Pac Web - North Edition
Selling Travel With Information Technology
Pacific International Travel Group's Trend-Setting Program.
One of Australasia’s biggest travel companies is using the South Pacific tourist market as a test bed for the application of new information technology (IT) to the business of selling travel. "We may well be the first group in the world to actually properly deploy it," says John Porter, a British businessman whose London company, i-spire Plc, recently took 70 percent control of the Pacific International travel group.
"It should be clear that a large part of European tourism is based on very short-haul city break activities which may need less of this," Porter told Pacific. "But what you see a lot of in Australia and New Zealand is complicated long-haul travel, because almost by definition once you get out of Australia you are into a long-haul proposition. I think we are going to come up with a very good approach for that large segment of the travel market."
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Pacific International, a grouping of seven travel-related companies, moves 50,000 Australian and New Zealand tourists a year into the Pacific Islands, with its main focus on Fiji. In Australia it operates Pacific and International Travel and Pacific Unlimited and in New Zealand Go Holidays, ASPAC Vacations and Travel Arrangements. Pacific International was launched in 1971 by a Sri Lankan businessman, Siva Subramani, who is now a one-third owner with Porter and New Zealander Andrew Chalmers as equal partners.
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Subramani took shares in Porter’s London company in a deal which gave i-spire Plc control of the Australasian business. Porter, a scion of the family owning the big British Tesco chain store company, has a background of computer software sales. He was a co-founder of Verifone, an operator of credit card verification terminals, and two years ago started a business, now the largest network of server farms in Europe.
"Linked to that I started i-spire, which has the approach of picking three business areas greatly changed by the Web, develop the technology and take an important stake in one of the operators in that field to get the technology actually into place." This was why it bought into the Australasian travel company.
Porter said the objective is to enable the well-informed travel agent to be the "most competitive person in the travel space. At the moment people go around the travel agents. That can work for certain types of short-haul travel, but for complex or package travel, which has to be actually sold to the customer, that does not get you anywhere.
"What we are doing is meeting one of the critical issues, and that is to allow the travel agent to be able to confirm the space in real time for the customer. The customer does not have any worry, anxiety or doubt about what they are getting and where. You need to have a view about what is going to be effective in the medium term in the travel space. For that, what we need is to be cost-engineered in different ways when people communicate with each other. That’s when IT comes in. Once people are travelling a certain distance they like to know that there is a human they can get hold of if necessary. I can see a future where people may hit a travel Web site, come up with a view of what they want, reserve a whole itinerary and yet they still have the travel agent there to give them advice."
Porter said Pacific International’s IT approach should greatly spur travel to the Pacific Islands. "You have two things going on simultaneously. You have a very important change where the connectiveness of the thing is improving, and that makes a huge difference to the travel industry. A lot of this stuff happens in the background and the consumer doesn’t need to see it. But rather than referring to travel Web sites, what we are really focusing on is making sure, once a consumer has decided to come here, that it is easy to design an integrated package which meets their needs.
"That requires a fair amount of IT. If you ask why is a group in London spending so much time in the Pacific, the answer is because programmers in New Zealand cost one-third the amount in London and also have a willingness to get it done. So we decided that this is probably the best test bed."
Photo: Robert Keith-Reid
