VYRE: Company - Customer Details

Virgin Holidays

Since Virgin Holidays was founded it has gone from strength to strength. It now offers holidays to mainland USA, Canada, the Caribbean, the Far East, South Africa, the Middle East, Indian Ocean, Mauritius, New Zealand and Australia including a well-established ski programme. Virgin Holidays has become the largest and most successful transatlantic tour operator, holding the position of the market leader to the USA and Florida.

Profile

• Company: Virgin Holidays
• Industry: Travel / Tourism
• Site scope: Content Management & Digital Asset Management
• Content Management Solution: VYRE Unify

Business Overview

Virgin Holidays has become the largest and most successful transatlantic tour operator, holding the position of market leader to the USA and Florida. Since it was founded in 1985 it has gone from strength to strength, and now offers holidays to mainland USA, Canada, the Caribbean, the Far East, South Africa, the Middle East, Indian Ocean, Mauritius, New Zealand and Australia including a well-established ski programme.

The company has traditionally published its holiday information via two channels - brochures and a public-facing website. These two channels were tightly coupled, which meant the website content was frequently out of date. Furthermore, the process of creating brochures was predominantly offline and Virgin Holidays sought to bring efficiency to this process by transferring it to a web-based application.

VYRE has helped Virgin Holidays to bring these ambitions to life, and provided a web-based application where content is dynamically updated; ready to be published to the web and its brochures. In addition, as the content is now totally decoupled it can also easily be re-purposed to additional channels such as mobiles.

Furthermore, as all the information is now held in a central repository, Virgin Holidays has also been able to make it available to its call centre staff in order to improve efficiencies further and increase services to it's customers.

Challenges faced: Brochures

As the production of Virgin Holidays' travel brochures has to date been an offline process it was hence paper-based and manual. It not only required the resources of many of the company's staff but also third parties such as hotels, which supply up-to-date information on their facilities, and graphic designers, who design the actual brochure pages.

Obtaining up-to-date information from the hotels was often done through emails, Word documents or at times even hand-written notes. These were then passed on to the designers. Approving the brochure pages was also done offline and there were up to 13 to 14 cycles to the proofing process per page. This not only had cost and accuracy implications but on average the creation of a brochure would take 10 weeks.

Challenges faced: Website

Once the content of the brochures had been approved and the pages had been created, the content then had to be manually re-entered onto the company's public facing website. Not only was there a great deal of duplication of effort, but again it had time and cost implications for the company.

This long offline process of revising information also meant that updating its web content was tied in to the brochure creation cycle. Most of its brochures are updated once or twice a year, and consequently web content too was also only updated once or twice a year. Virgin Holidays found that it could not be as responsive with its web content to changes as it would have liked.

Project Objectives

With these challenges faced by the tour operator with regards to its brochure production and its web content, the objective of the project was fourfold:

• Moving the brochure production process online
• Reducing the brochure production cycle by 50%
• Increasing data accuracy of the website by removing dependency of the web content from the brochure production cycle
• Setting up a central repository for all its data so as to manage content more effectively and efficiently and to allow re-purposing of data

VYRE Solution

Virgin looked at two specific brochure creation systems as well as VYRE Unify. However, it felt that the brochure creation systems were too rigid and would not give the flexibility required in order to evolve in the future. It felt VYRE delivered a more cutting-edge and more flexible platform that could accommodate future changes easily.

Before the VYRE Unify deployment commenced, the VYRE team worked on a discovery phase with the project stakeholders at Virgin Holidays. During this phase it was established what the company needed from the new content and digital asset management system and how this could be best met. As VYRE Unify is an agile product it is tailored to the client's requirements instead of making the client's requirements fit the software.

It was established that Virgin Holidays needed an intranet for internal staff to manage its brochure production, which in turn meant managing its content and digital assets. And as third parties (hotels and graphic designers) are also involved in the brochure creation process, Virgin Holidays wanted to make its new content and digital asset management system externally available to these parties. This would not only streamline the whole process as much as possible but also cut the amount of time and effort it takes to produce its brochures.

Furthermore, as VYRE Unify allows Virgin Holidays to store all of its data, content and digital assets for its brochures in a central repository, Virgin can also easily and quickly build on and re-purpose the content and publish it to it's website and other distribution channels allowing web content to be accurate at all times.

And with VYRE Unify's comprehensive built-in workflow and approval features it brings structure to a complex and long process that involves the input of many internal stakeholders and external partners and suppliers.

Benefits

All of the company's brochures are now built and configured online using the VYRE content management and digital asset management system. In more detail, Virgin Holidays has seen the following impressive benefits to date:

• A 50% reduction in the time it takes to produce its brochures (with its bigger 300pp brochures being produced within 5 weeks when it took 10 weeks prior to the implementation of VYRE Unify)
• A reduction in the average number of page proofs from 10-13 to 2-3 giving the tour operator much more control

The brochure production and web content processes have been successfully decoupled, and there is no longer a reliance on the brochure cycle for web content. This is now completely independent, which means Virgin Holidays can be as responsive with its web content as it likes or needs to be.

As content and digital assets are held in a single repository they can now be easily re-purposed for its website and other web-based applications. All this has improved efficiencies and streamlined processes. Furthermore, system controlled processes and workflows ensure all content is verified and version controlled internally and by the source. This is of utmost importance to the tour operator from a due diligence perspective.

Hotels have been given the possibility to take ownership of maintaining their data. They can now upload images as well as leave comments informing Virgin Holidays of changes as and when they happen so that the tour operator can implement these on its website ensuring that the information on the Virgin Holidays website is up-to-date at all times.

Virgin Holidays can now also pass on almost complete brochure pages to its designers. And designers and Virgin staff can also take advantage of the workflow approval features, reducing the time it takes as well as bringing more order, structure and clarity to this process.

All this in turn also reduces the costs involved in creating its brochures and publishing this information to its website. Further developments within the system such as a page building tool have also enabled Virgin to reduce external agency spend. In the current fiscal year this equates to 50% of its brochure titles being produced in house with the intention of increasing this to 100% in 2009. In terms of ROI the tour operator is anticipating a 1:2 return on its investment over the first two years.

Furthermore, when this was an offline process it took a great amount of time out of staff's schedules. However now, as the production cycle will be greatly reduced, staff are freed up to concentrate on other aspects of their work.

Another benefit of its new intranet is that the Virgin Holidays call centres have also been given access. When dealing with clients and customers on the phone they are now able to quickly and easily access information knowing that the data is up-to-date and correct and enhancing the customers experience when dealing with the Virgin Holidays call centre.

Future

Currently the DAM tool only includes images, however, the company plans to also include video assets in subsequent phases of the VYRE Unify deployment.

Virgin Holidays also has plans to re-purpose its content to new channels besides its public-facing website. As the tour operator develops the solution further it will start to feed content to other media types such as mobile devices in 2009.