Travel company Lunn Poly will use a virtual travel assistant called
Lisa to give advice to customers on choosing and booking a
holiday
The agent technology is part of an integrated and transactional
travel portal offering online bookings being developed by Lunn Poly
and the independent software consultancy, Plato Computer
Services.
Eventually, the technology will link Lunn Poly's consumer Web site,
a customer call centre and the company's high street stores.
Lunn Poly hopes this will provide a single view of the customer
that will span all its distribution channels.
The second stage of the project went live in mid-November.
According to Colin Baker, principal project consultant at Plato,
the site is based on BEA WebLogic running on Sun Solaris.
Plato designed and built a dynamic Java-based search engine that
provides links to Lunn Poly's associated companies as well as its
own products.
"We have taken a multi-tier approach," he explained. "The front end
server handles interaction with customers while the back end takes
care of integration with legacy IT systems."
An integrated system will allow customers to view a wider range of
holidays. For example, a customer visiting www.lunnpoly.com will be
able to check the availability of packages provided by Lunn Poly's
parent, Thomson Travel Group.
The site's business logic uses Java Beans, which Jones believes
will help Lunn Poly implement cross-selling and improve the
accuracy of the site's search engine.