Travel management company Clarity launches proprietary booking tool

UK-based travel management company Clarity has launched its first proprietary booking tool, ClarityGo, with the majority of its customers expected to migrate to it within the next six months.

The tool, which is both customer and agent-facing, has been in development for three years and is built on cloud-based technology to provide an agile platform. Clarity touted the tool’s “user-friendly interface and lightning-fast results” as key benefits.

“Clients have already been blown away by its sheer speed and functionality,” said Sue Chapman, Clarity’s executive director – product and commercial, who led the development team. “We created a system that’s fit for the future, and we can react quickly without relying on third parties.”

Clarity CEO Pat McDonagh added: “We’ve created an online booking platform on one hand and an agency-operating platform on the other… it’s truly one platform for all with zero friction whether a booking starts online by a direct user or offline by a member of our team.”

McDonagh said the new tool is microservices oriented, “meaning it’s not this huge monolithic thing that becomes very difficult to manage. We are building in products and services that enhance the shopping experience.” He cited the integration of Routehappy’s rich airline information and Thrust Carbon’s emissions data as two examples of enhanced point-of-sale information.

The TMC boss said ClarityGo can handle “huge numbers of transactions per minute” and had so far been rolled out to around ten per cent of Clarity’s customers, with early progress indicating strong adoption levels. Three of the UK’s largest higher education institutions, which often have complex travel needs, have seen online adoption increase “more than ten per cent, and in one case they’re now at 95 per cent [adoption] which is incredibly high in the education sector,” McDonagh noted.

Hotel content includes more than one million properties globally, sourced from GDSs, OTAs such as Expedia, and direct connects including Premier Inn and Travelodge. Air content is provided by a combination of GDSs and aggregators – the latter for low-cost carrier and NDC content – while direct connects are a future possibility.

“We can take NDC content from aggregators like we are right now, we can take it from the GDSs when we believe it’s commercially and operationally viable to do so, or we can build out direct connects where we think neither of the above work,” said McDonagh, cautioning that “building multiple direct connects means more pipes to manage and more potential points of failure.”

The TMC, which acquired rival agency Agiito last year, had previously offered a Clarity-branded SABS booking tool to its customers alongside the option of Concur Travel.