How A Travel Agency Became A BPO
By AAINA

These days it’s quite common to see change in work culture and environment. Are we really ready for that change and is it good ?  That is a question many managers and employees ask themselves.   This is about a company, which used to be known as ebookers, then Tecnovate, then Cendant, and currently goes under the name of  Travelport. There is news in the market that the company is for sale again.

 I guess no body has tried to figure out the reason that why the company is no longer a profitable organization. A company which has grown from 30 to 1500(approx) in close to 4 years is put up for sale time and time again.  The reason is in their policy changes, which have come into effect after it was taken over by Tecnovate in Sep`05. The company which used to be run as travel agency and which used to believe in sharing its profit with its employees by giving them huge incentives on basis of their performance is a BPO now, which operates on structured, soulless SLA (Service level agreement). 

There is nothing wrong in changing the policies of the organization if it is helping in its growth.  In this case,  it has paid no dividends.  Within the next few months they have a plan to introduce Austin which is basically a system where an entire booking can be made on the website. As a travel agent, I can definitely tell you that this is not good for customer as well as employees. Agents will no longer be using CDS (Centralized Reservation System). The employees would be working on website, and so they would be having access to same kind of tools which each customer will have. I believe that they would become ‘order takers’ not ‘order makers’. It would no longer be a skill-based process. Just because of this change in policy,  the company has lost many of its skilled employees who used to generate huge revenues (Appx Rs 6,80,000.00 per agent).  These ex-employees used to give an average profit of 8000.00 pounds. The figure is quite significant because loosing 10 agents means a loss of 70 lakh in a month. On top of that they have to hire new people to take their place, which means an extra Rs 1,00,000.00 as those people won’t be productive for the first few months. I am not able to see the growth for the company because of this change in policy. In the end, I would summarize the Company  lost its identity because of failure of different managements.

(UK-based Ebookers lost many skilled employees because it stopped the practice of giving incentives and thus sharing profits with employees.  What the figures were in 2005 and later give the reasons why many employees left.

In Dec, 2005

Target used to be around 7000-8000 pounds
No qualifiers
On every hotel booking bonus of Rs 200, car hire Rs 150 and Insurance Rs 150
They used to have slab for targets.
  5500  pounds - Rs 4000
  6000              - Rs 6000
  6500              - Rs 8000
  7000              - Rs 10,000
   Slab goes on
After 11000 for every 500 pounds Rs 2000

                           
Now (2007),the situation is

Target is 6500-7500 pounds (no change)
Too many qualifiers like conversion, quality, and rejection. And if you are not able to 
qualify even one of the parameter you are denied any incentives.
The slab had been reduced and is
       5500 pounds - Rs 1500
       6000             - Rs 2000
       6500             - Rs 2500
       7000             - Rs 3000
       7500             - Rs 3500
       8000             - Rs 4000
The same goes till 12000 and after that for every 500 pounds Rs 1000.00
If loss is more then 1% you are out of incentives i.e If you have made 10000 pounds and the loss is 100 pounds ……You are out of incentives. Basically means getting  99% accuracy
You still get the same amount of bonuses of Rs. 200 for hotel , for car Rs 150 and Insurance Rs 100 and so on.

From March, 2007 incentive structure would be further revised.  It would be fixed incentive of  Rs 4500.00  only after you achieve your specified targets
)