Journal of Convergence Information Technology
Volume 5, Number 8, October 2010
Construction of Marketing Management Information System of
Travel Agency Based on Customer Relationship Management
Wei Min
School of Management, Xiamen University,Xiamen,China
xiada2000@xmu.edu.cn
doi: 10.4156/jcit.vol5.issue8.27
Abstract
The theory of customer relationship management has been gradually penetrated into all levels of
enterprise management. As a close business with customers, travel agency should focus on customer
relationship management, which is very important. This paper attempts to combine the concept of
customer relationship management and the processes of traditional travel agency marketing to
construct the system architecture, considering the actual situation and specific requirements of a travel
agency, combining with norms and standards of the management of travel agencies industry, as well
as, using the current popular system architecture B/S (Browser/Sever) Mode. By extensively studying
the theory of software engineering, database theory and object-oriented languages and Web
programming, management information systems analysis and design process of travel agency
marketing is discussed in detail based CRM.
Keywords: CRM (customer relationship management), Travel agency, Management information
systems, Database
1. Introduction
World Tourism Organization has released a report: “Travel E-commerce accounted for 25% of all
travel transactions in the accounts for half of all e-commerce.” We can say that tourism's network
operation will be an inevitable development of the industry or already a reality. With a large number of
tourists spending on the Web, do we still holding large amounts of materials for their tourism business?
No, this low efficiency of the traditional mode of operation has been unable to meet the requirements
of the information society. E-commerce requires us to work with networks to adapt to meeting the
customers requirements for diversification, personalized service, so that the conception of “customer
first” can be come true. Customer relationship management is essential, and implementing CRM in the
travel agencies has become a strategic investment of a well-known international and domestic tourism
enterprise. With China's successful accession to WTO, China's tourism industry will also face more
severe challenges. Foreign famous tourist brand and advanced management will bring a strong impact
on domestic tourism. Integrating advantageous resources and developing its own core competencies are
urgent needs. Only full utilized of advanced information network technology to carry on the
information construction of travel agencies, could the travel agencies enhance their ability to
participate in international competition.
Despite diversity in the literature on managing call centers, a common theme has been to show how
work intensification and workplace surveillance is achieved primarily through the time and target
pressures that are facilitated by technology (Taylor & Bain, 2005). The ‘gaze’ of the electronic boards
displaying their unceasing demands on staff combined with tele-computing and the automatic
distribution of calls (ACD) ensures that backlogs are always driving performance. This is perpetuated
through the accumulation of electronic databases that capture in digital form the behavior of customers
and customer service representatives (CSRs) at the point of interaction in service/sales encounters. It is
capable of translating a whole series of material and symbolic interactive events into a digitized set of
numbers, categories or forms.
In the travel agency business processes throughout the enterprise such as tourism and the
production, marketing, quality control, marketing plans, pricing, human resources, scheduling, service
and finance, as a complete value chain of tourism enterprises, tourism product sale is a core business,
whether the core business is good or bad depends on the market and the customer. Therefore,
Construction of Marketing Management Information System of Travel Agency Based on
Customer Relationship Management
Wei Min
customers become one of the most important resources for travel agents, for which, customer
relationship management process becomes an indispensable and important part of travel agents. The
system design goal takes the customer relationship management as the key factor, contract
management and marketing program management as the core, supplemented by price management,
production planning management, financial management, to form complete marketing system of
management information systems for a travel agency based CRM .This system can realize a complete
business
process
including
customers→important
customers→sales
order→marketing
plan→production planning→marketing. See Figure1.
Customers
Important customers
Sales order
Marketing plan
Production planning and Marketing
Figure1. Marketing system of management information systems for a travel agency
2. System Requirements Analysis and Design
2. 1. The Requirements Analysis of System
Economic globalization and the rapid development of information technology have changed the
competitive pattern of travel agency, and competition direction was changed from pressure of price
competition to the value of around the customer. The travel agencies who grasp the needs of customers,
retaining customers, will be able to win the competition in brutal campaign. This situation also has
changed the nature of the tourism product sales, and now sales staff must give the rapid response to
customer's needs and problems, with the ability to build customer relationships. The travel agency must
be “customer-centric”, “market-oriented” and thus attract more new customers, retain more customers
and strive for greater profits. Travel agencies need to focus on market segmentation, through the CRM
(customer relationship management systems) to fully enhance the tourism product marketing and
management capacity to deal with ever-changing customer demand. The core of CRM is the difference,
so the travel agents need to find the differences and provide differentiated customer service. In order to
develop a successful solution and the effective use of customer relationship management (CRM), travel
agencies which build the necessary infrastructure platform for CRM should normally be under two
ways: Management improvement is the basis for the success of CRM, while information technology
will help to improve the efficiency of customer relationship management.
2. 2. The design goals of System
CRM-based travel agency marketing management information system is an integrated
systems engineering, whose goal is to view the CRM philosophy as a guide, as well as, the
application of computer technology, network technology, information technology to i ntegrate
the cash flow, logistics, information flow of travel agencies in marketing management activities.
Journal of Convergence Information Technology
Volume 5, Number 8, October 2010
In addition, the management thinking of modern “process reengineering” is applied to establish
a functioning travel agency's own information system. Ultimately, customer is viewed as clues
to be analyzed to develop and retain customers for travel agents to provide a full range of
management perspective. By the analysis of corporate marketing, sales, service exchange links
with customers a full range, tracking and understanding of customer needs, multi-angle
quantitative and collaborative management, the overall strategy for travel agents can be made
scientific decisions. Through the travel agents a comprehensive business process management,
the business costs can be reduced. By enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty, travel agents
can increase sales, optimize profitability, and, ultimately, profit and development objectives can
be realized.
3. Main modules function of the system
3. 1. The Description of System Function
CRM-based travel agency marketing management information system functions include
system management, sales management, customer management. Sales management mainly
includes price management, contract management, and project manageme nt. Customer
relationship management mainly includes customer management, contact management,
statistical analysis. Systems management mainly includes user management, password
management, and rights management.
3. 2. Customer Relationship Management
Customer relationship management is to manage clients’ basic information, contacts, and
sales opportunities; to evaluate the customers’ situation, contacts, cases, potential customers,
and sales opportunities. Sales department of the travel agency inputs the users’ business
information, including: customer name, address, telephone, bank, account number, tax ID, their
districts, industry, the level of assess, nature of an enterprise, enterprise scale, cooperative
experience, credit rating. The customer level assessment require the four aspects of customers,
including the business license, tax registration certificate, legal person code certificate, business
license, according to the evaluation criteria for customer input rating. In addition, the client's
data is to realize the functions of changing, modifying, deleting, and inquiring. Flow chart is
shown in Figure 2.
Contact
information
adjunction
Contact
information
modifying
Customer
information
adjunction
Customer
information
modifying
Module of
customer
relationship
management
Customer
information
inquiring
Customers
assess
adjunction
Contact
information
querying
Customers
assess
querying
Customers
assess
modifying
Figure 2. Flow chart of customer relationship management
Construction of Marketing Management Information System of Travel Agency Based on
Customer Relationship Management
Wei Min
3. 3. Price Management
Price management remains a high-potential approach for a travel agency to identify and capture
new margin opportunities. Today the travel agencies are faced with the challenge of managing
sometimes infinite combinations of tourism products, terms, policies, customers, channels, and
promotions which are far too complex to be handled by manual analysis techniques. As a consequence
price management is either almost non-existing or subjectively decided. With relatively small changes
to pricing and pricing policies, price management solutions not only enable companies to be more
efficient in discount or rebate executions but in fact offer them improvement potential in margins and
revenue growth.
There are a total of 5 different price lists for customers to choose in price management of this
system, including the price list of travel routes, the internal price sheet of travel agents, the price list of
tourism products, the price list of ancillary tourism products, insurance, the price list of taxes and fees.
In every price list, query functionality can be provided for customers to choose various types of queries
in different ways. Sales department is responsible for the price of entry, price adjustment, and price
review. Flow chart is shown in Figure 3.
Inner
Prices subject to
change
Price
Audit
Price
input
Price list
External
User
query
Figure 3. Flow chart of price management
3. 4. Contract Management
Contract management or contract administration is the management of contracts made with
customers, vendors, partners, or employees. Contract management of a travel agency includes
negotiating the terms and conditions with other tourism enterprises(such as hotels, scenic spot
development companies, tourism transport companies, etc.) in contracts and ensuring
compliance with the terms and conditions, as well as documenting and agreeing on any changes
that may arise during its implementation or execution. It can be summarized as the process of
systematically and efficiently managing contract creation, execution, and analysis for the
purpose of maximizing financial and operational performance and minimizing ri sk .
The system of contract management includes sales contracts and fee contract. Contract
management module includes contract entry, query and review. Modified functionality should
be provided in the contract input, while the functions of adding and deleting should be provided
in the contract queries. During the period of the assessment of the contract, the function of the
contract should be provided for the functional departments to review. When the assessment is
passed, the adoption of a formal contract to this contract is taken as the conduct of subsequent
business processes; otherwise, the contract should be modified.
A contract is a legally binding agreement between the parties identified in the agreement to
fulfill all the terms and conditions outlined in the agreement. A prerequisite requirement for the
enforcement of a contract, amongst other things, is the condition that all the parties to the
Journal of Convergence Information Technology
Volume 5, Number 8, October 2010
contract accept the terms of the claimed contract. Historically, this was most commonly
achieved through signature or performance, but in many jurisdictions - especially with the
advance of electronic commerce - the forms of acceptance have expanded to include various
forms of electronic signature for travel agencies.
3. 5. Program Management
Program management of a travel agency is the process of managing several related projects,
often with the intention of improving the profits of a travel agency. Travel agency marketing
plan management is on the basis of annual marketing plan, quarterly marketing plan and
monthly marketing program management.
According to the view that programs deliver outcomes but projects deliver outputs, program
management of a travel agency is concerned with doing the right projects. The program
manager of a travel agency has been described as “playing chess” and keeping the overview in
mind. The pieces of tourism products should be used or sacrificed being the projects. And also
according to this view above, successful programs deliver on time, to budget and to
specification, whereas successful programs deliver long term improvements to an organization.
Improvements are usually identified through benefits of a travel agency. An organization should
select the group of programs that most take it towards its strategic aims whilst remaining within
its capacity to deliver the changes. On the other hand, the view that programs are simply large
projects or a set of projects of a travel agency allows that a program may need to deliver
tangible benefits quickly for a travel agency.
Travel Agencies’ marketing program management is further divided into plan modifying, plan
increasing, plans for the deletion, plans for the inquiries, and other specific functions. Travel agency
marketing plan management module diagram is shown in Figure 4.
Marketing
Contract
Annual
Plan
Monthly
Plan
Quarterly
Plan
Daily
Plan
Marketing
Plan
Management
Figure 4. Travel agency plan management module diagram
4. Database Design
Construction of Marketing Management Information System of Travel Agency Based on
Customer Relationship Management
Wei Min
4. 1. Customer relationship management database
Customer Relationship Management is a continuous process of continuously strengthening
exchanges with customers, and continuously understanding the customers’ needs and continuously
improving the products and services to meet the needs of customers. The connotation of CRM is that
the travel agents, who use information technology (IT) and Internet technology, achieve integrated
marketing for tourists is based on the core of the tourists to achieve marketing technology and
management. Customer relationship management focused communication with customers, therefore,
the business of travel agents, is a customer-centric, rather than the traditional product-or marketoriented. To facilitate communication with customers, customer relationship management can provide
customers with a variety of communication channels.
Customer relationship management is to manage the clients’ basic information, contacts, sales
opportunities to evaluate the customer credit rating to consistently find significant customer. Customer
Relationship Management database contains three data tables which are the clients basic information
sheet (Kh-jbxx), contact information form (Lxr-xx) and Client Assessment Form (Kh-pg), and E-R
diagram is shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5. The E-R diagram of customer relationship management database
4. 2. Travel agency marketing plan management database
A Database Management System (DBMS) is a set of computer programs that controls the creation,
maintenance, and the use of a database, which allows organizations to place control of database
development in the hands of database administrators (DBAs) and other specialists. A DBMS is also a
system software package that helps the use of integrated collection of data records and files known as
databases. It allows different user application programs to easily access the same database. DBMSs
may use any of a variety of database models, such as the network model or relational model.
In terms of a travel agency which has large systems, a DBMS allows tourism customers and other
software to store and retrieve the tourism data in a structured way. Instead of having to write computer
programs to extract tourism information, tourism customers can ask simple questions in a query
language. Thus, many DBMS packages provide Fourth-generation programming language (4GLs) and
other application development features, which help to specify the logical organization for a database
Journal of Convergence Information Technology
Volume 5, Number 8, October 2010
and access and use the information within a database. It provides facilities for controlling data access,
enforcing data integrity, managing concurrency, and restoring the database from backups. A DBMS
also provides the ability to logically present database information to users.
Overall, sales, customer service and business intelligence for the auxiliary functions of the travel
agency marketing system, in a sense, it is full of marketing ideas as the core of CRM. This new
database marketing system is explored shown in Figure 6.
Production
Department
Finance
Department
Marketing
Decisions
Marketing
Department
Knowledge
Model
Service
Department
Target
Data Collection
Management
Sale
Department
Data
Mining
Customer
Contact Center
Data
Reduction
Data
Warehouse
Customer
Database
Editing
Import
Sales
Channel
Market
Figure 6. Travel Agency Database Marketing System
The database marketing system is of such a system: marketing, customer service department collect
customer data through customer contact centers and various sales channels to compile the customer
database of travel agency’s marketing department through data arrangement. The marketing
department of travel agency should observe, count and analyze the customer data, if necessary, the part
of the data will be in-depth analyzed and processed such as data mining by streamlining the conversion
into the data warehouse to yield valuable knowledge through the visual representation of the model to
the marketing department. The marketing department of travel agency synthesizes these findings and
the productive sector, financial sector, information integration to develop the next phase of marketing
strategy to send to each sector as the reference for its activities.
Travel agency’s marketing plan includes annual marketing plan management (contract), quarter
marketing plan management (contract), and monthly marketing plan management (contract). The
corresponding data sheets are respectively the travel agency sales contracts sheet (LY xsht), tourist
routes and tourism product information sheet (LY xx), the annual marketing plan travel agency table
(LY ndcl), travel agency marketing plan quarterly Form (LY jdcl), monthly travel agency Marketing
Plan Form (LY ydcl), travel agencies monthly marketing schedule sheet(LY yxsl). Also, the basic
clients’ information sheet (Kh jbxx) is needed, and E-R diagram is shown in Figure 7.
Construction of Marketing Management Information System of Travel Agency Based on
Customer Relationship Management
Wei Min
Figure 7. The E-R diagram of marketing project management database
5. System management and security
5. 1. System Management
There are a total of three sub-modules in the system management, namely, user management,
password management, and permission management. There is mainly the user's basic information in
the user management, providing users to view feature, and the system administrators have the
permissions of amending and deleting. Password management is primarily made the available
functionality to the users to modify passwords and check password. Permission Management is only
available to the system administrator to set user permissions and modify the function, and only the
system administrator can modify the operation of the user's permissions. Data adjunctions, data
deletion, data modification, data inquiry, data review, the five kinds of permissions are according to the
user so that they have part of the nature of the work until all the permissions. User permissions
database apply bit numeric field to the five kinds of permissions, the numeric field value are 0 or 1, for
example, the parameters del is set to delete operations, if 0 is for no rights, while 1 is for rights. In
general, users can only have the permissions of viewing their own information, but they can not
modify.
5. 2. System Safety
The security risks of the solutions of IIS + ASP.NET+ SQL Server are mainly from the operating
system, development platform, as well as seamless connection between back-end database issues.
Others include web page design in the process of safety awareness, the database's own security and so
on. The following are several ways to solve security issues.
(1) Using 128-bit SSL protocol for transport layer encryption controls. SSL protocol is located in
TC / PIP protocols and the various application layer protocols for data communications to provide
security support, which has now been widely used in Web browser and server authentication, as well as
encrypted data transmission.
Journal of Convergence Information Technology
Volume 5, Number 8, October 2010
(2) Windows-based accounts of the IIS security certification system is applied to ensuring that
system services are not illegal calls. This measure is mainly carried out through the IIS restricted
access to the user settings to ensure that the user has specific permissions to access system services.
Through this measure, travel agencies’ construction and management of information technology bodies
to a specific user or system to provide system access accounts, in large part to ensure the system's
security.
(3) Use the online proof of identity of users logging, such as the E - mail and password, through the
appropriate identification procedures to log operating. If the system needs to request identification,
ASP. NET can send one Cookie that contains evidence of the identity. The next request is contained in
the header of this Cookie, in order to prove that the authentication has passed without further
authentication.
Note that the form itself does not play a role in authentication, but it is provided as a means to
obtain user identity on the E - mail and password, which will be able to achieve the processing of user
identity authentication. The operating mechanism of entire user authentication process is shown in
Figure8.
Correctly
Configured
on the IIS
Request
Access
Authentication
Cookie
N
Login
Authorization
Process
Y
Authorize
?
N
Cookie
Verified
Test
Authority
Denied
Authentication
Cookie
N
Y
Access to
Resources
Figure 8. Web Database Resource Security Access Mechanism Schematic
(4) In the SQL Server to limit Web user's permissions: In some of the SQL Server attack, the
database login account with high privileges is often applied to the database data in illicit operations,
therefore, It is necessary to restrict the SQL Server user logon account permissions. There are 3 types
of permissions in SQL Server: object permissions, statement permissions, and implicit permission
statement. In the system's Web server, all database operations are prepared in the form to store the
process. And for Web users to set up a call to the database only through stored procedures on the server
to perform certain database operations role, instead of allowing direct access to other database objects
and statements.
6. Conclusions
The system is to primarily evaluate the major clients and key customers, and tap potential
Construction of Marketing Management Information System of Travel Agency Based on
Customer Relationship Management
Wei Min
customers and markets by managing, analyzing and tracking the clients of travel agencies. And
on this basis, tourism products & tourism routs management, contract management, price
management and marketing program management can be carried on to achieve a leading travel
agency in marketing and sales management of new clients as the leading travel agency business
processes. The customer relationship management and marketing contract management are both
the major components of the system throughout the system, and then the price management,
program management and financial management are supplemented, forming a complete system
of a CRM-based travel agency marketing management information system. The development of
this system adopted today's popular BPS structure, taking ASP. NET technology is viewed as
the main development of technology, because ASP.NET platform is of many advantages, such
as low cost, security, flexibility and scalability, providing the basic conditions for development
of the ERP system in future.
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