Dan Langevin, Vice-President of Sales & Marketing, Softvoyage
Softvoyage’s technology solutions for the travel industry include tools that keep travel agencies competitive with major players spending millions of dollars on tech product development, says Softvoyage’s Vice-President of Sales & Marketing, Dan Langevin in this edition of Friday 5.
1. As a travel technology company, what is your biggest challenge?
“As we all know, the travel business can be complicated at times. At Softvoyage, we have over 100 different interfaces with suppliers, back office systems, airlines, etc. At times, we struggle to keeps things simple. We have a lot of very smart people with tremendous ideas but sometimes you need to really focus on the customers’ requirements, finish the project and keep things simple and also focus on the long-term health of the structure.”
2. We have been hearing the term ‘personalization’ a lot in the past 12 months. What is Softvoyage doing in this area?
“You are right, in my opinion, personalization is extremely important. Softvoyage’s solution was to develop Tripbook, which is a post-booking tool agents can send to their customers. Once the booking is complete, the idea is to send a very professional webpage where customers can book seats, apply payment, room upgrades, private transfers, etc. The large companies, like Hilton for example, are doing a fantastic job post-booking to keep the customer engaged and we feel this tool makes the travel agency community competitive with the larger companies out there who spend millions and millions in development.”
3. How do you decide ‘What’s next’?
“The development at Softvoyage is driven by our customers’ requirements. Our customers are living and selling travel every minute of every day. They help us decide on what we should do next. The most amazing things is, it never ends. There are always new applications we can use, more tools to develop, more enhancements to be implemented. Fully 100% of our customers are in the travel business, however we have yet to see two that operate the same. Fascinating isn’t it?
4. Do you use external or out-of-country development companies to help you develop these applications?
“No, we do not. We are 100% made in Canada. We feel it is important to have full control and to give jobs to Canadians. Canada happens to have a large pool of very gifted developers. We are lucky.”
5. As we end 2017, what do you see that’s exciting for 2018 on the technology side?
“Other than the mobile curve continuing to grow with more and more bookings, we see massive upgrades in IT infrastructure to respond quicker to queries, and continue to provide better and better security as well better and faster analytical tools helping our customer to market more efficiently.”
