SOPHIA ANTIPOLIS, FRANCE - Travelaer, a digital software provider for the travel industry, announced a new customer partnership with Finnair to build and launch the airline's new stopover booking experience.
"What we are building with Travelaer goes beyond the typical round trip and one-way bookings," says Rogier Van Enk, Finnair's Vice President for Distribution, Commercial Excellence & Data Science. "We have been looking to simplify the booking process for those travelers who desire to book a ticket with a stopover in Finland on our website. Launching this new booking engine is not only welcomed by our customers but also a vital part in supporting the Finnish tourism industry's StopOver Finland initiative."
Once available, travelers will be able to book stopover, multi city, and other more complicated itineraries in a user-friendly format. The booking engine is being designed to put full control of a better booking experience into customer's hands by providing them tools that simplify the process.
Finnair is implementing Travelaer's Travel PaaS, which is designed to integrate an airline's digital products and services into a single platform, while also allowing users to view their experience through a multitude of screens and devices. Travel Paas will allow Finnair to appeal to an increasing number of customers interested in a stopover experience and improve revenue from these bookings with the addition of ancillary services.
For Finnair specifically, Travelaer is integrating the following Travel PaaS modules into their new booking engine:
- Stopover Module, which offers the possibility to add a hotel and car reservation in path, to facilitate organization of their stay in the connecting point, and the module is fully integrated into the booking process.
- Instapricer Module, which acts as an aggregator of various pricing engines (Pros, Amadeus, Google, etc.), it scans and sends back to the Travelaer engine flight availabilities, fares, and airport taxes. It also supports promo codes, booking fees and any pricing features amending base fares.
- Tailored Trip Module, which will allow Finnair to sell a full ancillary suite of products, such as seat, meal, pre-paid lounge access, Wi-Fi, pre-paid baggage fees and more. Tailored Trip includes Seat Map, which integrates key data from Finnair's ancillary catalogue into the booking engine, giving travelers full assistance in selecting their seats.
"The goal of this initial partnership with Finnair is to radically improve the user experience for booking complex itineraries, such as stopovers," says Travelaer CEO Mike Slone. "Today's travelers have unique needs and desires, and like many industries, the travel industry is bogged down by legacy technology systems and apps that don't integrate with other systems, offer a confusing user experience and ultimately fail to meet those needs. Finnair's new booking engine represents a step towards changing that trend."
According to Anssi Partanen, Head of Onboarding and the project manager for the booking engine project at Finnair, "Finnair has already started rolling out the booking engine to our English-speaking markets and all markets with language versions will be available during the spring of 2018."