Claddah Travel has become the first company to sign up to a new dynamic packaging tool designed to help traditional tour operators grab a bigger market share. The Birmingham-based company, which specialises in travel and holidays to Ireland, has launched a new online booking service that will enable it to sell tailored products from its existing portfolio alongside new products supplied through third-party consolidators.

This new approach of combining traditional tour operator packages with dynamic packages is called ‘intuitive packaging’, because it automatically presents customers with a range of options including in-house offers, consolidated offers and a combination of the two.

The ‘intutive packaging’ approach will enable tour operators to enter into partnership with a number of travel consolidators and present a broad range of competitively priced packages under their own branding.

Martin Kilroy, the founder of Claddah Travel and www.irishcitybreaks.co.uk said:

“We are delighted to be pioneering this technology as it is helping us to remain true to our traditional values whilst adopting a new business model based on ‘intuitive packaging’. Claddah Travel will continue to be a specialist tour operator offering the best deals on Irish hotels, only now our customers will have a wider range of deals to choose from.”

Arthur Moulding, managing director of intuitive systems, the company behind the new technology, said: “Tour operators no longer need to be limited to only selling packages from their own portfolios, they can use an intuitive packaging system to offer an expanded range of products and convert more sales.

“We believe this new approach to online booking will give small and medium sized tour operators instant access to a much bigger market than was ever possible before. We’re excited at the potential of this product which is already generating lots of interest from forward-thinking tour operators like Claddah.”

The new system, called iVector, is a true ASP.Net application running on Windows 2003 and Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005 and is 100% browser based. Intuitive has further enhanced the framework by implementing its own Intuitiveclasses® which can reduce web page sizes up to 60%.

IVector embraces XHTML, XML and XSL/XSLT in both the administration and public elements of the systems and uses Ajax controls to enhance the users operation and experience within the system. Having been developed from the ground up using the latest technology, iVector is fast, scalable and can be run in a hosted environment.

Claddah and www.irishcitybreaks.co.uk will use the iVector’s ‘intuitive packaging’ technology for accommodation packages. The full version of the new system incorporating flights will be launched at the Travel Technology Show next year (13-14 February 2007).
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