In the News

Growing tourism business via online reservations

By Shyla Sangaran
shyla@nstp.com.my
Computimes (New Straits Times), Malaysia
Tuesday, 05 November 2002

Online reservation is gaining greater prominence in the tourism industry as in the case of YTL-Travel Centre, an on-line reservation centre for YTL Hotels and Properties. By leveraging on such system, the centre finds that business has been growing steadily and is expect to mark a further increase next year.

With more people opting for online reservations, YTL-Travel Centre records a six figure sales revenue monthly through its site, according to Meraj Karim Huda, principal consultant of forumline Consulting, which provides management consultancy services for the travel and tourism sector. Beside the international toll-free phone numbers, YTL-Travel Centre also processes reservations from three Web sites namely ytltravel.com, pangkorlautresort.com and tanjongjararesort.com.

Meraj says the most popular destination is Pangkor Laut Resort although Tanjong Jara Resort is steadily attracting customers there too.

About 50 per cent of YTL-Travel Centre's customers are from Malaysia, while the highest number of international visitors are from the United Kingdom, Singapore, Japan and Germany.

"YTL Travel Centre is a unique online operation as it focuses solely on fulfilling Internet-generated reservations for resorts and hotels. The objective is to manage online (Web-based) and phone-based enquiries, and reservations received from around the world. Currently, 50 per cent of all enquiries are international."

Meraj says the centre is established to accommodate the expected volume generated from an aggressive international advertising campaign.

"As a result, forumline identified the need to address both information technology (IT) issues and staff resource. On the IT side, forumline integrated and enhanced the existing Web-based reservation system using MySQL and inter-faced it with the customer relationship management. This, he adds, provides the YTL Travel Centre an ability to segment and identify the customer base for its marketing programmes and management reports.

"We also recruited and trained the staff with appropriate skills sets to deliver a high standards of customer service using an IT environment," he added.

Set up in June 2001, the YTL Travel Centre has an office at the JW Marriott Hotel in Kuala Lumpur. It presently has a manager and two customer service executives, who manage a six-day, 9am to 10pm operation. The centre makes sure that all enquiries are responded within 24 hours.

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Computimes (New Straits Times), Malaysia
Growing tourism business via online reservations (PDF, 54KB)

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