Online Booking System

Situation

Rocky Mountaineer Vacations (RMV) is a family owned British Columbia business and as part of the Armstrong Group provides unique Canadain train trips and vacation packages across Canada. RMV was recently voted as one of 50 Best Employers in Canada 2007 and was also the winner of the World Travel Awards' "World's Leading Travel Experience by Train" two years in a row (2005 & 2006). It has expanded from a small entrepreneurial business to one of Canada's leading tourism providers.

Business Challenge

In order to expand the access channel through ebusiness, RMV was looking to enhance and streamline the business functionality of its online booking capability from the back office Protour Reservation System, extending beyond what was implemented in 2006 with more options and flexibiltiy.

Critical to the projects successful business outcome was the need to gather clear requirements and have smooth coordination and management of both internal resources and an outside vendor.

Solution

A five-month project effort followed to build this web based extension of their existing Whistler Mountaineer Online system. It comprised of an initial requirements definintion phase, followed by design and development, testing and implementation.

The enhancements now provide the customer with the ability to check availability and confirm their desired booking for hotels and activities in both Whistler and Vancouver in combination twith the standard booking of full vacation packages and train trips. Call center staff at RMV can now also log in to the system to perform the booking on behalf of phone-in customers, simplifying the booking process compared to using the Protour Reservation System directly.

Results

The end result based on the feedback from staff members who assisted in the load test activities were that the system is intuitive, easy to follow and very user friendly. Most of the participants were not neccessarily familiar with this online booking system so they were representative of what the customer would experience with this new online booking solution.

KLR represented the client's interest in this collaborative project with TELUS, providing project management specialist expertise and experience from the development phase through to implementation. Managing all of the activities associated with the project, including status review, project documentation, change management, coordinating and compliance with schedule and completing deliverables according to RMV's business needs.

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