Zurich/Berlin – Since mid-December 2016 Bentour Reisen has also migrated its dynamic production environment completely to the state-of-the art OTDS data standard. As a result BENX is the third dynamic tour operator whose data is based by a 100 percent on the Open Travel Data Standard. More efficient production cycles as well as a significantly increased variety of offers are instantly noticable consequences from this transition.
Deniz Ugur, technology-oriented CEO of Bentour Reisen, has consistently pushed forward the migration to OTDS, in order to no longer be reliant on inefficient data formats such as INFX, KATI and Datamix for the production of his travels. „For us gradually deactivation of legacy data formats equals pure money: We save more than 100.000 Euro per year in hardware and operational costs“, Ugur calculates. „We rather invest this money into direct interfaces to airlines, hotel bed banks, and Incoming-agencies“, Ugur adds.
The installation of an OTDS-Players by the company Bewotec in 2014 was Bentour’s first step into the world of new data standards. Bewotec also produces the OTDS for data deliveries to distribution systems with central caches. Traveltainment processes OTDS-data from Bentour exports since 2014. By integrating BENX, Bentour’s migration to the new standard has been completed at Traveltainment. In October 2015 Travel-IT started pulling travel data from Bentour’s OTDS-Player for its consultation system LMplus.
Ultimatively Bentour now scores in all major distribution systems as well as on its own website with a significantly higher data quality than before OTDS: In more than 90 percent of all cases prices remain stable during the search and booking process, approximately 95 percent of all trips are available. In addition the indication of alternative flight times made possible by OTDS is an important mean in order to focus the customer’s interest on a specific travel offer and in the long run to increase the look-to-book ratio.
As the spreading of the open standard is an vital issue to Deniz Ugur, he also contributes by serving the OTDS association as a member of the board since November 2014.