Amadeus, Galileo, and HotelsPro, as XML partners, TravelAps has plans for wider connectivity, enlarged network, and more services down the lane.
