Transavia.com is flying high—even during a recession. In the Netherlands, three major elements attract tourists throughout the year: transport, accommodation, and entertainment. The degree of cohesion between these three elements heavily determines how tourists experience their holiday. The Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions (NBTC) projects inbound tourism to grow in the coming years. It’s anticipated the number of foreign overnighting guests will increase each year by 2%, to approximately 14.25 million visitors in 2020.
Low Fare with Care
Transavia.com is a thriving member of the Air France/KLM Group, who provide scheduled and charter flights to more than 90 destinations—primarily in Europe—with special attention to holiday destinations in the region. Their business is defined by the slogan, “low fare with care,” and offers attractive base prices with additional (paid) products and services. Almost 90% of the airline’s tickets are sold through its website. This makes the low-cost airline the largest online marketplace in the Netherlands.
In its 45-year history, transavia.com has grown into an airline with a broad range of destinations. But the company faced a number of problems in light of its rapid growth. Their systems were unable to respond to increasing pressure created by business expansion. Structural issues included disconnected systems and staff, and outdated information created issues in effectively running the growing business. The increasing number of communication channels by which customers use to book flights, such as mobile and SMS, meant the company required a broader IT approach to serve these new needs.
It was essential that a new reservation system remained approachable for transavia.com visitors, as well as external sites like CheapTickets.com. Recently, the company debuted their new reservation system known as News Choose (NSK). The migration to this new system has positively affected communication between internal and external applications by increasing the speed of the reservation system. By using an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as middleware, transavia.com was able to customize the migration to suit the needs of its organization. They partnered with TIBCO to establish a solid and reliable ESB. BusinessWorks became the backbone for the company’s website by bridging existing web properties with old interfaces to the new interface of News Choose.
Flying High
The new and more robust website can scale to accommodate overwhelming holiday traffic. Transavia.com now offers more than 100 direct-booking destinations and 133 routes from the Netherlands. This range of choices means that transavia.com maintains the leading position of being the premier holiday carrier in Europe. During the annual Feather Awards (Verenuitreiking) earlier this year, transavia.com was chosen as the best low-cost and best charter airline by the Dutch travel sector for the fifth time in a row, which makes them an undisputed airline leader in the region.
Curious about where your company stands in system integration? Take the Integration Maturity Assessment.
