On technologies in place
Kuoni Travels is a 100-year-old company in the travel space. It is a dominant player in the Indian outbound and business travel segment. IT implementations in last two years have been mainly in-house because travel is a niche industry and, hence, ERP players do not have solutions specific for our vertical. We have developed front office solutions for our four business entities- inbound, outbound, business travel and visa facilitation.

On challenges
We continue to grow through acquisitions. So when you acquire a company, you acquire its people, its culture and its IT. You end up having multiple systems and multiple platforms. You have to consolidate them and make them homogeneous. That is a daunting task. The challenge becomes more pronounced because in our industry IT has not played a substantially big role. We want to use IT for productivity improvement and market differentiation. That is where we feel we can make IT the key driver over the next three-four years.

On reaching the suppliers
We have gone in for HR solutions from Polaris. In a service industry, people matter the most and hence software that touches the people is used. It is also a strategic software for us. We have also acquired a small IT business called Traveljini. They had a hotel-booking engine called 'Resnet', which we are integrating with our business. Going forward, we intend to bring an enterprise wide change by strategically using IT down the line.

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