Well, that felt like the month that would never end! Probably like many of you, I’m pleased to see the back of January as it was an extremely difficult month both personally and professionally.
Hard to believe but I’ve succeeded doing dry January (for those of you who know me, you will know what a monumental achievement this is!) Coupled with lockdown and homeschooling, it’s been a challenge, but I was determined, and I’ve also reached my goal to run 100k this month too, these personal goals have definitely helped me through the month. As a business, we have really been encouraging our teams to ensure they get fresh air/exercise and take a break from their desks as looking after our #mentalhealth is so important for us all at this tough time of year. I hope you and your teams are also looking after each other as we navigate each day and week.
January has seen some challenges for us post the AWS migration move which we can’t deny and take full responsibility for. As a business, dealing with these difficult challenges are never easy and we, of course, realise the impact, this has on you our customers and your staff. I want to emphasise that this investment was 100% required to future proof your technology and enable your business to be ready for the bounce back. In the last week of January, we completed the final pieces of the jigsaw with our last transitional jobs from NTT to AWS. Post these changes many of you have reported speed improvements to us, and we can now further optimise where possible. The dedication from our teams to achieve this significant transition has been incredible with many late shifts and its hard sometimes to explain the gravity of what has been achieved. So thank you to our partners once again for your support and patience during this transition.
In January, system stability challenges coupled with support and maintenance have been detrimental to any progress on roadmap items. Although I planned to share this with you in February, we are not yet ready to do so. However, we have made great strides in this area, and planning is very much underway. We have recruited 2 people to join our product team as product owners/business analysts, and one starts in February and the other in April. We plan to share our product plans with all of our customers in March at our quarterly business review meetings, and we plan to be fully transparent with our product plans as we did with AWS customer communications, so regular webinar and progress reports will be a core part of our journey with you all. There will also be the opportunity for customers to work with us on a customer advisory panel as we turn our attention to our applications’ rebuild. We require a little more patience as we map out our product moves and address many of the things that excite us as a travel technology company. We are excited about our innovative plans, that’s where we want to be, collaborating with our customers, not speaking with you about maintenance tickets!
This month we have completed several payment gateway upgrades, including Paysafe and Cybersource. All clients are now on the latest version of our MSC and Hotelbed’s API integration. Our integration with Virgin voyages is so nearly there, and for our UK clients new tour operator Biblio Travel is also extremely close, so I’m sure we will shortly be sending updates out on how to connect with these operators. We have just started work on integrating Arosa into our system too, so we will keep you updated as this progresses.
Lastly, I’d like to thank all of our customers for completing our NPS survey, and we will share our results and actions we will take as a result of this with you all next month.
If you have any questions about anything mentioned in this month’s Tektalk, please do not hesitate to contact your Account Manager who will be happy to help.
As always, thank you for your continued support, let’s all hope the continued good news on the vaccine stays positive and we start to see some green shoots again in February.
Yours sincerely,
Cressida Sergeant
Chief Commerical Officer