I just completed an exhausting two week trip to the Middle East (Kuwait and Saudi Arabia), Dublin, Ireland and Washington DC. I thought I would create some short blog entries about each of these trips.

First up, my first visit to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). My client Al-Tayyar is one of the largest travel companies in the KSA, the GCC and througout Africa. I was hired by Al-Tayyar to evaluate their internally developed ERP system and to comment on their soon to be launched IBE. Obviously, there is a level of confidentiality that prevents me from talking about their systems in any great detail, but in general I found the systems to be very impressive. The main point here is that Al-Tayyar has embraced the concept of dynamic pricing based on customer value. This is approach maximizes agency profitablity while recognizing the value of different customer types and forms of payment they use. This relates directly to the agency’s bottom line and is a type of customer management which is ahead of much of the global travel industry. The IBE system they have built has a multi-source structure and allows customization of packages dynamically. I was very impressed with both these systems, but I did realize they were built around requirements that were very specific to the KSA market. The sytems were built in partnership with Interglobe Technologies a very experieinced Indian travel software company.