Is It Time for Travelforce?

Summary

Salesforce, a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) suite of services, is arguably the world’s most popular CRM platform for businesses. With its many modules, Salesforce delivers tools to provide better business results: improved marketing and sales effectiveness, higher customer satisfaction and enhanced customer experiences. Given its success worldwide (100,000 customers and 5,000,000 users), it may be interesting to envision what a similar approach to the unique business of travel distribution might look like using a Salesforce-like product designed just for travel agencies (TAs) and travel management companies (TMCs).

Granted, providing this suite of services supporting travel agency activities has long been the function of global distribution systems (GDSs) in support of the TA/TMC community. However, due to Internet-enabled direct connectivity, the GDS role continues to change where the GDS is just one of many sources of content. This change could result in the provisioning of core services moving from the GDS to the TMC/TA. In this analysis we will address the components and implications of a hypothetical “Travelforce.”