Amethyst Developments

Case Study: First Choice

Amethyst responsibilities: project manage business and technical aspects in getting managed content to all sales channels.

Supporting e-commerce and Digital TV (DTV) platforms.

The project: To develop and launch an on-line bookable e-commerce platform selling package holidays to the UK market.

The timeline: following on from our work on Due Diligence, brochure publishing and customer services

The deadline: January 2001

The concept: create a virtual on-line brochure for FirstChoice.co.uk, aggregating the content from 12 retail product lines

The scope:

web-site design and build;
content management design and build;

Development platform: MS-SQL server, ASP, JSP, Coldfusion, Allaire Spectra, and good old MS-Access... (no, don't ask)

CMS: bespoke, based on platform developed for First Choice Publishing

CMS model: distributed authoring and editing; overseas approvals and submissions

Initial upload: Word Doc and RTF files; direct entry to CMS

Constraints: Time! Like the millenium work also going on at the time, the annual January early booking campaign (across the UK package tour market) was an immovable deadline.

Client staff: 60+

Development shop: external suppliers, Nettec and Iradx

Hosting Supplier: NTL/Telewest

CMS for First Choice

The programme delivered 3 CMS solutions

Brochure Publishing system, which eventually became the Page Planner; this contained the brochure-level content for countries, resorts and acccommodation
Spectra CMS; this held the more general site content, offers, marketing and promotional text
Terms and Conditions database;

Built by systems house Iradx, coding Page Builder application and content database. The publishing database is the key source of published information both on paper and on the Web.Containing all brochure text, images; RIF and PIF, that is;

Property information form
Resort Information form

RIF/PIF

Following initial paper audit and data capture to bring the publishing database up-to-date, the RIF/PIF engine allowed capture of hard facts onto the database; how much how, many, how often, for example number of floors, number of rooms, swimming pools, distance to beach, disabled access. RIF/PIF also houses the property tagging engine, whereby product marketing could set up the resort and accommodaiton features to be tagged for on-line searching.

Terms and Conditions

The Terms and Conditions CMS application extends the Publishing Database to cover further types of content.

Brochure ‘Extro’ text
Booking Terms & Conditions
Feature Descriptions
Extras/Excursions text for e-commerce

From a due diligence perspective, Booking Terms & Conditions need to sit within the Publishing domain in order to ensure that there are adequate controls surrounding updates and amendments.

Booking terms and conditions along with Descriptive narratives (e.g. description of All Inclusive etc. in intro pages) are an integral part of published information and therefore should be stored within the Publishing domain.

However, owing to time and resource constraints, a separate Terms & Conditions Database application was developed to meet the Project Propeller requirements, only later integrated with the core Publishing Project software. Amethyst developed this component as a stand-alone application and not part of the core Publishing database itself.

What it does

Holds the small print; legalese.
Holds the extra content; e-commerce channel-specific.

The Challenge

Define a structure to allow re-use of common elements whilst specifying elements particular to brand or channel

common data - cancellation and refund policies
sales channel specific data - who we are trading-as company name and address
seasonal data - summer/winter, 2002-03 changing for 2003-04
feature text; descriptive text to associate with tags

The database application is required;

to store the Booking Terms and Conditions
to ensure that the Terms & Conditions can be updated within a workflow procedure in the business
to ensure that the Terms & Conditions can be split up and presented in different ways according to holiday type etc. e.g. there will be separate Terms & Conditions for car hire; Late Choice and so on.
to make space available to store narrative text on all those items NOT explicitly covered in Brochure Publishing database or Spectra. Areas identified included:
- Booking Terms and conditions (‘Extro pages’ not yet on BPP) e.g. Flights T&C’s, Car Hire T&C’s, Free Kids places, Travel advice, Visas…
- Feature Text (Intro pages not on BPP) e.g. Kids Club, Air 2000 Premium, Ideal Holiday definitions – ‘Tropical’, ‘All Inclusive’, ‘Golf’
- Feature narrative e.g. All Inclusive Web-specific feature narrative
- Extras narrative e.g. welcome pack
- Extras/Excursions (not on BPP) and their mappings to the Reservations system e.g. Gemini extras/excursions codes manually mapped to text for web applications
- Air 2000 Premium seating narrative
- Extro data for e-commerce