Case Studies \ Citi Discounts
Cordero Salketing Ltd required a turnkey solution to intermediate between leisure businesses and travel facilitators. Icreon implemented this concept by developing CitiDiscounts.com - a dynamic Web-enabled business process automation solution. It brings together city-based leisure businesses and travel facilitators who book tours for their customers. Providing discounts offered by leisure businesses to travel facilitators, the solution increases sales for these service providers, while offering greater value for money to travelers. Citidiscounts.com fosters online selling of services offered by leisure businesses to travelers through travel facilitators. Acting as the link between leisure businesses, travel facilitators and travelers, it assists businesses in reaching out to a large and global customer base with greater prospects of increased sales for travel facilitators & leisure businesses.
Customer Profile
Cordero Salketing Ltd. is a Dublin based organization registered in the Republic of Ireland. The organization deals in providing innovative travel services and is engaged in charitable funding for various institutions, worldwide.
Business Requirement
Cordero Salketing, conceived the idea of developing an online business process automation solution to enable travel facilitators and leisure businesses to expand their horizons by showcasing their services through CitiDiscounts.com, thereby increasing their sales figures. Owners of restaurants, recreational places, museums, and other such places, based in different cities and countries, could list their offers and discounts through this business process automation system. Travel agents, hotels and airlines reservation providers would be able to offer these discounts to their customers, while booking tours for them. The solution required to communicate discount offers to travel facilitators while maintaining updated discount lists for different cities and countries.
Enterprise Computing for Effective Manageability of Operations
Benefits
- Seamless access to discount lists and offers
- Easily deployable desktop version for offline travel facilitators
- Proactive front-end management through a dynamic administrator module
- Advanced reporting tools for business status monitoring
Technologies used in developing this application are:
Our client conceptualized the idea to provide a common platform for leisure businesses and travel facilitators to offer discounted services to tourists.
A business such as, a restaurant would like to have more customers visiting them, and to achieve this, it offers attractive discounts and schemes to entice such customers. However, as much as the restaurant intends to showcase these offers, it is unable to immediately inform visiting tourists about its discounts offers. Conversely, tourists do not know about the discounts offered by the restaurant, so they may not avail the offer on their visit to that particular city. CitiDiscounts.com required to bridge this gap between the tourists and leisure businesses.
Striving to offer cost-efficient and useful services, Cordero Salketing Ltd. teamed with Icreon to develop a dynamic Web-enabled solution to implement this unique marketing concept.
Icreon realized that the prime objective behind CitiDiscounts was to work out a system of effective communication between travel service providers including but not limited to leisure businesses and travel facilitators. The system had to manage city agents, who would coordinate with leisure businesses to obtain the latest discount offers provided, in different cities. These discount offers would be made available to travel facilitators once they register for the service through CitiDiscounts.com
We developed two modules for CitiDiscounts:
Super Administrator (SA) :
This module allows the super administrator (SA) to manage city agents and discount lists for various cities and business categories. The SA can add cities and business categories, such as, restaurants, hotels, museums, and nightclubs, covered by CitiDiscounts. The accounts for travel facilitators who register for the CitiDiscounts service needs to be activated by the SA, through this module. In addition, the SA can modify specifications of travel facilitators and view reports through the Super Administrator module.
City Agents :
This module allows city agents to list their offers on CitiDiscounts. A city agent contacts the leisure businesses and travel facilitators to inform them about the CitiDiscounts service. In case, the leisure businesses agree to advertise their services on CitiDiscounts, they can enroll for the service. The City Agents module constitutes sub-modules, which allow city agents to add discounts, show the expiry status of the discount and view reports displaying the status of discount providers.
In addition, Citidiscounts.com allows travel facilitators to register for its services. The services are available for both online and offline travel facilitators. We developed an application that the offline travel facilitators could download on their desktop. This application downloads updated discount lists from the CitiDiscounts. Offline travel facilitators can offer the discounts mentioned in this list to their customers. The online travel facilitator can simply download the discount lists through e-mail.
CitiDiscounts.com has been developed on ASP 3.0 with SQL Server 2000 as the back-end. The following figure displays the technology architecture for CitiDiscounts.
CitiDiscounts.com is a unique concept based on a thoughtful marketing strategy. Catering to the needs of businesses to boost up their sales, the solution provides them an effective alternate to market their services, without incurring extra costs on marketing. Its benefits extend to travel facilitators, who gain an edge in competition, by offering discounts to their customers, not to forget the customers or tourists who receive higher value for money, while traveling. As an automation solution, driven by business needs, CitiDiscounts.com, stands to implement Cordero Salketing's marketing strategy, effectively.
As Mr. Alex Kiernan, MD, Cordero Salketing Ltd, states - "To be perfectly honest, I have never experienced anything like what it has been like to work with Icreon. In Today's world of parasite software developers waiting to take your money rather than build your dream, Icreon is a breath of fresh mountain air."
