V2 Developer Update

Traveltek Is Helping To Change The Travel Industry

It’s been a busy six months. Since welcoming our very first V2 developer to Traveltek in May, we’ve grown to two full teams dedicated to building out the new product and achieving our goal of becoming the world’s best travel technology provider.

A lot of fantastic work has gone in behind the scenes to onboard new colleagues, embed new ways of working, and build a great culture of learning and support. It’s been brilliant to see how this has been embraced by everyone in the teams and across the wider Traveltek business. It puts us in a really strong position to deliver our best work and build a great product.

As the V2 teams continued to grow, much of the summer was dedicated to developing a prototype of a Flight Search journey. We wanted to put some of the team’s ideas to the test, and see how quickly we can integrate new suppliers and return search results. The outcomes were hugely promising, and we wrapped up with plenty of learnings to take forward into the next stage of development.

Where we are today

Building our V2 Cruise Technology

As you’ll have heard from our latest round of webinars, we’re currently focused on building a world-class Cruise API and Search & Book application. This will be the first major step in our journey to build V2.

The groundwork for Cruise began at the end of August, following the completion of the Flight Search prototype. We were able to draw on the research, surveys, and feedback gathered from across the business over the last few months and plot a course to deliver a first version of V2 Cruise next year.

We now have two development teams dedicated solely to building V2 Cruise. Each is focused on a distinct workstream – namely Supplier Integrations and a Cruise API & Application. We anticipate spinning up further teams as the work progresses.

With work underway on the Application, we’ve also been working at building out our UX function. This includes re-working our processes to put UX at the forefront of conversations, as well as recruiting new talent into the business.

Customer Engagement Sessions

Alongside the excellent work which the teams are doing on developing the Product, it’s been great to take some time to get to know some of our customers through a series of engagement sessions. These took place during September and October.

These calls have given us the opportunity to hear from a huge range of customers – from the UK to Australia – and gather valuable feedback. Everything we have learnt will help us shape our approach to building out V2 moving forward. Some highlights include:

Confirming that a ‘One Platform’ approach is a crucial principle for our customers.
Plenty of detailed feedback around Search & Book journeys, including our approach to filtering results and adding ancillaries to bookings.
Lots of suggestions about how we can make reporting more effective and robust.
A great range of ‘blue-sky-thinking’ ideas to consider as we look to ensure innovation is at the heart of the V2 build.

The customer engagement sessions were the first step in what we hope will be an ongoing partnership between Traveltek and our customers as we progress with V2. We’re already planning our next round of sessions, which we hope will go into further detail on some of the key areas raised during the initial calls. We’ll be reaching out to a cohort of customers directly to set these up.

Where we’re going

Our current focus is clear – we want to deliver the first iteration of our V2 Cruise technology. Everything we do over the coming months will be with this goal in mind. For the immediate future, our focus internally is on the following key areas:

Cruise Search
Cruise Search Results
The first round of supplier integrations

We will continue to update you as we progress the build through the Cruise Search & Book journey.

In addition, there are a couple more things to watch out for from Traveltek:

Further customer engagement and feedback sessions hitting the diaries
The opportunity to take part in demos as we release the first iterations of the V2 product

We’re dedicated to ensuring that we bring our customers along on this journey. A journey as we work towards technology that is changing the travel industry.

As always, if you have any questions, feedback, or comments, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

For more information: www.traveltek.com

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