TRAVEL EUROPE and crossbase - a joint journey

TRAVEL EUROPE Reiseveranstaltungs GmbH, based in Stans, Austria, and its subsidiary VISIT EUROPE SA, based in Paris, are among the most successful tour operators in Europe and offer groups and individual travelers round trips, city breaks and hotel stays in Europe and the Middle East. Travel Europe employs over 100 people at its head office and a further 80 at its branches in Paris, Bastia, Prague, Budapest, Dubrovnik, Pula, Krakow, Berlin, Vienna, Funchal, Lisbon and London. Customers now come from all over Europe, North and South America and Australia.

A customized PIM and cross-media solution was implemented for TRAVEL EUROPE based on the standard crossbase software. More than 700 brand- and market-specific trips and over 10,000 bookable travel dates, which are organized by travel type and season, are imported via Excel files. Each trip is structured. This is done via main attributes such as hotel category, room type, board and price attributes such as basic price, surcharge and surcharges. In addition, over 200 excursions can be booked depending on the trip, with each excursion in turn consisting of a package of services.

The numerous text and image descriptions are updated seasonally. The texts in French, German, English and Spanish are structured according to text types such as titles, travel information and travel descriptions and are partly generated automatically from the above-mentioned attributes. The integrated image database makes it possible to organize the constantly growing number of currently approx. 20,000 images thematically. The trips are then displayed in the various market and media-specific sales channels. This includes over ten travel catalogs for different seasons, themes, group and individual trips, which are automatically typeset using Adobe InDesign. A special feature is the compression and matrix display of the granularly stored travel dates depending on the prices.

A fully automated interface to the website (XML, TYPO3) has been implemented. The API server supplies the data for the booking system to enable the electronic display and selection of trips.