Singapore is known for its technological savvy. It makes sense then, that a Singaporean firm would lead the way in developing an entirely paperless way for its agents to book travel.
Dynasty Travel International recently outfitted its staff with iPad Minis that allow them to make online bookings of packaged tours for customers without ever touching paper.
The company achieved this through a mix of off-the-shelf iPad Minis and proprietary software that pulls it all together.
Dynasty spent two years and roughly S $500,000 (US $394,000) on the solution, including proprietary front-, middle- and back-end software that powers the initiative.
The solution made its debut during a road show at the Suntec City shopping mall recently, where 50 of its employees came armed with the iPads. Overall, the company has 100 iPad Minis for its 110 people on staff.
Clifford Neo, managing director for Dynasty, thinks it is a first in the travel industry.
“I’ve not seen any travel agency with this sort of capability,” Neo said. “Dynasty is not only the first in Singapore to achieve this, I believe it is a world-first.”
He said the overall goal for the company is going entirely paperless. This will increase bookings, efficiency and productivity, he said.
While perhaps not as flashy as what’s going on in Singapore with Dynasty Travel, companies in the U.S. can take similar steps to boost efficiency with a paperless workflow.
It need not cost as much as the Dynasty solution, either.
One way to move in that direction is with fax-over-IP (FoIP) software. Using a provider such as FaxSIPit, businesses can cut down on paper use and move to a fully digital workflow by eliminating the paper that comes from traditional faxing.
Instead of dealing with paper faxes, FoIP allows incoming faxes to arrive by email. With advanced features such as automatic document routing and optical character recognition that enables faxes to be searched as if they were Word documents, FoIP brings added functionality above and beyond just what comes from going digital.
Initiatives such as that by Dynasty are nice—but they need not be so flashy to be effective.