Camino: the journey to travel industry recovery with Open Destinations
TTE in London back in February 2020 seems like a very long time ago, – all those great face-to-face meetings and coffees with our clients. And boy, did we miss ITB in Berlin as our regular date with industry colleagues over a Pils and some Currywurst!
Just like everyone, the Open Destinations team has spent a lot of time in Zoom rooms and on Teams over the past year. We have been busy finding new ways to work internally and of course with our clients, to maximise their business opportunities as the travel industry gears up for recovery.
We are really proud to have worked with our customers on major projects throughout lockdown, building solutions that are now being implemented ready for the upturn in travel.
Amidst all the bad news in the pandemic we are delivering new tech solutions that will bring big eCommerce and operational benefits to our travel industry customers.
Our key product, Travel Studio, has undergone some major changes over the past year. We’ve called the upcoming major release of our system, “Camino”. The ‘Camino de Santiago’ is one of the most loved tourist walking routes in Europe, ending in the beautiful city of Santiago de Compostela. Our new release name is inspired by that incredible journey.
The “Camino” version of Travel Studio brings a strong mix of new and enhanced features designed to put our clients in a strong position for recovery. Our new online traveller portal provides an “out of the box” solution to provide travellers with easy access to their booking details, payments balance, documents, and ability to enter profile information including special requests and travel data needed for Covid regulations. Further features have been added to our market leading “drag ‘n drop” itinerary builder that make it the best solution available for FIT, Tour and Package Operators alike. A new integration hub has also added hundreds of hotels and bed banks to supplement fully contracted or channel managed rates in the system.
We’ve also developed a full villa/cottage contracting and booking module recognising the importance of this market in the recovery. The system supports full property information including room configurations, facilities, cleaning days and turnaround days. The reservation functions provide a view of availability on a week by week or daily calendar and the network of villa owners are supported with a dedicated portal to view bookings and to easily update availability.
The range of incredible rail journeys around the world makes the growth in rail leisure travel no surprise to us. We’ve launched some new rich functionality for our Rail Operator customers in Rail Manager to support rail passes or concessions, operational disruptions as well as an iPad app for train managers to view all key details of travellers by route segment as well as provide upgrades and seat changes.
The past year has demonstrated the great resilience and camaraderie that makes the travel industry so strong. The team at Open Destinations has been busy working to enhance our software to deliver important benefits to our customers as the recovery gets fully underway.
Our goal is simple: ‘We do the tech. You do the travel.’
We’re looking forward to working with you in the weeks and months ahead as we work together to bring the industry out of this pandemic and into a strong recovery.
