My experience in the Travel and Tourism Sector

BAA, Saga Holidays, Titan Travel, The AA, TUI Travel and HRP are the brands I have worked for so far in the travel and tourism sector.

The variety of projects and pace of change in this business sector has made it an exciting place to be.  Projects have  included new websites and mobile,  web-chat and call-centre integration, social media integration,  re-platforming and system upgrades, and managing RFP’s for decisioning solutions.  I  have provided a mix of Programme Management, Project Management , Consulting services and most recently Product Management.

I have managed and led technical teams, operational and business stakeholders,  working across the businesses from C-level, to call centre agents,  capturing project requirements and confirming scope,  setting up governance and project controls and delivering  technical and business changes.

I have also developed an online holidays proposition of my own, combining web, mobile and social media integration.

Holidays and travel

Aviation

I was retained by BAA as a Project Manager to lead a £3M project to re-platform BAA’s website portfolio, comprising six internet sites (one for each airport division), six extranets and the corporate intranet. These sites were all to be redeveloped onto new content management systems (Vignette, Microsoft SharePoint). Scope included a design refresh. A commercially complex project with multiple suppliers delivering UI design, solution architecture, component build and IaaS virtualized hosting, site governance and SEO.

 

Package Holidays 

TUI UK & Ireland  embarked on a project to deliver a Customer Decisioning solution and required project management support to manage an RFP processes and assist with the preparation of a business case and plans for a phased deployment across the business. Scope of the RFP included the completion of a requirements specification and selection of both a product vendor and a systems integrator to implement the solution.

Customer decisioning can provide the business with propensity modelling capability, surfacing both static and dynamic actionable data (from CRM, booking systems, inventory/asset management systems, analytics data) and using this data to determine the Next Best Action for the customer. This can enable the business to improve targeting, uplifting the conversion ratings for campaigns and also enable real-time next best actions to to support relevant cross-sell and up-sell opportunities for incoming customer contacts. Customer Decisioning can be deployed across all customer touch-points including campaign management (telemarketing and email),   inbound/outbound call centre functions, web, mobile, high street retail, in-transit / in-flight and in-resort.

Travel Services and Roadside Assistance 

Acromas Holdings is  a private equity business who’s  main activity is the sale of branded goods and services through its subsidiaries which are household names including The AA, Saga Travel and Titan Travel.

Retained by Acromas to run an eCommerce programme  delivering technology and business into each of these brands, scope of which included:

  • New Website for The AA with an upgraded CMS (Interwoven) with new workflow
  • Newly architected back end services to support a more agile approach to changes and shorter releases cycles
  • Upgraded analytics including Session Replay capability.
  • Mobile apps and mobile optimised websites
  • Multi Variate testing
  • Webchat

Heritage – Historic Royal Palaces 

I was retained for 2 years by Historic Royal Palaces as their Strategic Digital Channel Manager, responsible for Digital Product Management across all customer touch-points. My job was to develop new digital capability and lead the adoption of business change to support this digital transformation.  I  owned the digital product development roadmap. I worked with customers to understand their wants and needs.  I worked with senior management and stakeholders on prioritisation, strategy and developing new operating models.   I worked with project managers and delivery teams on Agile development of exciting and innovative new products and services,  across HRP’s digital customer journeys, from mobile/web and mobile-apps, to ticketing and retail/EPOS, covering six palaces (including Tower of London and Hampton Court):

  • Developed digital product strategy and prioritised the roadmap with stakeholders across the business.
  • Defined new digital governance framework for adoption to a new target operating model / capabilities underpinning a future proofed digital experience and sustainable incremental growth in online revenues.
  • Led creation of solution architecture based on hosted CMS/CRM (Umbraco/Dynamics on MS Azure).
  • Led web redesign, replatforming and delivery into client’s environments from 3rd party suppliers.
  • Led development of a ‘Digital Visitor Guide’ (mobile/augmented reality) for orientation and storytelling.