The Albatross Group initially partnered with Transparity to maintain and develop their legacy but effective bespoke internal booking system, which was reliant on a single developer nearing retirement. Having partnered successfully with Transparity as their preferred development partner, the Albatross Group initiated a standalone development project with our team. This project was to build a new solution to integrate the online booking platform used by their Brisbane based team seamlessly with their marketing tools, to introduce intelligent automations, and to transform reporting with a new API and database. As a result, daily reporting time dropped by 97%, manual tasks were streamlined, and customer communications improved setting this part of the business up for secure, scalable growth.
The Albatross Group had a single developer who had been part of the team for 14 years and who knew the system (and business) inside out but was approaching retirement. Albatross had to considertheir options; should they recruit a developer to take on the task of managing and improving the legacy system, or should they turn to a trusted partner?
The team decided to take the opportunity to seek a partner they could trust with such a vital system.
After seeing great success with their partnership with Transparity, the Albatross team decided to rewrite and transform the integration between the Australian online booking platform and their marketing platform to set the business up for continued long-term sustainability. The existing setup was operating with a legacy integration that cost the business £30,000 a year, didn’t offer the capabilities they needed and began to cause challenges in day-to-day workflows. The lack of effective integration and reporting processes was proving more and more of a hinderance as business picked up again post-COVID.
The initial partnership was focused on maintaining and building on Albatross’ bespoke booking system. Our experts took over from the Albatross Group’s trusted internal expert, allowing him to retire with the system in safe hands.
After success with Transparity as their development partner of choice, the Albatross team turned to us to begin scoping out the team’s requirements for a new solution. The project aimed to transform the way the Australian online booking platform integrated with other systems and was split into three main phases:
Albatross Group were looking to create a simple, seamless integration between their Australian wing’s booking system and their email marketing platform. The team wanted to ensure that, for example, a customer’s contact information updated in the booking system would translate to the contact information in their email marketing platform. Further to this, they wanted to enable intelligent marketing automations so that, for example, if a booking was made through their system, it would flag the contact in their marketing system as a live customer, triggering relevant communications.
In the process of making a booking, customers are required to fill in essential information like travel document details and dietary requirements. Previously, this information was held at the individual passenger level, rather than at the full reservation level, making managing this data and ensuring all the information was complete challenging.
To remedy this, our developers created a range of intelligent automations to translate this data to the reservation level, replacing lengthy manual tasks with seamless data management.
Finally, to make better use of the data captured in the booking process we set about creating a new database offering brand new capabilities. In Hannah-Jane’s words, ‘the reporting function was this booking system’s worst feature’, making vital daily reports and sales management a headache for the team. Essential reports like the number of passengers on a tour or the number of spaces remaining was a 30-minute task, carried out daily.
To remedy this, we pulled the data from the system’s existing API into a new database, allowing the team to run these reports directly from the data rather than the booking system itself, drastically improving reporting times.
“Working with Transparity was a lot of tick-tick-ticks, it increased my confidence that we’ve found the right partner to make things happen.”
Hannah-Jane Ellery, Head of Continuous Improvement at The Albatross Group
As a result of the partnership the team at Albatross have a development partner they can trust both with their foundational systems and transformative projects. We continue to work alongside their team to maintain and develop their essential booking system, while working flexibly on standalone projects too.
With a new API and database, real-time insights are just a click away, making sales and operations reporting faster, simpler, and far more accurate. The integration has streamlined processes, removing manual data entry and reducing errors, while integration with their email marketing platform has unlocked smarter, more personalised customer communications.
The impact this integration improvement has had on the team has been significant, taking essential reporting from 30 minutes to less than 1; that’s a 97% decrease in time taken for this essential daily task and almost 2.5 hours saved a week!
With a trusted technology partner, The Albatross Group is equipped to meet growing demand and continue delivering exceptional customer experiences and making the day to day running of the business simpler.
The Albatross Group is the leading provider of group tourism services, operating more than 2,100 tours annually throughout the UK and continental Europe. The Albatross Group consists of nine brands in the group leisure tourism sector working in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer sectors.
