Overview:
Serving millions of business travelers in over 100 countries, GetThere™ is the industry’s most sophisticated and reliable online travel management solution. To remain competitive in today’s dynamic travel landscape, agility is critical. Onboarding customers to our system as quickly as possible is very important and the process needs to be automated cutting down any manual intervention. We at GetThere™ have been focused on process automation leading to increasing productivity, reliability, efficiency, quality and reducing turnaround time & operational cost.
Challenge:
GetThere™ holds data for multiple lines of businesses like Air, Hotel, Car and Rail. These data include some of the vendor metadata to onboard partners and third-party connectors which we call Air Connect. Air Connect provides access to regional low-cost carriers leading to greater flexibility and choice when booking air travel. Very often, GetThere™ needs to onboard Air Connect carriers for Air LOB (Line Of Business) and similarly to delete various obsolete hotel properties for Hotel LOB.
This is a repetitive and time-consuming task. We end up losing booking if the Air Connect carriers are not available in a timely manner which is loss of revenue. Similarly, if we don’t have a seamless way of removing the obsolete hotels from our application, it creates a lot of confusion and inconvenience for our customers.
The existing process had been tedious and required huge dependency on database engineers to perform the stringent change request process.
What Sabre did:
Team Data Snipers – a participant team in
SuperBlitzcode 2020 (A 3-day hackathon at Sabre’s Global Capability Centre, Bengaluru conducted every year to solve key business challenges facing the travel industry) came up with Process Automation in GetThere™.
Our
SuperBlitzCode idea triggered when we planned to automate some of the tiring processes of repeated customer requests.
About 25% of the customer requests in 2019 were to
- Onboard new Air Connect carriers
- Delete obsolete hotel properties
Onboarding Air Connect carriers involves potential revenue generation for GetThere™. We found the ideal solution to onboard them using a smooth and efficient way.
Key approaches to the solution include:
- Enhancement of GetThere™ internal tool
- Optimized way of data validation and manipulation
The team took the opportunity to prioritize with Product Management partners and have successfully released to production in Q2 2020.
We are reaping the benefit of our SuperBlitzCode solution with more such requests!!.
Results:
- 10X process improvement!
- Toil away ~30 hours of manual effort per request
- Eliminates CR bottleneck
- Decoupled functionality
- Efficient and secure
- Effective utilization of time
AND FINALLY, MORE HAPPY CUSTOMERS!
