Dubai-based destination management company, Desert Adventures, has taken bold steps on the digital transformation journey over the past two years in an effort to become more agile and flexible. Senthil Velan, director of operations for Desert Adventures, told TechRadar Pro Middle East that his first role was to use technology to expand the company's distribution network. Desert Adventures has been in the region for over 20 years and is one of the largest destination management companies in the Middle East, covering the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Oman. It was started by an entrepreneur and was taken over by Kuoni, a leading leisure travel organization in 2010, and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Thomas Cook (India) Ltd. Although some Destination Management Companies (DMCs) have advanced with technology, some still rely on email, Velan said. "My goal was to convert 90% of traditional bookings and 10% of digital bookings into 70% of digital bookings over the last two years," he said.
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"My goal was to convert 90% of traditional bookings and 10% of digital bookings into 70% of digital bookings over the last two years." Senthil Velan, COO of Desert Adventures (Image credit: Desert Adventure) The company bought a nice tour management app called TravelBox, from CodeGen in Sri Lanka, to make reservations, connect with vendors, and distribute hotel inventory to various tour operators from around the world. TravelBox was operating on-premises, but Velan got up and moved to the cloud in six to nine months without a hitch with the help of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “We don't have a large IT department to do deep vendor analysis. I selected two providers, Oracle and AWS, and looked at their capabilities, numbers, and cost of ownership. I found Oracle to be a better option in terms of cost of ownership,” he said.
The cloud absorbs irregular spikes in demand
As the company looks to expand its source markets and providers, he said IT infrastructure requirements are sure to increase. “We have to be prepared to handle demand spikes without visibility, and the cloud has allowed me to handle irregular spikes very effectively. We are seeing €1 million in savings over the next two to three years, plus increased revenue opportunities by moving to the cloud,” he said. “My sales and operations teams don't realize a system works because everything works well. This trust is priceless,” he said. With no activity for the past six months, he said, “I would still have incurred infrastructure and resource costs with on-premises, but with cloud I can seamlessly reduce usage and volumes. activity and helped me reduce costs during Covid -19. In addition, he said the opportunity was the ability to expand your business portfolio without worrying about IT infrastructure and that cloud is the "way forward" at this age. Public cloud spending is expected to increase from € 2.6 billion in 2020 to €6 billion by 2024, at an annual rate of 23% in the Middle East, according to research firm International Data Corporation Turkey and Africa “The travel and tourism industry was severely affected, like others, during Covid-19.There were no tourists in the UAE between March and July despite the first two months seeing 15% annual growth.However, we are seeing green shoots from the last quarter of the year in between from a 50% drop from the same period a year earlier.“We get bookings from Russia, the UK and the US, assuming the countries open up their airlines.Like IPL which is expected to take place in the United Arab Emirates , will prove to be a good catalyst for the Indian market. In 2020, we expect our revenue to be down about 70% from last year,” Velan said. For DMCs, who work with tour operators around the world, he said the first three and last three months accounted for 70% of business. Desert Adventures works with around 700 tour operators around the world and is a pure business-to-business player.
More automation in progress
Over the next six months, Velan said the company would offer its services to 10 destinations and that would not be possible without the "technology." Currently, the company has invested in robotic process automation (RPA), to manage the increase in its reserves for the last quarter of the year and the first quarter of next year. “We currently have three software bots running in the organization to automate repetitive tasks based on rules. One of the main goals was to automate emails, because we still get about 40% of customer quotes via email,” Velan said. It's working with a German vendor to introduce natural language processing (NLP) to interrupt emails, interact with systems, and automatically forward quotes to customers without involving its reservations staff. “The digital transformation journey started in 2017 and we are 75% digitally transformed. I am very confident in what we have achieved in the last two years, but there is more to automate,” he said. “People assume that automation means identifying technology and doing magic. Automation requires you to understand your business problem, understand the industry capabilities that are available to you, and ensure that you match your business requirements with industry and vendor capabilities. All three need to click into place, and once they're in place, he said the cost needs to make good business and economic sense. “So if all the pieces don't fall into place, sometimes you end up with a divorce and that's what happens in a lot of automation projects. I am very careful with these pieces to make sure I check the right boxes before I go on a journey,” he said.