Thomson agents in the chosen 100 shops can now log-in to the main reservation system which is now integrated into the Thomson’s back-office system. TUI Travel director of new media Graham Donoghue said in a statement: “What we give to B2C we give to B2B so 90% is the same". Thomson’s current aim is to now establish the feature throughout the entire TUI retail network and then possibly offer it up to third party agents sometime in 2009.
The recent change to the site is one of many new additions to aid not just TUI agents but also customers searching for Thomson Holidays. Other recently added features to the site include the introduction of predictive text for holiday searches as well as a search ‘cloud’ which displays the most recent holiday destinations searched for, and changes the size of the text depending on the search volume of the destination. Thomson Holidays is also in the midst of trialling the iGoogle destination widget which enables customers who have downloaded it to search for Thomson holidays from their own personal iGoogle homepage.
