OpenJaw Technologies has successfully delivered an advanced holiday search engine to Budget Travel, a subsidiary of World of TUI. This move forms part of Budget Travel's initiative to maximise Internet sales, and has resulted in an increase of over 3

Published: 27 Jan 2005

OpenJaw Technologies has successfully delivered an advanced holiday search engine to Budget Travel, a subsidiary of World of TUI. This move forms part of Budget Travel's initiative to maximise Internet sales, and has resulted in an increase of over 3

OpenJaw, developer of advanced travel distribution products, has provided extra direct sales for the Irish tour operator during its January sale period, handling huge increases in customer traffic volumes. The new system, which uses OpenJaw's xRez Internet Booking Engine and xDistributor XML Middleware, is based on the recently released Travel Technology Initiative TORIX XML specifications for holiday package distribution.

In October last year, Budget Travel made the decision to move to a more direct sales model, and consequently needed to insure that its web presence was primed to handle additional volumes of traffic especially for the much publicised, annual post Christmas sale.

"We needed to deliver a solution rapidly for the January 5 sale date and be certain that it provided not only enhanced functionality on the original website but it had to be highly scalable and reliable,” explains Ian Lennon of Budget Travel. “The OpenJaw solution helped us to achieve all these things, and we have had 100% uptime since go-live with very fast search times for our customers. We also found the OpenJaw team to be very flexible in relation to all our dealings with them."

Declan McGuinness, OpenJaw's SVP Sales & Marketing says that the Budget solution was a challenge primarily because of the tight timescale but also the requirement.

“It absolutely had to deliver business on the website from the sale day January 5. This project made extensive use of xDistributor's business rules engine capability, allowing Budget to quickly and easily modify cross-selling, discounts and other business rules. We are delighted it's been a successful project for both parties,” he comments.