The Challenge
Within 20 years, House of Travel has transformed itself from a single retail outlet to a nationwide brand name. Catering for the upsurge in demand has been a challenge, but has also spurred the business to grow faster. This has particularly been the case over the last five years as travel has become more affordable. This growth has necessitated the continual addition of services, products, staff and retail outlets, not to mention the Orbit corporate travel division.
The dynamic market growth has attracted plenty of competition, lowering margins and forcing product and service diversity. This has created the need for greater efficiency and to cut base costs whilst selling greater volume. In turn, with a constrained headcount, this put a great strain on the IT department to deliver.
In 2007, due to their reputation for quality, Intergen was selected as a partner to help House of Travel keep pace with their soaring business.
The IT market lacked the appropriate packaged products that were required to deliver the necessary functionality. This prompted Intergen and House of Travel to build the necessary solutions themselves inhouse. At a time of rapid expansion in their business, the introduction of a multi-tiered architecture to deliver just-in-time information for travel bookings presented a great challenge. On top of this, most information comes from a third party provider, which is interpreted and then presented back in a consumable form for branch staff or web customers.
The Partnership
Core to the relationship has been Intergen’s team of high quality developers working onsite to augment the House of Travel development team, demonstrating House of Travel’s commitment to developing internal resources, not simply using contractors.
Over time there has been a variety of disciplines blended into the House of Travel teams, from senior developers and architects to intermediate developers and team leads, quality assurance and performance testers, interactive consultants, business analysts and project managers. All this has been provided in conjunction with regular support and contact from an account manager and the local General Manager.
The Business Difference
Over the past two years a number of large projects have been undertaken within House of Travel, considerably improving their ability to move ahead within the marketplace. Significantly, House of Travel now has an attractive e-commerce channel that is a central part of their go to market strategy. Intergen has been highly involved in the interactive design of the web interface, and has also provided developer resource, contributing to all the various tiers supporting this channel. The agile multi-tiered modular architecture enables IT to deliver information in real time to the customer through their channel of choice.
The Future
As the relationship continues to mature and evolve, Intergen will remain a key vendor for House of Travel. The knowledge, trust and friendships that have been built up through some exciting and challenging work will continue to evolve and deliver value to a business that is expecting further change and expansion.
Given the maturity and competitiveness of IT in the travel industry, House of Travel is further looking to extend their first-mover market advantage by looking to Intergen to provide an innovative incubator aimed at developing and fostering new ideas around emerging technologies.