Our World
For as long as people have been booking travel online, there have been predictions that travel agents would disappear. Our World, a New Zealand travel company specialising in holidays to the South Pacific and Worldwide Cruising Holidays, has kept proving them wrong, with expert people backed by smart technology.
For many travel companies, the natural next step would be to go direct online and let customers book for themselves. Our World has the technology to do that. Its booking system, Sandfield’s OnHoliday, could sit behind a direct booking website. But Managing Director Rick Felderhof has chosen not to, because competing with Expedia and Google for online bookings isn’t where Our World adds value.
"That puts us in the same space as Expedia, Booking.com and Google. Who's got the bigger budget to spend on technology? What they can't do is put a human expert in front of that technology to give our customers advice, recommendations and solve problems."
Instead, Our World is using technology to give its specialist Travel Advisor team more time to focus on the needs of their customers, working with Sandfield, its technology partner of almost two decades.
Our World is a New Zealand-owned travel company based in Auckland, with about half its business sold direct to travellers (B2C) and half through other travel agents (B2B).
Travel is affected by almost every kind of disruption, from strikes and volcanic eruptions to coups, wars and fuel crises to name a few, and Our World had plans in place for most of them. What it hadn't planned for was every airport closing at the same time.
"COVID gave us an opportunity to reset our business. We were trucking along quite well before Covid, but we weren't doing anything especially innovative."
The reset made Our World take a hard look at where it adds value. Rick points out that travel is an unusual product, because "you can't touch it, you can't feel it", and much of it has become commoditised. Competing on price, where there's little room to charge for your service, was a slippery slope.
So the business simplified and focused on the two areas where expertise matters most: the Pacific Islands and Cruising holidays. Through its Our Pacific brand, it has become known as New Zealand's premier South Pacific specialist, and its cruising volumes continue to grow strongly.
Pacific holidays are often more complex than they look. A third child can turn a one-room holiday into a two-room one, and more families are now travelling across multi-generations, with grandparents booking four or five rooms and each family adding their own plans before and after. That's difficult to coordinate online, and it's an example of where a specialist makes the difference. Cruising is just as complex and is a very personal experience, where doing it yourself regularly catches people out.
"If you get your cruise wrong for your preferred style of holiday, you're stuck on a ship for 12 days that you're hating. It's important to have that first hand experience or knowledge to match the right cruise with the right customer."
That's why Our World invests in its specialists, training them and sending them to the islands and on cruises so they can advise from experience and build lasting relationships with customers.
Once the business had stabilised after COVID, Rick turned his attention to technology. His goal was to grow the business through technology rather than simply adding more people. OnHoliday sits at the centre of that with Our World using it to manage its supplier contracts, hotel and tour inventory, pricing, quotes and bookings.
At the same time, the industry has moved from static to dynamic pricing, with hotels and airlines using algorithms that adjust prices instantly based on demand and availability. Managing that in a legacy system would never work.
Over the last two years, Our World and Sandfield have focused on connecting the back end of OnHoliday to the wider industry. It now links to hotel channel managers and airline distribution systems through several APIs, including Pacific Bedbank, SiteMinder, Amadeus and Expedia's B2B platform, which gives Our World instant confirmations, last-room availability and live pricing.
What Rick values most is that OnHoliday can handle both sides of the market and have new capabilities added for as his needs change. Our World can still load rates manually for those smaller more unique properties and experiences who set their prices once a year, while pulling in dynamic pricing and inventory from larger suppliers.
With the back end now largely connected, Our World is now shifting its focus to the front end, meaning its customers and its marketing. There are three pieces of work planned with Sandfield.
HubSpot linked to OnHoliday. Our World onboarded HubSpot this year, and next year an API will let the two systems update each other automatically.
A customer app. This would give customers one place to see their quotes, booking confirmations and invoices, likely with payments built in, and it would update as travel plans change, even while they're travelling.
An in-house AI assistant. Supplier information is currently spread across document repositories, cloud storage, shared and personal mailboxes and various websites. An AI tool built on Our World's own information would let the sales team get answers to common questions without checking six different places, and could also run quick price checks on supplier websites.
Rick estimates their sales team could improve their productivity by 20% to 40% by creating efficiencies through technology, especially for those common and repeated questions and solutions, leaving them more time to focus on their customer engagement.
He's also clear about where the line sits with AI.
"You can tell which companies have gone over the fine line between using AI to help the customer experience, and going overboard so the customer experience gets battered around a bit."
Our World had been looking at a US subscription product for building itineraries and customer documents, although it would still have needed an integration with OnHoliday.
Rick still sees a place for software-as-a-service, and HubSpot is a good example given how much it's investing in AI. But he believes the old rule of never building your own technology, because you'll always be paying to keep it up to date, doesn't hold in the same way anymore.
"You can keep your tailor-made software relevant much more efficiently using AI. The equation for deciding what to outsource and what to build has changed significantly."
Rick's history with OnHoliday goes back further than Our World. He had worked with it at his previous business before selling that company, and when he came back into the market with Our World, he chose it again. It has grown and adapted with the business ever since.
Today OnHoliday works alongside OnAccount, Sandfield's financial management system, which handles Our World's accounting. Because the two were designed to work together, Our World avoids many of the integration problems other businesses deal with.
"It's flexible enough to cope with the complexity of travel, but it's got good enough controls to make sure it's not a free-for-all."
Rick puts the length of the partnership down to people who understand his business, and to loyalty that goes both ways.
"Sandfield has been big enough to provide grunt, and small enough to provide personal, tailor-made solutions. They've had good people who've taken time to understand what we're trying to achieve, and then delivered it."
Looking ahead, Our World's goal is to be New Zealand's best South Pacific and Cruise Holiday travel operator, using technology to help get there. Rick sees each new wave of technology, from the internet to AI, as another tool for his team rather than a replacement for them.
"Each time, we just keep using it, growing it and adapting. We'll use it to our advantage, but there will still be a need for human involvement."