EDREAMS ODIGEO: A NEW TRAVEL RETAILING MODEL
Dana Dunne, CEO of eDreams ODIGEO, shares how it’s using Travelport+ to operate its pioneering, subscription-based business, engage five million travelers, and unlock further global growth.
Results
- A stronger content, NDC, and ancillary solution
- More cross-sell opportunities
- Better customer retention and satisfaction rates
A bit about eDreams ODIGEO
In the travel industry, there are disruptors, and then there’s eDreams ODIGEO. Founded in 1999, the online travel agency quickly skyrocketed from the vibrant streets of Barcelona to become a global household name. Today, it’s widely considered the ‘Netflix of travel’, having pioneered the industry’s first subscription program, called Prime.
A subscription service… for travel?
“We’re a technology company focused on travel. Not the other way around” explains Dana Dunne, CEO of eDreams ODIGEO. We’re here with Dana at the company’s Barcelona hub, which is home to 1500+ of its staff. And, being a city renowned for spectacular architecture and engineering, where could be a more fitting HQ for this fast-growing tech trailblazer?
The first thing we want to know is: how does a subscription service for travel attract customers? Dana explains: ‘In other industries, people were increasingly subscribing to services that offer better content, better deals. Spotify, Disney+, CostCo…we knew we could do that for travel, because consumers are overwhelmed by the number of retailers out there, which makes it confusing to know who to trust when booking’.
And it’s a business model that really works. Since its launch in 2017, the Prime program has gone from strength to strength, helping eDreams ODIGEO achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 220% over the past five fiscal years. Which makes this modern retailer the world’s fastest-growing subscription platform. Impressive. But keeping five million paying subscribers happy is no small task for an OTA. That’s where Travelport comes in.
A better NDC solution
Sourcing the best content has always been a priority in eDreams ODIGEO’s retailing strategy. In line with this commitment and aiming to enhance its offering further, the agency partnered with Travelport to elevate its content and retailing capabilities, notably with NDC. This collaboration has been instrumental in:
- Speeding up search times through Travelport’s ability to normalize content (i.e. make it uniform with content from other sources, meaning it then can be compared like-for-like)
- Improving the customer experience by helping travelers and agents visualise and understand the details of what they are buying
- Reducing the burden on agents by offering more traveler self-service functionality to resolve exchanges and refunds issues independently
Travelport’s NDC solutions are built with agencies in mind. Our first step was to develop a minimum requirements benchmark for NDC, plus an end-to-end error handling design format. This ensured that across every customer touchpoint, the content would be delivered in a retail-ready way, making searches faster, richer, and more accurate — which in turn improves conversion rates. That’s NDC sorted.
Support on ancillaries:
Ancillaries is the other content focus area for eDreams ODIGEO. Dana told us “Part of our value proposition is looking after the end-to-end customer journey, beyond flights alone. But that’s an incredibly demanding area to be in. There are so many different products, seat maps, bag options…the complexity is absolutely immense.”
eDreams ODIGEO needs access to a broad range of ancillaries across all airlines — and again — for that content to be standardized. Just like NDC content, this is critical for keeping search times fast and accurate, and helping the consumer understand and compare options side by side.
Thanks to Travelport, we’ve got the leading platform for sorting and managing ancillaries and many other products and services.
The Travelport ancillaries solution was twofold. First, we consulted with eDreams ODIGEO to identify opportunities to offer enhanced content, and worked with partner airlines to deliver them. Then, we normalized and standardized the ancillary content, and set up APIs with more automation, to either look or ignore certain fields, which improved search times, quality, and accuracy. This made it easier to offer customers everything in one place, get more cross-selling opportunities, and drive customer retention and satisfaction.
Unlocking future growth through modern retailing
Customer acquisition costs make it notoriously hard to drive loyalty in the OTA space. This new subscription model changes that. As Dana explains “Travel is becoming more and more stressful to the consumer, so as retailers, it’s really about making things easier for them. By doing that, you build brand loyalty and get more potential to earn and grow”.
Travelport+ is an incredible platform. And not just by today’s standards, they’re constantly building on it to remain the best, and provide what a 21st century flight retailer really needs.
Getting modern, getting results
Modern retailing means removing outdated processes. Old back-office systems for managing bookings are full of manual steps — which slows operations down and makes cost and revenue metrics harder to measure in real time. But Travelport supported eDreams ODIGEO in its automation journey through our advanced API capabilities. Now, when changes are made to a booking, the back-office gets data in real time, allowing eDreams ODIGEO to manage cost and revenue per booking instantly.
That’s one way we’re helping eDreams ODIGEO capitalize on every opportunity to convert and cross-sell. Another is by providing more insight into its issuance rate (the number of successful bookings) plus the ability to see across the shopping cart from the moment an offer is selected, to the point of issuing a ticket. Now, eDreams ODIGEO gets insight on success across price, book, ticketing, and the value of the consumer’s basket. And finally, we help eDreams ODIGEO to earn through benchmarking and insight, making sure our API continues to meet the business’ needs in terms of features and capabilities within the tech stack.
Working with Travelport
“As a technology company, our needs are incredibly complex and demanding” says Dana. ““We want to remain at the forefront of the technology and retailing space, and that’s why we value our partnership with Travelport. Our focus on ease, on simplicity, and those are values we share with Travelport.”
On an organizational level Travelport is also really trying to push the boundaries with technology, just like us.
But it’s not just about technology. Dana tells us it’s about the Travelport people the company works, day in day out. “It’s been a joy working with the people there, because as a business they’re also really trying to push the boundaries from a technology point of view.”
And from Travelport’s perspective, we’re so happy to be a part of eDreams ODIGEO continuing success.
