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PIM and catalog production in use at the tour operator TRAVEL EUROPE

Stans, 17/04/2015: TRAVEL EUROPE Reiseveranstaltungs GmbH, based in Stans/Austria, and its subsidiary VISIT EUROPE SA, based in Paris, are among the most successful travel agents in Europe, offering groups and individuals tours, city breaks and hotel stays in Europe and the Middle East. TRAVEL EUROPE employs more than 100 members of staff at its head office in Stans/Austria and another 80 in its offices in Paris, Bastia (Corsica), Prague, Budapest, Dubrovnik, Pula, Krakow, Berlin, Vienna, Funchal (Madeira), Lisbon and London. TRAVEL EUROPE now has customers throughout Europe, North and South America and Australia.

For trip management, automated catalog production and data provision for its website and booking system, TRAVEL EUROPE opted for the PIM, MAM and cross-media solution from crossbase.

Central functions of the solution

Excel import interface and data maintenance

TRAVEL EUROPE is using the PIM, MAM and cross-media solution to maintain travel information. More than 700 brand- and market-specific trips plus over 10 000 bookable travel dates, which are organized by destination, type of trip and season, are imported using Excel files. Each trip is described structured by main attributes such as hotel category, room type, board type etc., and price attributes, such as basic prices, surcharges and supplements. Depending on the trip, more than 200 excursions can also be booked, each one in turn made up of a package of services.

The huge number of text- and image-based descriptions is updated every season. The texts in French, German, English and Spanish are structured by text type, e.g. title, trip information and descriptions and are sometimes generated automatically from the aforementioned attributes. The integrated image database allows the ever-growing number of images (currently around 20 000) to be organized by subject.

All-round solution – generating a large number of different print publications and electronic provision of data from one database

The trips are then depicted in various market- and media-specific sales channels, including more than 10 catalogs for different seasons, themes, group and individual travel, which are automatically layouted using Adobe InDesign. The challenge here was to compress and depict in matrices, based on price, the trip dates stored in detail.

By the end of 2014, the Visit Europe and Visit France summer catalogs (around 250 pages in total) had been produced using databases for the first time. Around 70% had been produced automatically, mainly using 5 layout templates and 20 table templates. In terms of graphics, the pages are very complex, containing around 3000 trip dates, around 1200 images and more than 5000 texts. Extensive use was also made of the function to save the layouts changed by hand – to save external graphics costs and minimize layout corrections for reprints.

A fully automatic interface to the website (XML, Typo3) and booking system (database interface) was also implemented to allow trips to be selected and depicted electronically.