The background
North America Travel Service started in 1977 as a specialist division of Kennedy Travel (Yorkshire) Ltd in Barnsley. The owners saw that there was potential for long haul holidays and having operated a North America desk within the Barnsley shop, they made the decision to open the first branded North America Travel Service shop in Leeds. From that initial North America desk, North America Travel Service has grown into an important industry player with offices in Leeds, Nottingham, Barnsley, Manchester, Fleet and Edinburgh selling tailor made holidays to the USA and Canada to consumers as well as via travel agents. They also handle business travel accounts across a variety of industries as well as media companies.
Data needed to be stored centrally
North America Travel Service was one of the first agencies to adopt Sabre as a GDS in the North of England. Flights, rental cars and some hotels were booked through Sabre, while the rest had to be booked over the phone or via fax. Costings were done on excel sheets, paper files were used for storage of booking information and documents were produced from Sabre. They were using a back-office system called ADS for accountancy but had no central management system. As they grew it became impossible to manage all their data stored in various locations and the need for one central system became essential.
A system that fits all aspects of the business
They considered a few options but eventually turned to Dolphin because of the nature of their business. The company has a number of different divisions – a tour operation, a flight-only consolidator, a corporate travel department and a leisure retail division. The new system had to be one that satisfied all these aspects of the business and Dolphin fit that requirement.
In 2004 North America Travel Service made the switch and rolled out Dolphin BMM. Flight bookings are still made in Sabre and interfaced over to the Dolphin system to manage them. Dolphin offers them a more efficient way of producing vouchers and travel documents and, having a central management system for reporting and accounting made an enormous difference to them in terms of productivity and saving time.
Since then they were one of the first to roll out Dolphin Product Database to better manage contracted hotels, allocations on properties, etc. which were previously all managed manually. Their need for a booking tool played a big part in Dolphin’s development of the Dolphin Reservation Module which they have been using for nearly ten years now.
"Dolphin is the best fit for us"
“Dolphin brought everything together and saves us a lot of time. If we didn’t have Dolphin, we wouldn’t be able to operate as efficiently as we do now. We enjoy working with the team at Dolphin and ultimately it is the best fit for us”, said Mark Standage, Manager Automation Development.