New Abacus marketing chief aims to drive productivity
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Abacus International is planning to help its travel agent customers by focusing on the “unglamorous” side of the industry, a new senior executive has told Travel Daily.
Speaking on the sidelines of the Travel Distribution Summit in Singapore last week, Martin Symes, Abacus’ new vice president of marketing, said that the manpower challenges currently facing the industry mean it is imperative that travel technology providers are able to increase agents’ productivity.
“One of the key challenges that agents are facing now is staffing,” Symes explained. “In Asia labour is getting more expensive and it’s getting harder to find qualified people at a price that’s affordable. If you look at what’s happening in Singapore, where they’re tightening rules on foreign workers, it becomes an even bigger challenge.
“So a lot of what we’re doing – which isn’t very glamorous but is absolutely critical to the industry – is focus on productivity,” Symes said.
According to Abacus customer research, the amount of unproductive time that the average travel agent spends on tasks such as managing queues and finishing PNRs, rather than serving customers, can be anything up to 75%.
“Anything that we can do to help the travel agent automate these processes has to be a good thing,” Symes said. “If you can improve your productivity by 20%, you can actually increase your bottom line by 50%.”
To facilitate this, Abacus is in the process of rolling out its new desktop solution, ‘Abacus Workspace’, which offers a greater amount of content and graphical displays to improve agents’ workflow. Symes said it was also crucial to add more non-air content and more non-GDS air content, such as low-cost carriers.
“Travel agents are booking a lot more than just airfares, but currently they’re not doing it all in one coherent environment,” said Symes, adding that Abacus Workspace offers cruise and travel insurance content, as well as wholesale hotel and air platforms.
“This is a pivotal time for the travel industry,” Symes stressed. “As the industry evolves, it’s critical to diversify our customer base, our product base and our revenue base.
“We need to spend more time thinking about how we can increase our addressable market, bring more non-air content into the mix, and bring non-GDS air content into the mix. We need to work out how we can move our business forward in areas where the industry is growing.”
But by first focusing on the basics of agent productivity and addressing practical issues, Symes and Abacus are laying the groundwork for future success.
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