We focus every day on improving the quality of the way we deal with agencies
Interview with Jorge Zamora, CEO of Servivuelo
We recently had the pleasure of meeting Jorge Zamora, CEO of Servivuelo, the largest flight consolidator in the Spanish market. He talked to us about his background in technology, and how technological innovation has contributed to the company’s growth by improving the booking experience and providing new features. We also discuss the company’s expansion into new sectors, such as hotel sales.
Jorge, how did you come to work in the travel industry, and what made you decide to found Servivuelo?
Before entering the travel world, I spent several years working in various technological sectors, particularly in the production of hardware for video games. It was entirely by chance that my wife and I decided to start something new, and created a travel agency. This change was basically motivated by our passion for travelling, so we started the business without having any conception of what Servivuelo has become today.
However, the lack of technology in the sector quickly caught my attention. For example, the first management program that we installed in the travel agency in 2003 worked on MS-DOS, when we had been developing software for Windows for 6 years by then. This gave me the opportunity to develop several applications and start supporting some non-IATA agencies so that they could issue airline tickets.
When this line of business began to grow, we contracted software to make automatic reservations, and thus we began to lay the foundations of what is now Servivuelo. However, it was in 2007 that we made a substantial leap by developing our own reservation platform.
How would you describe your business model?
We specialise in air distribution, and our clients are basically agencies (so, at a certain point, we decided not to contract with other types of companies, such as couriers or parcel services).
To do this, we have a B2B reservation platform, developed entirely by us, which our agencies can access for free. To generate revenues, we negotiate rates with the airlines, which we transfer directly to the agencies with no mark-up, applying, with absolute transparency, a fee per ticket issued depending on the destination (which we segment into national, European, and intercontinental flights).
What is the difference between a flight consolidator like you and a GDS (Global Distribution System)?
A GDS provides access to the inventory of companies, and the essential features to make reservations, changes, etc. Servivuelo uses the services provided by the GDS and adapts them in order to simplify their use, and improve efficiency when booking. It also passes on to agencies the fee agreements reached with airlines, allows them to issue tickets without being IATA-affiliated, and provides agencies with advice and support for reservations. The GDS is an essential partner for the consolidator.
What is Servivuelo’s competitive advantage?
We are, firstly, IATA-affiliated for issuing tickets, and secondly, have a global sales volume that allows us to be really competitive. This value proposition is interesting both for agencies that are too small for IATA-affiliation (and therefore can’t issue their own tickets), as well as for agencies of a certain size that consider themselves self-sufficient. An example might be an agency that has a sufficiently high volume of business to consider acquiring an IATA licence for issuing Latin American tickets. It is highly probable that, even though they are competitive in this market, they wouldn’t get the same prices every time they had to issue tickets to North America, Asia or Africa. We, on the other hand, have a large volume of sales globally.
In addition, we also cover all air product needs, working with published fares, negotiated fares for ethnic traffic, tour operator rates, group fares, etc. That’s why many IATA-affiliated agencies also work with us, using IATA in regions where they are strong, and using our rates for the rest (especially for long-haul flights).
What are your strongest markets?
We have an IATA licence for Spain and Portugal. As 95% of what we produce are flights to or from Spain, we get the most competitive rates through the Spanish IATA. That said, more and more companies tend to consolidate fares at the European level, so that nowadays the difference between having a Spanish, Italian, Portuguese or German IATA licence is increasingly irrelevant.
Although your core business is flights, you are also entering the bed consolidation market. What led you to that decision?
Basically because, over the last two and a half years, the agencies began to ask for more services, and this led us to start working with hotel sales. However, for the moment, we don’t have direct links with hotels although we are connected to several bed banks.
Clearly, hotel sales and the development of hotel sales is lower, because the margins at the hotel delivery level when you are working through these bed banks mean that we don’t have such an attractive differential as we do in the air. Obviously, the competition is much greater in this market, and our own suppliers are also our competitors.
What other projects are you developing in your company in order to continue offering consumers an interesting value proposition in an increasingly competitive market?
Basically we focus every day on improving the quality of the way we deal with agencies. In fact, last year we decided to renew our platform so that our client agencies had a better booking experience and we could offer them more features. We changed the whole platform to make it better adapted to mobile devices, with improved technology that makes searching faster and more agile, and which allows us to develop more features for the agencies.
As we don’t sell to the end customer, when I ask myself what can be done to improve sales, all I can do is try to get my agency customers to sell more. For this I provide tools that allow them to improve sales and attract more customers. For example, we have an application for mobile devices called Booking365, which allows agencies to keep passengers informed about every aspect of their reservation.
So, when a passenger buys a ticket at the travel agency, if it has been booked using the Servivuelo platform, the passenger will be given a voucher with the flight itinerary. This document has a QR code that can be scanned with the passenger’s smartphone after downloading the app. When the reservation is scanned, an alert is added to the smartphone calendar that notifies the passenger a few hours before the flight departure. Also, notifications are sent from our platform indicating any changes in the reservation (such as schedules, flight cancellations, etc.), plus, on the day of the flight, passengers are advised when boarding opens and sent the gate number.
Additionally, in December of last year we launched Servivuelo Plus, a loyalty program that rewards our agencies for working with Servivuelo. We offer a small credit for every ticket issued, which the travel agent can accumulate and exchange for an Amazon gift voucher.
Originally published at www.kantox.com on May 24, 2018.
