Company news
17/01/2007
James Villa Holidays upgrades e-commerce site in time for peak booking period
17 January 2007: TelecityRedbus to provide the power, space, resilience & redundancy needed to support the business’s offline sales & e-commerce platforms
James Villas Holidays, one of the UK’s leading travel companies, has migrated the hosting of its e-commerce site and call centre operation from its existing colocation partner to one of TelecityRedbus’ London data centres. The need for additional space and power prompted the move, which has been completed in time for the tour operator’s peak booking period in January and February.
In addition to rack space, TelecityRedbus is hosting the company’s new VoIP call manager platform and providing the network resilience and redundancy, via its back-up and IP Mulithome services, needed to support this predicted peak in traffic, and the company’s competitive growth targets for 2007.
In 2006 the James Villa Holidays website generated a significant percentage of the company’s revenues, receiving thousands of visits per hour, demonstrating the importance of high-availability web access to the overall success of the business. The remaining bookings were taken via the company’s 25-agent call centre and its retail outlet in the Bluewater Shopping Centre in Kent.
Richard Moger, IT Director at James Villas, said: “At James Villa Holidays we are constantly refining and improving the network infrastructure and sales processes to give us increased performance, improved customer service options, and higher systems resilience. To enable us to facilitate these infrastructure developments we had a requirement for more data centre rack space to house the extra kit, and felt it was time to re-evaluate our hosting requirements.”
As part of this investment, James Villa Holidays has purchased an IP-based PBX telephony system, which is hosted at the Maidstone head office and mirrored at docklands via a 100MB Ethernet connection. This has enabled the company to leverage the benefits of being on a single network, reduce operational overheads and open up flexible working options to its employees. It has also enabled the integration of the company’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution with its telephony system to facilitate sophisticated reporting metrics such as the conversion of calls to sales, average cost per customer and detailed breakdown of individual sales team performances, for example.
Adriaan Oosthoek, TelecityRedbus UK Managing Director said: “Businesses are becoming increasingly reliant on their websites for sales, as James Villa Holidays has demonstrated. Pure colocation is no longer enough to support a growing online business and increasingly we’re finding customers, such as James Villa Holidays, turning to us for additional services ranging from basic equipment monitoring through to sophisticated application and security management. The success of an online business is increasingly about the success of the partners that pull together to create a great buying experience for the end user.”
James Villa Holidays looked at a number of competitors, but found that TelecityRedbus not only had the capacity to support it through future growth, it has also enabled the tour operator to take on an increased level of management that couldn’t be offered via an ISP or reseller relationship.
Richard concluded: “We felt that TelecityRedbus had a genuine interest in building a direct customer relationship with us, which at this stage in our growth is important to us. At the moment we’re very happy with the remote management options we have in place, but moving forward we will probably want to look at taking on other advanced options.”
About James Villa Holidays
James Villa Holidays is the UK’s leading independent villa operator, with in excess of 1,500 villas in over 30 destinations. New areas are added each year – as well as additional villas and destinations, this year has seen the launch of James in Florida, the company’s first stand alone destination brochure.
The company is a privately owned business and was formed over 23 years ago. It is a direct sell operator offering a personal service and in-depth knowledge, with a call centre, online booking service and a dedicated store in Bluewater.
For further information or reservations contact James Villa Holidays on 0870 085 07 22 or visit www.jamesvillas.co.uk.
