Case Study - Holiday Extras

About

Holiday Extras is among the United Kingdom’s travel industry market leaders, offering full customer travel experience such as bookings of airplane tickets, hotels and parking, airport lounges, airport transfers by rail and coach, car hire and holiday insurance packages.

The company’s leading booking platform helps over seven million travelers a year achieve their holiday goals with a wide choice of products and unbeatable prices. With its award-winning reputation, Holiday Extras has developed a collaboration network with over 8000 travel agents and has 4000 exclusive partnership agreements (including AA, TUI, Thomas Cook, British Airways, Saga Holidays, easyJet among others).

Business Case

Holiday Extras saw a large increase in profits and a wide expansion across Europe in 2011. It became evident that this growth required a transition from reconciling in complex spreadsheets to establishing a modern technological platform that would bring both efficiency and best practices to the organization.

Soon after, it was the perfect time to implement a comprehensive reconciliation tool to complement their new financial system. Advanced Business Solutions – a long-time ReconArt partner in the UK – stepped in with a ReconArt recommendation.

After seeing ReconArt’s capabilities and ease of use, Holiday Extras looked no further. One of the biggest advantages of the system was the ability to match automatically thousands of invoices from hundreds of vendors on a daily basis.

We were very happy that ReconArt could largely do what we needed out-of-the-box…ReconArt was easily able to get around the complexities of the travel industry.

Benefits

The system is very intuitive and user-friendly. We are able to do many of the tasks by ourselves and don’t have to ask support team to get involved. But when we do, we always receive quick responses.

Having completed a smooth ReconArt implementation and training period, Holiday Extras saw efficiencies across the entire reconciliation process:

• ReconArt’s powerful data enrichment functionality allowed for the standardization of data sources and formats on import, specifically the invoices received from suppliers in large volumes and number of different file formats.
• ReconArt’s flexible Match Rules allowed business users to define their own custom business logic in one-to-one and one-to-many relationships
• ReconArt’s dynamic Exception management tools allowed for the accurate and fully auditable identification and resolution of small variances and legitimate exceptions.
• ReconArt’s Automation technology allowed it to handle all the repetitive tasks around cleaning up data, clearing matched items, categorizing exceptions, and generating reports, thus freeing up valuable time for the team.

Following the initial launch of the system, business users were able to manage all new suppliers’ formats and the entire reconciliation process modifications on their own. Now Holiday Extras use the latest available version of ReconArt™ to benefit from the latest functionality and performance improvements in the platform.