Travel Insured

Travel Insured International, one of the most recognized leaders in the travel insurance industry, offers comprehensive single and group travel insurance plans and many other types of travel related insurance.  Their products are sold domestically on their web site, through phone and mail orders, by travel agents, and additional channels, such as bank credit cards and commonly used travel web sites.

The Challenge

Travel Insured was facing a problem encountered by many companies. Their web site and back end systems were becoming outdated and more unwieldy every day. The current site was an antiquated ASP application that required significant manual modifications each time details changed regarding the various travel products available for sale.

Behind the scenes, there were disconnected systems and manual processes that limited business insight and increased the chance for human error. Daily sales from the TI web site were only available after nightly downloads to the main reporting database thereby preventing any real-time business intelligence. Data coming into Travel Insured’s systems from partners in the travel industry was received via multiple layouts and file types and required manual loading into the appropriate databases by a technical resource.

To address these issues and increase business and technical efficiency, Travel Insured needed to consolidate and automate both their user facing and back end systems. Travel Insured chose Tallan to assist them with this large-scale effort.

The Solution

Two key deliverables, designed and developed by Tallan, as part of the work done for Travel Insured were new public-facing and partner-facing web sites. The first site included a full redesign and update of TravelInsured.com. Travel Insured’s customer-facing web site now allows visitors to price and purchase travel insurance online and allows customers to manage claims by giving them the ability to file an online notification of a pending insurance claim, download all necessary claim documents, and check on a claim’s status. The second site is a secured site for Travel Insured travel agency partners. This site allows partners to quote and purchase travel insurance for their customers directly through the web site.

Driving the content on both of these sites is a new internal, administrative desktop application that eliminates the manual processes required to setup and update products and prices on the internet and extranet sites. All product and sales data was moved to a centralized SQL Server database and is accessed via the desktop application. This gives Travel Insured the ability to define the presentation of products for sales. Once product data is published from the client application, the updates are immediately and dynamically displayed on both the customer and partner web sites.

In addition to managing products on the web sites, the client application provides additional back office capabilities. These capabilities include providing Travel Insured associates a place to enter sales received over the phone or through the mail, recall agency commissions, pay agency and underwriter commissions, manage inventory, and electronically reconcile the Travel Insured checking account through automated processing of an electronic file received from the bank.

Finally, to automate the manual process of receiving and processing electronic sales feeds from Travel Insured partners and to build for expansion in the future, Tallan designed and implemented a new volume sales web service. This web service standardizes and exposes the file format that Travel Insured expects to receive from clients when clients transmit daily volume sales data. This eliminates the multiple file formats previously received from current partners and gives Travel Insured the scalability they need to attempt to form partnerships with larger travel providers in the future.

One of the main reasons that Travel Insured chose Tallan over other consulting companies was Tallan’s unique ability to provide a complete solution utilizing Microsoft technologies, including client, web, and integration applications. Tallan not only provided the technical resources to develop the applications and the management resources to guide the project to completion; Tallan also designed the infrastructure of the backend database environment, which included recommending the hardware and infrastructure design. And, when the co-location facility did not have the knowledge to setup the infrastructure designed by Tallan, Tallan resources physically traveled to the offsite location, setup the environment, and ensured that it was configured correctly.

Between management, design, development, infrastructure, and training Tallan truly provided a complete solution and helped transition a company with limited technical knowledge to a self-sufficient technical organization running a state-of-the-art Microsoft eCommerce solution.

The Results

Travel Insured saw sales increase 30% in the year following release of the new systems.