Business Challenge
Today’s travellers expect a comprehensive, self-service travel experience in line with their experience in an increasingly digital world. But for travel and flight resellers, slow, inefficient, manual post-booking processes erode productivity and prevent the delivery of the very best experience to travellers, and that is without mentioning the high labour costs that cut profit margins and limit scalability.
In 2017, an inaugural phase of rapid company growth brought skyrocketing flight sales, and the post-booking team at Hopper found themselves struggling to manage an increasing number of schedule changes. Working manually with internal tools, the team decided better technology was needed to increase productivity and to reduce unnecessary operational costs caused by inefficient processes. Automation would be essential
to managing increased volumes and scaling the Hopper business. This was ever more apparent after the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an endless backlog of ticket cancellations and staff shortages in a new volatile and unpredictable era for the travel industry.
About Hopper
Hopper launched in 2014 as a Canada-based travel website focused on price prediction (with its app launching in 2015). In a feat of rapid expansion, Hopper is now the #1 most downloaded travel app in North America and sells over $6 billion of travel each year from 25 points of sale worldwide. Its offering includes travel fintech products, flight content, hotels, car rental and rental homes, all at unbeatable prices thanks to sophisticated algorithms that analyse over 30 billion price points in real time. Moving forward, Hopper is focusing on expanding its B2B “Cloud” partnerships with travel players across the globe to realise its vision as the world’s best (and most fun!) place to book travel.
Why Trava?
Trava offers a comprehensive suite of customisable no-code automation solutions that allow customers to self-manage their post-booking processes across all booking environments. Flexible, scalable and easy-to-implement, the solutions empower travel businesses to develop a truly 24/7, touchless service and connect with travellers in innovative ways whilst maximising growth and profits.
Trava has firmly established itself as the partner of choice for OTAs and TMCs across the world, and it’s all thanks to decades of deep travel technology expertise. It was this inherent understanding of the travel industry and its complexities that attracted Hopper.
Trava has industry expertise and experience that I’ve never seen anywhere else that allows them to be so successful in this space. Their development capabilities are a huge wow factor because their engineers truly understand the travel space. We spoke the same language. I think that’s part of the magic.
Krystyna Dahms, Director of Ticketing, Product & Automation at Hopper
Hopper’s Trava implementation
After regular meetings with Hopper to set business objectives, brainstorm processes and discuss solution customisations, Trava delivered the first automation solution of what would become a long-standing partnership: minor schedule changes. From there, says Dahms, “we were given the support and guidance to play around with the tool, figure out what we could do with it, test it and conduct quality assurance. Trava gave us the ability to be completely independent but were on standby at all hours for our questions.” Hopper succeeded in securing, testing and launching just three months later. “We were able to run the backlog of 350,000 reservations and achieve a completely touchless automation rate of 95%.”
This success led to a new vertical within Hopper built around post-booking automation using Trava. Hopper’s direct collaboration with Trava focused on using the functionality of the technology in creative ways to support business expansion. The Hopper post-ticketing team has built automations for queue management, refunds, ticketing failures (automated from 30–100% based on type of failure), duplicate tickets (saving $100,000 within the first 6 months), and most significantly, major schedule changes with Sabre, Travelport and Amadeus (automation rates for each GDS are identical). Dahms reflects,“I never thought in a million years we’d get to where we are: over 80% completely touchless across GDS systems, including major schedule changes, which took a considerable amount of time to process manually. This automation alone has saved us $750,000 in customer service salary in just 8 months.”
Another key development was the successful implementation of automated processes for NDC, starting with schedule changes for one of Hopper’s largest carrier. Schedule changes (both minor and major) are now 98,8% automated. Additional functionality and carriers are continuously being added, connecting directly to the respective NDC environments.
Key benefits for Hopper
Dahms attributes Hopper’s ability to drastically reduce labour costs, increase efficiency and drive scalability to its partnership with Trava, “We wouldn’t have been able to grow the way we have without Trava.” As a result, Hopper has increased resources to look towards the future and develop businesses cases for emerging opportunities based on the creative use of the Trava technology. The magic lies in the sophisticated yet simple-to-use modules. Trava offers straightforward drag-and-drop workflows that allow customers to design automated processes in just a few clicks, with no need for coding knowledge, engineering resources or IT specialists. This intuitive and user-friendly technology means Trava customers are given full control over process management and the opportunity to experiment and explore their creativity.
“We have this platform we can play around with. Trava technology gives you the autonomy to be a creator independently, to solve your own problems, and the possibilities are endless, says Dahms.
Trava’s collaborative approach to project implementation is also a key benefit for customers looking to harness the functionality and capabilities of the platform. Hopper was able to push the limits of automation and develop and test truly customised processes due to the supportive backing of a flexible, experienced partner.
“Our working relationship has been so close; it feels like working with somebody on your own team. As we’ve got to know the capabilities of the Trava platform and the dedication of the team, we’ve been able to collaborate and stay creative with each other to develop the tool into a powerhouse post-booking automation solution that we’ve never seen anywhere else.”
Trava allows travel companies to:
Reduce manual work by over 90% and scale effortlessly thanks to lowered costs, increased operational efficiency and extra time to focus on revenue-generating activities.
Build touchless automation processes and implement changes easily with simple drag-and-drop workflows — no need for coding!
Optimise strategy and processes by empowering post-booking teams to unlock their creativity and design better, more personalised services.
Improve customer service with digital communication solutions that put the customer first.
