experience designer + (they / them)
Aurora Travel
service design, strategic design solutions, customer experience
“COVID hit independent travel businesses hardest” -
Judy Tanner, (Managing Director of Aurora Travel)
The solution I created halved the time spent on menial tasks allowing employees to focus on curating holiday experiences. This resulted in an increase in sales of 25% within a month
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1. Background
Travel had just started to pick up again when I approached independent business Aurora Travel. Rather than hurriedly booking clients’ long awaited holidays, business was slow.
The majority of clients were still hesitant to book holidays in advance due to repeated travel restrictions, illness and delays on air ticket refunds over the years of the pandemic in Melbourne.
As a result, Aurora’s travel agents were often spending half their day looking up cancellation fees and refund policies from numerous international airlines.
4. Ideate
Plan A: a bespoke webform that would pull data on ticket refunds/cancellation policies from either the airline's site or the GDS from the booking reference number.
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+ Accessible for agents and customers as the end user
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- Labour costs of developing a form to pull outsourced information that would rely heavily on the functionality of external airline websites.
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Plan B: build a function within Amadeus that allows for the information to be found at point of sale, rather than having to individually complete several time consuming requests for each ticket issued.
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+ Easy to streamline into current work process
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- Permissions and real-world testing may present obstacles/unforeseen costs
2. Problem Statement
In order to book their holiday, Aurora’s clients need to know about refund policies and cancellation fees in case of unexpected changes.
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Airlines have made it difficult to find the conditions of airfares once they have been purchased.
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This means if a client needs to cancel - there is a lengthy process for agents to find the policies for each fare.
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To reassure customers and facilitate the booking process, this information needs to be made accessible at the click of a button.
5. Build
After looking into Amadeus’ API - I found a SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) that could be tested by the agency. On the advice of a consultant of Amadeus, we were able to unlock this feature and test it for free.
We happily discovered that the feature generated this information in issuing the itinerary automatically, requiring only the booking reference number.
This would effectively save Aurora’s agents several hours of admin work per day.
As a result, sales over the month trial increased by 25% and some agents reported having their daily workloads halved.
3. Research
Before running an informal sprint,
I conducted interviews with staff and clients at Aurora, desk research to understand the pitfalls of the existing process.
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I sat down with Aurora's managing director Judy and looked at stats on sales pre/post covid and set our determiners for our idea of success.
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This research led us to examine the Global Distribution System (GDS) - Aurora’s ticket issuing platform - Amadeus.
6. Test
- Training would be required for each staff member to use the new function of Amadeus’ platform.
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- The new ticket was clunky in layout and further consultation was needed. A marketing consultant was contracted for “sprucing up” the itinerary look & feel.
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Aurora’s commitment to customer service meant that the function was made available to its agents as the end user.
7. Result
Overall the implemented solution led to an increase in productivity - effectively halving hours of menial labour in each work day for a number of agents.
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Judy decided that these benefits outweighed the costs identified in testing my solution.
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The month trial saw an increase in sales of 25%.
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We will review in 6 months if this solution is still useful or needs further tailoring.