South African Airways (SAA) has embarked on a voyage into e-commerce, with its flysaa.com e-commerce site lifting off the runway late last week.
The new site, designed and developed by an in-house team in conjunction with Irish e-business solution provider, Datalex, local systems integrator Dimension Data, and Atraxis, offers users the ability to book flights online, interact with frequent flyer programme Voyager, and arrange hotels and car hire, among other services.
"SAA plans to roll-out a range of travel-related product and service offerings that will empower our customers to make and manage their own travel plans," says SAA executive VP Bonang Mohale.
"This is our first product for the South African market in which SAA has made a substantial investment to ensure that customers get the best attention. Another area we are currently working on is a business-to-business product for small and medium business customers."
During this year, the Web site's capabilities will be extended, with the next phase entailing the development of a system aimed at business travellers.
A business-to-business product, identified for smaller businesses, is currently under development, where people may wish to make or change their own travel arrangements. Administration rights can be assigned, enabling people to logon as members, manage their own bookings, and even pay with a company credit card.
SAA is developing international sites available for passengers who originate from the US, UK and Germany, to book with SAA. "The next product in our planning phase will be to look at how we are going to interact with the travel industry, and to enable them to go the e-commerce route," Mohale says.
"We call this a Web channel because it's more than a Web site," says SAA e-commerce GM Theunis Potgieter. "It's a means of selling products and services, and of allowing the customer to interact via the Internet. The benefits to customers are extensive. For example, customers can ask to be notified by SMS if a flight is delayed. They also have more control over their reservations and access to a fast, 24x7, user-friendly service."
"The channel has been integrated with SAA's existing back-end systems, including its inventory, customer care and reservation applications as well as the Voyager Frequent Flyer system," says Greg Vercellotti, sales and marketing director of Dimension Data i-Commerce. "In addition, the channel interacts with Nedbank's iVeri credit card payment system."
The call centre required to control the Web channel was outsourced to Dimension Data's Customer Contact Solutions i-Media Centre due to the project's short time frame.
The site's booking and availability capabilities are powered by BookIt Consumer, Dalatex's online travel-booking engine. SAA already uses Datalex's ARIVA AccountProfile sales force automation software and ARIVA MarketProfile data-mining and data-analysis software.
"SA has opened up a new world of opportunities for Datalex and also a new set of challenges, which we will meet head-on in the development of solutions for this market," says Datalex CEO Neil Wilson. Other Datalex customers include Aer Lingus, Air Canada, Amadeus, American Airlines, AMTRAK, Ansett Airlines and British Airways.
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