Firstly I’d like to take this opportunity to wish you a very Happy New Year and I sincerely hope that you all managed to have a restful and enjoyable festive break with your loved ones, despite the challenging times and changes in restrictions that we all experienced so close to Christmas.

It’s fair to say that the end of the year was again a very different experience for us, usually, we are extremely busy in October and November getting ready to down tools mid-December and not touch any development in preparation for our customers precious January peaks period. For many of you, we worked 7 days a week and on transition weekend many of our development teams did 24-hour shifts to achieve a successful AWS migration pre Christmas. This was a monumental achievement for Traveltek and we couldn’t have completed this without the terrific support from you our customers and our dedicated development team. All Traveltek clients are now fully hosted in the cloud and although there have been some challenges along the way, we are really delighted with how the transition has gone.

Sadly news of the new Covid19 strain has certainly dampened the positivity and improved booking levels that we were starting to see in December 2020. From a personal perspective, the news of soaring rates is certainly not a surprise as we are now seeing the effects of the lockdown being lifted early December and I’m sure this trajectory will continue for another 6 weeks as we see the effects of Christmas too. The January period has so far been a bit like a damp party popper, but fortunately, the light at the end of the tunnel is starting to shine. Its been truly amazing to see and hear news of the vaccination programme and although I’m sure that the next few months will continue to be tough for us all, there will be an end to this.

During December we had to make difficult resource decisions and as a business, we solely focused on AWS, this did mean that some maintenance and support jobs (not critical) were paused. Our main focus in January is to ensure optimum system uptime and customer support so you can trade as well as possible, we have therefore put all product development on hold for January.

The long-awaited product roadmap had to be paused for us last year, due to all our resources focusing on our customers and AWS. I’m pleased to share with you, that we have already kicked off conversations around the enhancements we plan to make on our API and core products this year and next. We plan to be in a position to share this with you in March, so we just ask for some time in the next few weeks to have some headspace for us to work through this. We have also made the decision to invest in a Product Manager who will join us reporting to Leanne Woolvine as part of this rebuild and we hope to have this role in place in Q1.

This month we have just completed an integration with Interhome, so please contact your Account Manager if you would like more details on their product. In the coming weeks, we will also complete an integration with Virgin voyages and for our UK clients new tour operator Biblio Travel. Tracy Sharp our Head of Commercial is also working with all payment gateway providers to ensure we will achieve the dates required for 3dv2 upgrades in 2021.

Our focus on our data product will also commence now AWS has been completed and we will be in touch shortly on when our advanced reporting and data insights can be shared with you all. We will also be running some lunch and learns through our Account Management teams in Q1 sharing some information on how RPA could benefit your business.

Lastly, I’d like to invite all our customer to complete an NPS survey. We started this in January 2020 and ran the survey again in June 2020, it really is valuable feedback and I personally read and respond to all feedback where necessary, which is also shared with our entire company and our board. Please take the time to complete this survey as this really helps us on our mission to constantly improve our customer service.

If you have any questions about anything mentioned in this month’s Tektalk, please do not hesitate to contact your Account Manager who will be happy to help.

As always, thank you for your continued support and from us all at Traveltek, we wish you a very successful, positive and healthy 2021.

Yours sincerely,

Cressida Sergeant