Running head: TRAVEL INDUSTRY PROBLEM SOLVING

Travel Industry Problem Solving

Meghana Oruganti
Pranaya Reddy Kankanala
Sindhuja Krishna Managani
Wilmington University
IST 7100

Under the guidance of

Prof. Anthony Intorelli

TRAVEL INDUSTRY PROBLEM SOLVING

Table of Contents
1. Abstract................................................................................................................................3
2. Introduction..........................................................................................................................4
3. Background..........................................................................................................................5
4. Statement of Need................................................................................................................6
5. Evidence..............................................................................................................................7
6. Plan of Action......................................................................................................................8
7. Budget....................................................................................................11
8. Funding.........................................................................................................................12
9. Schedule.............................................................................................................................13
10. Evaluation..........................................................................................................................15
11. Conclusion.........................................................................................................................17
12. References..........................................................................................................................18

Abstract

Technology became a key aspect in every industry and with the use of latest technology
trends; organizations are automating most of their processes. This became a major advantage for
the organizations to generate more profits and to convince their customers. Most of the industries

TRAVEL INDUSTRY PROBLEM SOLVING

have already started moving into the new technology trends like big data, business intelligence
and cloud computing and some of the industries have not yet implemented the plan. Travel
industry is one among those industries which has not implemented the new technologies and they
are facing some troubles in their business process. This document will solve the problems of the
travel industry by providing the big data and business intelligence solution. This paper will also
explain about the project scope, industry background, the actual need for the change, project
budget, schedule, plan of action and the evaluation techniques. This document will help the
travel industry companies to get an overview about this latest solution which will solve their
problems.

Introduction
In a world of drastically changing technology innovations, business such as Travel
industry must innovate with great velocity. Travel industry is one of the largest industries in the
world and huge revenue is being generated with this industry. Travel websites play a crucial role
in running this industry as most of their customers started buying tickets online. The travel

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websites provides ticket bookings to various destinations, hotel bookings and special tour
packages etc. In spite of providing all these services, travel companies are finding hard to attract
customers based on their interest and thereby finding problems in decision making. Travel
companies have a strong goal on fulfilling customers needs and they want to provide best
services according to the customer requirements. Most of the customers want easily accessible
information and they are concerned about getting information in a single website (WTTC, n.d.).
The problem begins here when customers dont get proper services and guidelines regarding
travel information. Travel companies are facing problem in earning income and they are unable
to attract customers (Tnooz, 2012).
Implementing big data and business intelligence concepts in the travel industry will
change the whole scenario. Proper implementation of both these technologies in the
organizations will help in increasing revenue and customer base. By implementing these
changes, many organizations can fulfill the customers wants and the customers also can save lot
of money with the availability of more options (Honigman, 2014).
The scope of this project is to build up a solution for the travel companies which include
implementation of two large technologies in their business processes. This project will provide
the needs and advantages of implementing big data and business intelligence in travel
companies.
Background
Business associated with Travel industry is an economic activity and it has been agreed as
a service industry which deals with buying and selling of travel related services for satisfying
human needs. The problem is that Travel companies are finding hard to attract customers because
of more competition and lack of technology. Customers are not satisfied with their travel

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experience and most of the customers are suffering to find the information regarding travel
options. It becomes more difficult if a customer wants to book a hotel room at reasonable rate
near to their destination place without proper use of technology (WTTC, n.d.).
Travel companies had invested a lot of money by setting up a flashy websites, servers,
customer support and many resources and ended up with improper results according to their
investment. Most of the customers were booking their tickets via airline websites which has
impact on many travel website companies with great loss in income.
The role of travel agencies was started in 19th century and the use of websites was started
after the evolution of internet. The problem has arisen after the launch of website by the airline
companies. Customers faced difficulty in purchasing a ticket when there are websites with the
Airline Company and Travel Company. Travel companies are gradually experiencing losses from
2010 as most of the customers are directly buying their tickets via airline websites. Travel
companies goal is to provide the best information to the customers by means of best deals that
include best price, special tour packages and convenient range of prices etc.
Some travel companies are trying their best to solve this problem by implementing best
customer service or implementing some kiosk models at some busy places to attract the
customers. This brought some attention to the customers but still it never solved the problem for
both of them (Laverty, n.d.).
Statement of Need
The proposed solution for the above stated problem is implementation of big data and
business intelligence in the organization. This solution will definitely solve the current problems
and increases the organizations income. Apart from the income, this will provide the best service
for the customers. Travel companies will produce a lot of data every day by customers bookings,

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past transactions and customer visit data. If the travel companies collect all the data from various
databases into a data warehouse and apply big data and analytics solution; it might help the
organizations to improve accuracy. Travel and transportation organizations can make use of this
big data to access critical information needed to deliver best customer service (Shannon, 2015).
Applying big data will show lot of trends in the data. Big data concepts will make us
understand customer behavior and his interactions with the website. Big data is one of the best
analyzing concepts in recent times. Business intelligence is also very useful for these large
datasets for querying and reporting of data. BI tools will be helpful for creating dashboards and
data mining into the data. This will help the companies in all ways by providing right
information about the customer (Shannon, 2015).
These solutions are far better than many other alternative solutions like branding and
implementing kiosk models. Technology solutions give better results and it mainly solves the
problems faced by many organizations. Customers can view the information which they are
looking for. Travel companies can also provide tours and packages according to their interest by
analyzing their past and current data. This creates interest in the customers and they get satisfied
with their bookings (Laverty, n.d.).

Evidence
The global travel industry will grow to 10 % by 2022 if they implement big data in their
business processes. It will also make an annual income of $10 trillion every year if they
implement it properly (Datafloo, n.d.). To achieve this success big data should be implemented in
all sections of the travel industry. Travel industries collect every part of the data by the customer
and this massive data will be very useful in expanding their business with new innovations.

TRAVEL INDUSTRY PROBLEM SOLVING

It is proven that 90% of the customers of the people who visit the travel website will not
convert to regular visitors. 60% of the customers will never visit after their first visiting. This is
bringing millions of loss to the travel companies (Datafloo, n.d.).
There are many brick and mortar travel companies got closed after the rise of internet.
There are many online travel companies got started from 2010 and this became a major
drawback to the regular agents (Coza, 2015). Even online travel companies business is not going
well because of improper implementation of technology in their business. Social networking, use
of internet and mobile applications are drawing attention from customers. Travel companies are
unable to reach customer satisfaction because of improper technology. There are many startup
companies which are closed because of lack of investment and poor business model.
According to CMO survey, 73% of the US marketers say that the data analysis is the
growing priority in business world and 66% also said that there is also more demand for data
collection. If companies start using big data and predictive analysis then they will get an ROI of
1000%. Implementing big data and BI tools will help the companies to adjust the price based on
the demand. The companies can implement the trends like e-Commerce websites like providing
the right service to the customer. To implement this companies have to invest some time and
money and that will generate 10 times the investment (Kenny, 2015).

Plan of Action
To implement this solution and make the organizations succeed the travel companies
should follow this plan of action:
1. First the organization head should conduct a meeting to share his views about the new
technology implementation.
2. The Organization should make everyone ready for the new technology implementation.

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3. To implement the solution, the organization should not disturb the current business process.
4. Organization should buy huge servers and should get all the new software licenses. They
should also make the office space ready with all the new technology equipment and
networking equipment.
5. Then they should hire the staff according to the domains they need. They should hire from
manager to fresher for the new project implementation.
6. After confirming the office space and fixing the systems and networking equipment, the
organization shall start their work.
7. As already the business case is ready for the implementation of these new technology
standards to the travel companies, the new project plan will be started by the project
manager.
8. As part of the implementation of the new technology in the companies, first they have to
collect all the data from different databases in their business. Those include booking
database, hotel database, website visit database and all other databases.
9. After pulling the data from the databases they should transform the data into a single format
for better analysis. Then they should load the data into a data warehouse.
10. This large amount of data will be dealt by big data technology. The company should
automate the data retrieval and changing the data standards.
11. All the data will be in a single warehouse and the whole analytics will be implemented on
this data.
12. The staff should be trained on the required technologies and the company should project their
goals to the staff members in order to get the best results.
13. They should write the best predictive analysis algorithms which uses both the current and
past data.
14. The analysis and projecting to the website will be continued till the organization exists and
the organization decision making team should also look for new innovations and should
implement immediately in their business.
15. The whole process should be documented for referring them in the future.

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To implement all the above mentioned tasks, the company should hire new staff
and should assign roles to them and those include:
1. Project Manager: To look after whole project process and creating the milestones and for
managing the project life cycle, the company should hire a project manager. Project manager
is responsible for managing all the employees in the organization.
2. Business Analyst: The business analyst should be acknowledged with all the new
technologies and he/she takes all the new requirements from the stakeholders. Business
analyst is responsible for making note of all the requirements and assigning them to design
team.
3. Data Analyst: The data analyst will be responsible for analyzing the data and finding the new
patterns from the data. The report from data analyst will be screened by the company head.
The person should know any of the BI tools.
4. ETL developer: The ETL developers will be responsible for pulling the data from the
database, transforming the data and loading the data.
5. Database Architect: Architect plays a role in designing a new database model and handling
huge data work with the new data standards.
6. Java Programmer: Programmer will design, test and debug program code and the new
analysis algorithms according to the requirements.
7. Big data Expert: This person is responsible for all the big data responsibilities in the
organization. He/she should be responsible for finding all the new insights and patterns.
8. Tester: The organization should hire people who have good knowledge on testing and should
look deep into the concepts and their process. The person should know all the test
methodologies for working on the application.
9. Security Analyst: As this is a huge investment and the company deals with lot of customer
data, they should hire a person who has good knowledge on network security concepts,
policies and procedures.

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The company should hire the project members from experts to the beginners and there
will be many kinds of work performing in the organization. To setup the new staff and all
equipment needed, the company should build or lease a new place because the place is
permanently used by the organization and they should look for long term. Organization should
hire the people who are flexible to work in any condition and the one who can operate with a
great deal of autonomy. Training the staff is important after selecting them and make sure if they
are serious about working for the long term or not.

Budget & Funding

This is the most important part in any organization as we cannot schedule the things
further in any project without budget proposal. So the estimated budget for implementing the
above tasks is mentioned in this section. Budget plan and its assumptions will provide a basis for
improving the efficiency of the business. Budget estimation should be presented to the board of
directors for approval and then it should be compared with the regular basis estimation to check
whether the company goals are being met or not. After estimating the overall budget that
includes material cost, labor cost and production cost etc., the company should also estimate
budget for the upcoming years. After estimating the costs and income of an organization, the
team should calculate the Return on investment (ROI) from the project implementation (Graham,
2013). After developing the final budget, it should be presented to the company board of
directors and the changes beyond a specified cut-off would require approval by them. Majority of
the budget should be allocated for technology implementation and resources (Kenny, 2015).

TRAVEL INDUSTRY PROBLEM SOLVING

Sl.no
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

Action
Hadoop
Resource Salaries
Benefits
Systems cost
BI tool
Networking cost
Infrastructure cost
Third party costs
Other costs

11
Cost
$50 million
$3 million
$1 million
$100,000
$10,000
$50,000
$200,000
$300,000
$100,000

The overall implementation cost of the project will take up to an estimated price of
$55million. The BI (Business Intelligence) tool helps in monitoring data and produces necessary
components to make smarter decisions. It takes very less budget as there are many tools
associated with it in the market (Elana, 2016). Capital budgeting is important because investing
without understanding the risks and returns would result in huge loss at the end of the project.
Although funds may be approved in total during this process but most organizations follow
separate process for approving funds. Some companies will use personal assets while some
borrow assets from others. Also, there are different types of expenses which should be predicted
by the organization during the budget year. Every sponsored project contains two categories of
costs known as direct costs and indirect costs.
1. Direct costs: A direct cost is defined to a particular thing. For instance, the expense of the
materials used to make an item is known as direct cost. Only few direct costs are
available. The cost of any consumable supplies specifically used to make an item can be
viewed as a direct cost. Direct cost examination can likewise be utilized outside the
production department. However, there are various circumstances in which direct costing
ought not to be utilized, and in which it will lead to wrong results. One issue is that it
totally disregards all indirect costs, which make up the bulk of all expenses caused by

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today's organizations. When making long term decisions, this might be a problem since
gives results that do not achieve long-term profitability. Most direct costs are variable yet
this may not generally be the situation (Bragg, S.M, 2014).
2. Indirect costs: Indirect costs are costs that cant be assigned to any particular cost objects
and these costs are utilized by various activities. Identifying indirect costs in useful
because they can be removed from the short term pricing decisions where administration
needs to set costs simply over the variable expenses of products. Indirect costs are
considered to be fixes costs and they commonly benefit various cost objects and it is not
possible to trace them accurately. Direct costs are more likely to be variable costs,
whereas indirect costs are fixed costs.

Schedule
Schedule is one more major aspect in the project management. Schedule in a project
defines what to do and when they need to do it. It will impact the quality of the final product and
the project not gets finished unless and until the customer is satisfied. There are various steps
which includes when there is a project proposal in front of the organization higher authorities.
The schedule depends on the project development life cycle. Using an Agile methodology for
developing this project will be the right choice. The schedule is estimated based on the previous
projects schedules which are related to big data and also for which they used agile methodology
for development. If you do not create a schedule which reflects projects risks, then there is a
chance of failing to plan. The main phases of the project are:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Project proposal.
Project initiation.
Project planning.
Project analysis.
Project Design.

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6.
7.
8.
9.

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Project Development.
Project Testing.
Project Implementation.
Project Closure.
Among all the steps project implementation and testing will take more time as the travel

companies should collect the data from different databases, implement BI (Business Intelligence)
tools and analyze the data. Project testing includes the testing of the database fields, BI analytics
and big data solution. The project schedule also includes the setting up of office space, buying all
the technology equipment, softwares and licenses, hiring the staff and training them. After
completing all these tasks the actual development of the project will get started.
Task
Project Proposal and Acceptance
Project Charter
Project Planning
Project Kickoff
Project Analysis
Project Design
Project Development
Project testing
Project Implementation
Project Closure

Number of days to complete

30 days
10 days
20 days
5 days
30 days
45 days
4 months
2 months
15 days
10 days

The overall project schedule is approximately one year and the project team should also
give some buffer time for any delays in the project. There may be various reasons for delays, for
instance, delays occur due to the impact of disasters occur in an organization. The organization
should also develop some business continuity plan to keep their organization safe from the
disasters and keep them running effectively. (Jeff, 2012).
This planning is based on the comparison with the old projects and also estimating the
right technology resources in the organization. Also, there may be delays in this tough project
because of data transformation into a common format. There may be large sets of database

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records with errors which are known as dirty data and we have to convert the whole data into a
single format for matching the business goals (Jeff, 2012).

Evaluation
This is one more important aspect in this project development. The project should be
monitored and controlled every time to make the required changes and make the project into a
highly qualified one. As this project works on agile methodology, there will be lot of meetings
for reviews and they are:
1. Kickoff meeting: This meeting will explain the project goals and responsibilities to everyone.
2. Pulse meeting: These projects are conducted regularly and these are also short term meetings
which are performed to know the project performance.
3. Review meetings: For every task and phase there will be review meetings for evaluating the
output of the particular task. The changes will be made after some careful review (AMA,
2015).
4. Stakeholder meetings: As the whole project develops on agile methodology and there will be
stakeholder meetings will be conducted after iteration. In this meeting the stakeholder
evaluates and suggests if there are any changes needed (Steven, 2010).
5. Technical reviews: These meetings are conducted with the Subject matter experts for
evaluating the technical specialties in project. All the design and coding reviews will be part
of this evaluation (Steven, 2010).
6. Dashboards: These dashboards are maintained by the project manager to keep track of all the
project process and milestones (AMA, 2015).
7. Management meetings: All the managers, project heads and the organization heads will be
part of these meetings. These meetings are responsible for sharing the status with the
investors. Then they will also evaluate and suggest if there are any changes needed (Steven,
2010).

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Conclusion
Travel industry has great importance among all the business sectors. But the present
requirements of the customers are making the industry to focus more on the technology changes.
Even the industry is facing a crisis while running their business. To overcome all these problems,
the travel industry companies should implement the big data and BI (Business Intelligence)
solutions. There are many industries which got succeeded by implementing this solution. This
document should be taken as the perfect reference for knowing about the solution
implementation and the organization board of directors needs to perform still more deep analysis
on this subject. This project proposal document will give an overview on what factors to be
considered for implementing the project depending on their budget, time and resources. When
the action has been initiated, it can be monitored to ensure that the plan is followed accurately
and thereby having the desired effects.

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References
AMA. (2015). Everything you need to know about running a project meeting. Retrieved from
http://www.amanet.org/training/articles/Everything-You-Need-to-Know-About-Runninga Project-Meeting.aspx
Bragg, S.M (2014). Cost Accounting Fundamentals: Essential Concepts and Examples (4th Ed.).
ACCOUNTING TOOLS.
Coza, D. (2015). How technology is changing the role of travel agents. Retrieved from
http://tts.com/blog/how-technology-changing-role-travel-agents
Datafloo. (n.d.). How big data will lead the way in the travel industry. Retrieved from
https://datafloq.com/read/big-data-lead-travel-industry/222
Elana, R. (2016). How much should Business Intelligence Cost? Retrieved from
https://www.sisense.com/blog/make-business-intelligence-software-fit-2016-budget/
Graham, D. (2013). Total cost of Big data: a CFOs lesson from wintercorp and Horton works.
Retrieved from http://blogs.teradata.com/data-points/total-cost-of-big-data/
Honigman, B. (2014). How Big data is transforming the travel industry. Retrieved from
http://www.forbes.com/sites/centurylink/2014/04/30/how-big-data-is-transforming-thetravel-industry/#456c79e423c1

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Jeff, B. (2012). Big data development challenges: Talent, Cost, Time. Retrieved from
http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/big-data-analytics/big-data-developmentchallenges-talent-cost-time/d/d-id/1105829?
Kenny, E. (2015). Big data updated: $1 returns $10 with predictive analytics. Retrieved from
http://www.boxever.com/big-data-updated-1-returns-10-with-predictive-analytics
Laverty, S. (n.d.). Impact of technology on the travel agency business. Retrieved from
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/impact-technology-travel-agency-business-57750.html
Shannon, A. (2015). Why big data means big opportunity for the travel industry. Retrieved from
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ibm/2015/07/09/why-big-data-means-big-opportunity-forthe-travel-industry/#2d4083802a5e
Steven, S. (2010). Types of Meetings. Retrieved from http://stevenmsmith.com/types-ofmeetings/
Tnooz. (2012). Big data and the infinite possibilities for the travel industry. Retrieved from
https://www.tnooz.com/article/big-data-and-the-infinite-possibilities-for-the-travelindustry/
WTTC. (n.d.). Insights of travel & tourism. Retrieved from http://www.wttc.org//media/files/reports/special%20and%20periodic%20reports/wttc_big_data_report_final.p
df

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