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1:30 Case Study: Integration of Travel Technology
•
Jim Crawford, Senior VP of Sales
Datalex
•
Mike Larsons, Project Manager,
24K 
•
Mark 
Worldspan
SPEAKER……
 AV interference
…… loyalty network efforts that go on, on a constant basis, and what we did essentially for this organization 24K Gold Points, is we put 24K,this site, this organization together with Gold Point, so we are now one organization andtogether our task is to be a world leader in clicks and mortar where people can earn pointsfor online purchases, points after participating offline locations. So real simply you cango and purchase, go and …….somebody said they couldn’t hear…… you can go out and book on 24K, let’s say at Radison, which would make us all very happy and you can goearn points for that particular, for that transaction on 24K, then you can go to Radisonand actually earn points from the Radison hotel, so you can double and triple dip. So thatis kind of the premise of what we are doing.And again, let’s talk specifically about 24K. It was really, looking back on it, theexecutive management within Carlson Companies wanted to put something together thatwould be an electronic presence and it really is 24K is really the flagship of the CarlsonElectronic Properties and we were taught, asked by Carlson Executive Management to build a reach-out to the consumers and it really kind of co-lists the brands. And the brands is a pretty strong message to you because we use 24K, or we needed, indeveloping 24K, we needed to make sure that we were able to reach out to the other  brands, when possible use their buying power, use their knowledge and obviously it is thefocal point in 24K Goldpoints which we talked about.It really…. What did they ask us to do? They asked us to design, to enhance, facilitateand simplify consumers leisure life. So, I didn’t say that very well, but really what 24K is, is it is Web portal designed to enable your leisure life, so you can go out and you can purchase travel, you can get entertainment information and entertainment options, youcan do shopping and we need to incorporate all this into what we were developing and Iknow I am going kind of fast, I apologize, I think we should have time for questionsafterwards and if you guys need clarification as I go along, don’t hesitate to ask.So, 24K Travel, what does that encompass? Obviously air, car and hotel, we do havetravel package capabilities; we have the destination information and all of the contentneeds that you would find throughout the industry. We are also moving forward thethings that we needed taken into account. Where we needed to go was, we were going to be taking on affiliate partners or working with affiliate partners, we are going to be doingco-branding, we will have private label capabilities and then obviously we are gettinginto wireless. I think everybody is. So that is kind of the direction.So what was our charge? And this is coming from Carlson Executive Management whohappens to know travel very well. They said we needed to design and develop animplement, a world-class Web portal with basically most of the travel functionality that ison par with the competition and what that really means is that out of the gate, obviously
 
we can’t….we knew we could not compete with a lot of the players out there but wewanted to make sure that the core functionality would be competitive with what our competition is doing and obviously, as I just mentioned, as a Carlson entity, the travelcomponent needed to be pretty strong and all this you understand that’s going in andwhen you are designing it and when you are building it, it really doesn’t come home untilyou actually see it for the first time and then the sparks fly.So what did we have to do? We essentially had to deliver all of this capability, not justthe trailer piece of it but the entire thing in less than six months, and that included most of the analysis and spec work, some of which was done before the six month period and itreally goes from the beginning of this year to May 31
st
which is when we launched,which I will get into in a little bit.So we had to do a lot of the analysis work still and a lot of the spec work. We had tochoose our partners and I can talk about it a little bit but we started down the road with acouple of partners and then switched. These guys came and showed us what we could doand it was a great solution for us, so we went that way. Also we had to choosetechnologies. We had to figure out where we were going to go and how we were going todo this and what technology partners are we going to use. If you try to ask me detailedtechnology questions, I’ll get confused, but I would be willing to take the questions back and get them answered if you want to leave them with me and then leave me your emailaddress or your contact information, I will try to get those to you. And then we also hadto get through all the development work, all the testing and the implementation.And then there is other considerations that….other considerations is not really a goodthing, a good way to put it. I think if you look on the program you will see that DaveGriswold was supposed to be here, well I found out what yesterday about noon, that I wasgoing to be here, so if you see inconsistencies in here, they’re in there, trust me.So some of the things we had to take a look at is personalization. We need ….the degreeto which we want to have personalization on an on-going basis kind of drove some of thetechnology and partner quest decisions that we had and also because we were driving thisthrough a loyalty program. Really what happens is when you sign on to 24K you cancome on as a guest or you can sign in as a member. If you sign in as a member you canearn points for everything you do, so we really drove towards that.We chose Broadvision as one of our technology partners to develop our xxxxx and platform. We also did a couple of things. The presentation layer, obviously wedeveloped that in Broadvision, we developed all the specs for those; the middle layer with the business rules, we developed that and then we worked with Datalex so all thehost access goes through an interface to Datalex’s J Book-it product and one thing Ididn’t mention is there is…..I’ll get into it a little bit, but we have our back-endfulfillment partner is TRX and they’re also an Atlanta company.Some of the complicating factors that we had …………………. End of tape
 
……………..that we have has expectations that we are going to be Best World Class,Best in Class and we needed to educate them about exactly you can do in the timeframesthat we were given, which leads me into the time frame. We in essence had about sixmonths to develop everything, and that is everything, that is from the first time you startrating specs to when everything goes live and all the contracts are inked are all that kindof stuff; it was everything. And believe it or not, we did have limited financial resources.We…..there wasn’t an endless pool of capital and we had to make sure that we were being careful with the dollars that we had and we had limited people resources too.Carlson is a fairly large corporation, we have a lot of travel experience, a lot of experience in general, but we couldn’t, we didn’t have the luxury of just grabbing bodiesand throwing them at this project; we had to be pretty smart about it.So what we ended up doing is we put together a team and the team basically consisted of these: us as 24K employees, the developers, we brought E&Y as our developers. We brought in a project management consulting firm to help us out; they really saved us inmore ways than one and we asked Datalex to be our partner and they graciously agreed,thank you again. We brought in Worldspan, that’s Mark Branders, and again we thank you, and TRX as the back-end fulfillment and then were on an ISP partner and thenobviously other partners; there’s a myriad of partners. There is a couple sitting in thefront here that I am not mentioning and they’re going to throw things at me, so…What we essentially put together was a virtual team and this virtual team…this is a prettycritical component of us getting to where we needed to be because we were spread out allacross the States and we were travelling all over the place and we had development goingon in multiple places and we had partners all over the place and so really how was it thatwe brought all this together and one of the key factors in pulling this all together was theProject Management Team. The projects software project, which is pretty standard reallywas our daily guide. We used that for everything. There was really no whimsical, ‘I feellike doing this today,’ I mean they came and sat on you and said “This is what is in the plan, you have to do this today,” and that wasn’t just us, that was all our partners too andone of the things that really was amazing, looking back, is that we had to put a lot of rigor and discipline in this whole thing and it is really, really sticking to the methodology thatwe had, is what brought us through in the time frame that we needed.We were able to launch successfully on 5.31 on time and on budget. Right now, and thatwas the soft launch, we really didn’t do any advertising it was more a kind of a testingtime frame, our hard launch was 9.5 and that is when our media blitz started, though itwas kind of soft at first, you might see some ads out there and you will see today and National Geographic and other magazines and publications, and so far the response has been phenomenal. I know I have skipped a lot of things here and went right fromdevelopment into launch, but we have kind of a limited time frame, so if you havequestions, keep them and at the end hopefully we can get to them.Some of the success drivers that we found when working this project through is, teamwork is critical. We had sub-teams and then we had bigger teams and the high-poweredteams really made this thing fly. The co-ordination effort put together by the Project
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