The senior team at Open Destinations held a conference session at Travel Technology Europe show in London. The session was attended by more than 50 visitors from travel companies throughout the UK and Europe, and as far as South Africa and Malaysia. The session showcased focused on the advantages, challenges and sustainability issues when publishing a B2B and B2C API, including search and availability, speed, latency, implementation, customer support and monitoring. Speakers from Open Destinations included Kevin O'Sullivan, CEO and Brian Mebourne, Senior Vice President of Technology.

1. How to execute a
successful
e-commerce strategy
for tour operators
and wholesalers

2. About us
Speaker profiles
Kevin O’Sullivan
Chief Executive Officer, Open Destinations
•20 years of experience within the travel technology industry
•Founded Open Destinations in 1999
•Previously Managing Director of Tourplan, e-commerce consultant for First Call Tickets and
Group IT Manager in Tourism International
Brian Mebourne
Senior Vice President – Technology, Open Destinations
•25 years of experience working in IT within the travel and financial services industries
•Broad experience spanning Microsoft and Open Source technologies
•16 years with Gulliver’s Travel Associates, where he was part of the senior IT management team
running the internal development teams.

3. Agenda
1. E-commerce strategy
and case studies
2. Organisational change

4. About us
Leading technology provider exclusive to the
travel industry
•Established in 1999
•Offer complete software solution for reservations, operations and
web-based selling
•Over 90 installations of our software in 30 countries
•Over 5,000 daily users of the system
Our team
•Company headquarters in London
•Development, support and outsourcing centre in Goa, India
•Combined staff of over 270 people

5. Our Partners
• Hotel and flight data providers, accounting systems, credit card authorisation
interfaces

6. Ecommerce Strategy

7. Post-
travel
follow up
• Customer
questionnaire
• Upsell
opportunities
• Email marketing
and direct mail
Travel
• Customer goes on
holiday
Service
• Self-service
customer portal
• Support issues
• Upsell
opportunities
Billing
• Email documents
• Vendor
management
Res-
ervations
• Site search
• Availability is key
to keeping
customer
• Email marketing
with offers and
advice
• Promotions and
vouchers
Pre-
booking
• SEO friendly
content
• Price comparison
• First experience
with website
• Lead capture
Which area is your
business focus?
Travel Customer Life Cycle

8. What a good API has..
• Clear documentation
• Ease to implement
• Performance
• Good customer support

9. Organisational Change

10. Organisations: a change of approach
As you move from an offline operation to an online operation,
aspects of your organisation need to change too
•Maintain your website
•Understand the challenges for sales and marketing
•Support your online customers

11. Organisation: Maintaining an online
presence
Maintaining a successful website requires some skills:
•Project Management
•E-commerce Business Analysis
•Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Specialisation
•User-Experience Specialisation
•Web Mastering / Directing
•Software Development
•Quality Assurance Specialisation
•API Integration specialisation

12. Organisation: Sales and Marketing
Sales and marketing moves from selling the product or service to
selling the website or API capabilities as well:
•Digital media
•Search Engine Optimisation
•Paid search
•Site metrics
•Cart abandonment
•Conversion rates
•Stickiness – pages viewed
•Visits

13. Organisation: Customer support
Customer support considerations can change significantly:
•How do you support customers when they can’t do what they want?
•Call centre?
•International support?
•Out of hours support - 24x7?
•API technical / integration support

14. Technical Considerations
Hosting an e-commerce API
Overview of main issues from Brian Mebourne

15. Ecommerce: Scenario
You want to provide your services to your clients via a Business-to-
Business interface. You choose to expose an interface to your
system over the internet.
•The upsides are obvious
•Warning!! Don’t overlook the new challenges
•Understand the potential opportunities!

16. Infrastructure
Hardware!
•Web server
•Database server
•Internal Network
•Internet Service Provider
•Firewall
Plan ahead!

17. Challenges: High availability
• Resilience
• Redundancy
• Load Balancing
• Data Replication

18. Challenges: High performance
• Question: What needs to be as fast
as possible?
• Answer: Everything!
• Question: What really needs to be
as fast as possible?
• Answer: Searching
• Local Network Traffic Management
• Scaling – Horizontally and Vertically
• Latency

19. Challenges: Latency
• Latency: the delay caused by
accessing or transporting data over
a network
• Caching
• Vertical scaling

20. Challenges: Customer Support
Implementation Support
•Help new clients understand, implement and
use your API
•Be careful when changing your API!
Post - Implementation Support
•Make sure problem resolution processes are in place

21. Challenges: Monitoring
Monitor everything!
•Servers
•Network
•Internet Service Provider bandwidth
•Requests / responses (traffic profiles)
Protect your Service. Protect yourself!
•Understand your Traffic Profiles
•Defend yourself against misuse
•Set Look To Book (LTB) ratios

22. Opportunities
• Client specific infrastructure
• Segment your infrastructure
to serve specific clients
• Commercial opportunities?

23. Opportunities
• Cache / offline data files
• Allow your clients to search within
their own environment
• Searching will be faster
• Price and availability may be out of
date

24. Summary
Plan!
•Hosting a B2B API is more than a technical
implementation
•Business and IT need to coordinate implementation,
support and monitoring
•Do not break the API Contract!
Prepare to Invest
•Time, Technology and People supporting your
customers and your infrastructure.
•The correct hardware infrastructure will ensure a
resilient, high performance service to your
customers.
•Monitoring traffic profiles can allow you to serve
your customers proactively.

25. Thank you