For the truly discerning traveller, Travelpack
offers the holiday arrangements that suit your needs. Our aim is to
offer you true flexibility - the easy way, with just one stop shopping
at great prices whether it’s a Weekend Break, a Multi-centre holiday,
an Escorted Tour, Rail Tour, a Motorhome holiday, Adventure holidays,
a Self/Drive Tour, a Cruise or just a flight to visit friends and
relatives.
Travelpack is a well-respected and long established
tour operator. For your financial security we are fully bonded Air
Tour Operator License (ATOL 2866) by the Civil Aviation Authority.
Travelpack are also members of the Association of British Travel
Agents (ABTA), members of the International Air Transport Association
(IATA) and the Pacific- Asia Travel Association, UK (PATA-UK).
Sometimes, however, technology can drive a business in
the most rewarding way. Two years ago, Travelpack, a UK-based provider
of specialist holidays to India, moved most of its data entry and
accounting functions to offices in Goa. It set up an IP-based virtual
private network to handle data transfer.
"The downside was rapidly escalating phone bills," explains Travelpack's
joint managing director and IT director Tim Bushell. "Wages may be lower
in India, but telecom costs are not."
On the recommendation of IP Integration - the company that set up the
VPN, Bushell looked into voice over IP, which provides voice calls at
local internet access rates. Travelpack adopted eight-port,
Linux-based Bosanova IP telephony gateways from BOSCom to provide eight
VoIP lines between Harrow and
Goa, and internet links from its three other Indian offices. The cost
was less than £5,000. "As we already had 1mbps leased-line links to our
UK and Indian ISPs, our voice call tariff costs were nil," says Bushell.
Voice quality is good, even at peak times, although there is a fall-back
to the public switched telephone network should quality drop. Travelpack
decided it was good enough for external use too, and took advantage of
the time difference to route early-morning customer calls from the UK to
staff in India.
"Without IP telephony, our monthly telephone bills between the UK and
India would top £100,000 a month," Bushell says. "We built this as a way
of communicating with 15 or 20 internal staff in Goa.
There was not a great deal of pressure for it to work, and it did not
involve much expenditure. So if it did not work, we could have just
chalked it up to experience. But it performed way beyond what
we expected. "We have just bought a new building in India, capable of
taking up to 1,000 staff, primarily because we can see the cost savings
in taking calls over there.
"It is almost as if the technology has opened up the business, which is
a bit bizarre." Somewhere, deep down, perhaps this is what every IT
director is hoping for: a miraculous business transformation from
simple, low-cost technology. The difference today is that we no longer
expect it.
Case Studies
Travelpack