Companies in the Travel and Hospitality space face constant pressures to streamline costs, increase RevPAR, improve passenger yields and delight the customer. Compounding these operational issues is the market imperative to innovate with new product and service offerings to a highly-segmented customer base. In our discussions with industry leaders, four themes have emerged as table-stakes for new product design:

1. Seamless Guest Experiences

Over the past decade, the leading casinos, resorts and theme parks have incorporated new processes and technologies to minimize the hassle of pre- and post-stay travel. For example, Disney uses bar-coded bag tags to facilitate bag handling at the Orlando airport, within the Walt Disney World Resort and onboard the Disney Cruise ships. Once a guest drops their luggage at their home airport, the next time they see their bags is onboard the ship or in their hotel room. Other brands are implementing RFID, customer analytics, recommendation engines and mobile applications to create integrated service delivery processes.

How Enablus Can Help

Enablus’ User Experience Design team will work with your service delivery teams to understand the nuances of your guests and passengers and conceptualize seamless experiences that bridge the online, handheld, and in-person “moments of truth.”

2. Customer Data Integration

Fifty years ago, “guest recognition” and CRM consisted of 3x5 note cards stored at the Front Desk. Today, travelers have multiple “profiles” based on whether they are traveling on business or pleasure, resort or city, domestic or international. Adding to this complexity is the plethora of customer databases which result from mergers and acquisitions and external GDSs, TMCs, and suppliers. Sorting through this maze of data is a challenge for guest services, revenue management, and marketing.

How Enablus Can Help

When designing new offerings, we can assist your organization to find the best sources for customer data inside, and outside, your organization. We will leverage the insights of this data to design and validate User Personas which form the goals for the new product or service offering. During development, we will build processes to extract, transform and load (ETL) the data into a operational database and connect it to a new website, web application, or rich internet application.

3. A Better Booking Process

Most travel web sites and online booking engines use a common strategy for fare search, retrieval, and booking - the user describes location, dates of travel, class of service, and then waits for results. Some sites may use AJAX controls to filter and sort the search results. But the overall experience remains “me-too” from site to site.

How Enablus Can Help

Working with Adobe Flex 3.0, Flex 4.0 Beta, Silverlight and HTML5, we can build an online booking engine that is highly usable, compelling and engaging to your guests. With Adobe LiveCycle Data Services, your site will minimize the use of pagination and maintain near-real time connectivity with your available inventory.

4. Leveraging Web 2.0 Technologies

To-date, much of the industry’s fascination with social networking and user generated content has been largely experimental in nature. Many travel social networking sites chase the tail of TripAdvisor.com and fail to provide anything that is truly differentiated. Despite this current situation, there are still many opportunities to leverage Web 2.0 technologies to augment your brand initiatives.

How Enablus Can Help

Our Product Strategy Consultants will help you sort the confusing maze of social networking, mash-ups, content delivery, and service-oriented architectures to arrive at a product concept that meets your business objectives and audience needs.

Developers of consumer and enterprise software face several unique product development challenges:

1. The transition to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

If you offered a $15K version of your $200K product that provides 60% of the functionality would you expand your customer base? New advances in Rich Internet Applications, cloud computing, open source technologies and virtualization have radically altered the underlying economics for product development and deployment. In the recent past, if your enterprise solution relied on a commercial technology that needs to be physically installed at your customer’s data center, then those requirements limited your market attractiveness. Today, product companies are rushing to create SaaS offerings that leverage their existing application’s business logic, but offer new deployment options to serve a larger number of customers.

How Enablus Can Help

Our Product Strategy Consultants can assist your team to define new market segments that can be served by a SaaS offering. We’ll help you architect new applications that leverage the latest user interface technologies, cloud computing, and virtualization. Armed with a new deployment model, we’ll create and refine development roadmaps, cost models, and the business case. We can also manage all, or part, of the product build.

2. Redefining their Product’s User Experience

Believe or not, many web offerings flounder because the Product Team does not have (a) a clear understanding into which customer segments the app is supposed to serve, (b) unclear value proposition and no mapping of product features to the segments' wants/needs, and/or (C) little effort to envision an engaging user experience for these segments.

How Enablus Can Help

Our UX Design Team will dig deep to understand the latent needs and wants for your target customer segments. We will then create User Personas, which provide UX design targets for your primary and secondary customer segments. Through the use of Personas, your Product Team will have a clear understanding of what product features are required to appeal to the target customer segments. The UX Team will also have a priority in which on-screen interactions needs to be “engaging” in order to provide a differentiated offering.

3. Compressing development cycle-times

Agile development, Scrum and eXtreme Programming (XP) have gone from being fringe methodologies into mainstream approaches for software development. As technology companies seek to reduce the product development cycle-time, they are exploring how to apply Scrum to the stage-gating process of the PDLC.

How Enablus Can Help

Enablus has instilled the Scrum methodology as the philosophy for how we organize our client work, regardless of whether it is app dev, UX, or business modeling. Our focus is to continuously deliver value-added work products at the end of each two-week iteration, based on the latest market dynamics. Through our collaboration, clients begin to adopt the Scrum mindset, even amongst their non-technical team members. The end result is a Product Development team (not just the software engineers) that is attuned to the philosophy of delivering value-added output every two weeks.

4. Scaling their implementation capabilities

Software and hardware companies are often attracted to the margins generated from professional services. In a company’s early stages, these revenues fuel R&D and growth. As a company matures, the challenge is how to successfully manage a product company and a professional services group. You don’t want to confuse the market or your investors with an over-reliance on services revenue. In later stages of corporate growth, the challenge is to find enough talent that can implement your solutions, especially as new offerings are launched into the market.

How Enablus Can Help

Our Technologists and Business Consultants can create implementation teams that go on-site at the client to deliver your company’s solutions. We will work with your product and subject matter experts to understand the nuances of your solution’s value proposition and customize our Enablus Implementation Methodology accordingly. We will provide all the necessary program management expertise to ensure a successful implementation for your client.