PhoCusWright Travel Innovator: Cadabra
Cadabra is a research and booking website for New Zealand. The site is based on Cadabra’s tour planning software which allows customers to search, plan, and book a variety of travel products including accommodations, car rentals, and attractions. The system includes wizard based tools that help the customer through the planning process.
I signed up for an account so that I could try the itinerary planning tools. The interface is very easy to use and nicely designed. The itinerary building tools are quite sophisticated and make logical sense. Once you choose a hotel, you can find activities that fall within the date range of your stay and in your immediate location. This makes sense and means the customer can avoid having to search for activities based on date and location criteria. The itinerary also allows you to build your trip before you actually book it. This also makes sense because it allows you to fine tune your plans before you commit to paying. The danger here, however, is that if you take too long, your accommodations or activities might not be available at booking time. I didn’t go through the booking process, so I am not sure how they are handling this particular problem.
The technology appears to be quite flexible and is being used in New Zealand as a case study (I would presume). Because of the amount of content required in the production of a site, I would be interested to know how they are handling the content and data strategy.
Questions:
1. How is the content managed? Is it imported in through 3rd parties or is it all managed by Cadabra?
2. Is the product booked in real-time through partner connections?
3. Are there plans to open the system up to more content providers for other regions?
4. This is a great example of how the system works, but the corporate site is very vague about the actual technology, how customizable it is, how much it costs, how flexible it is, etc. I would like to know more about what makes it tick.
Hi Stephen
Thank you for your comments in your article – we are pleased you liked the system!
As you assumed we designed Cadabra to be implemented in for each country around the world – concentrating on destinations where people tour. We are partnering with inbound tour operators in each market – who are responsible for populating their database – including destination, accommodation, activities and transport. This information can be entered directly into the system or it can be imported through a XML interface. Also, they can get their suppliers to update their individual data, add images etc via a Supplier Extranet feature.
Our business model is shared risk / reward – we do not charge upfront – but on a royalty basis for bookings made through the system.
The system is already available for the Cook Islands at http://www.cadabrapacific.com and is currently being loaded for implementation by companies operating from UK, Scandinavia, Poland, India, Malaysia, South Africa and Australia. We are in advanced discussions with companies from several other destinations.
Please don’t hesitate to contact me directly if you (or your readers) would like any further Information.
Kind Regards
Graeme Frost
CEO – Cadabra Limited
graeme@cadabra.com
PS – a minor point – in the article you have inserted an extra “a” into our name in several places – it is Cadabra – rather than Cadabara.
Kind Regards
Graeme
Thanks for the clarification Graeme, you’ve got a really nice platform and I look forward to seeing you in Los Angeles. There might even be some opportunities to partner with Rezgo in the future (shameless plug there). BTW, I’ve corrected the spelling errors.