Software Development Under Control
Customer: TravelWeb
Travelweb LLC is a travel distribution company owned by Hilton Hotels Corporation, Hyatt Corporation, Marriott International, InterContinental Hotels Group, Starwood Hotels, priceline.com and travel technology provider Pegasus Solutions, Inc. Travelweb's private label offerings, distributed through Travelweb.com and leading third-party Internet partners such as Lowestfare.com, aavacations.com, Continental.com and Orbitz, give consumers access to a the largest selection of hotel accommodations at discounted rates online. Travelweb LLC is a private company headquartered in Dallas and can be found on the Internet at www.travelweb.com.
At Issue:
TravelWeb had initially created their customer service booking system without considering special municipal charges and taxes. The needed an application that would allow their senior customer service representatives to select blocks of reservations based on specific search criteria, and then applies charges or credits to all of them in one pass. Before this application could be created, they were pulling up a single record at a time and manually applying charges and credits to each one, which wasted much time. Another developer had aborted development with little work to show and the project was left hanging.
The Solution:
Using Microsoft's ASP.NET, an internal Intranet portal was created that allowed
specific customer service representatives to log in and perform searches for customers
using a variety of criteria, from confirmation number, booking ID, arrival and departure
dates, and more.
The specific technologies used were: Microsoft ASP.NET 1.1, SQL Server 2000, and
Visual Basic.NET.
Once the search is performed, a list of the results is presented. The customer service
representative can select as many of the result set as they wish, by checking the
associated checkbox next to the records they need to work with.
They can sort the results, page thru them, or return to the search screen to narrow
down the result set by fine tuning the search criteria.
Once they have a set of bookings to work with, the customer service representative can page through the individual records, reviewing the demographic and booking information, as well as reviewing all of the accounting/charge information for the specific booking.
After the customer service representative is satisfied that they are working with
the correct set of records, they can set up the adjustment to be performed on all
of the selected bookings, and once set up, and they can perform the adjustment across
all the bookings by a click of a single button.
This system saves hundreds of hours of senior customer service representative time
every month. As the system was written in under two months for a very reasonable
budget, they received return on investment in less than 90 days.