Classic Travel boosts competitiveness and accelerates growth with OCI

Classic Travel is part of Expolanka Holdings, which operates in a diverse range of sectors with over 45 offices in 17 countries. After recently entering new segments of the travel value chain, Classic Travel searched for a comprehensive business analytics platform to support continued growth, diversification of its corporate customer base, and expansion into international markets.

With business data held in disparate systems, management reporting for internal and external clients was a slow, manual process that involved multiple departments at the company. Tactical marketing and strategic business decisions were further hindered by a lack of insight into customer behaviors and market trends.

Classic Travel also sought a more robust, scalable, and cost-effective IT infrastructure to facilitate its business development plans.

Classic Travel evaluated multiple solutions for its business analytics platform, including Microsoft BI. The company selected Oracle Analytics Cloud because it proved to be a superior product in terms of analytical and reporting capabilities, user experience, and cost effectiveness. Additionally, Classic Travel’s IT staff already had a sound understanding of Oracle products.

The company chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) because of its rapid scalability to support business growth. Also, it would provide the best performance for Oracle Base Database Service, which is the backbone of Classic Travel’s operations, with no additional licensing required.

Classic Travel drove business growth and competitiveness, enhanced decision-making, and reduced operating costs by unifying business intelligence with Oracle Analytics on OCI.

The company improved strategic decision-making by gaining detailed insights into a range of key business indicators, such as spend values per customer and travel trends per destination. Using Oracle’s comprehensive business analytics, executives steered Classic Travel’s expansion into Bangladesh and imminently into Dubai.

Classic Travel withstood the pandemic by using detailed customer and market analytics to identify optimal leisure and travel opportunities for its client base. By analyzing historical data and trends, it effectively prepared for market reopenings, leading to a tripling of business the following financial year. As a result, Classic Travel won the Restart Resilience Award at the Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing Brand Excellence Awards for outstanding efforts in overcoming the challenges of the pandemic.

The company supported rapid business scalability and achieved cost savings of nearly 50% by moving from on-premises hardware systems to OCI, which is now used throughout the Expolanka Group for workloads including Oracle E-Business Suite and HighJump’s warehouse management solution. Internal and external reporting is now streamlined thanks to a powerful cloud engine and a single analytics platform covering all business data. Management information systems reports that previously took three hours to compile are now complete in less than 30 minutes—more than six times as fast.

Marketing teams now regularly monitor the impact of travel promotions without waiting hours for reports from the finance department. And business users develop specific reports themselves without IT support—creating time savings of up to 70% and freeing IT specialists for more strategic tasks.

The travel company enriched its service offering and increased marketing campaign effectiveness by using Oracle Analytics to better understand customers’ travel and purchasing behaviors. This boosted business retention and acquisition, and enabled Classic Travel to diversify its customer portfolio, which is a key strategic priority.

OCI also improved the collaboration between the firm’s inbound, outbound, and visa management businesses, as well as with external companies. Using new market knowledge gained from Oracle Analytics, Classic Travel partnered with the Singapore Tourism Board to deliver a campaign to kick-start Singapore’s tourism industry post-pandemic, achieving more than 3.5 million impressions and generating hundreds of inquiries.

For the implementation of its OCI solution, Classic Travel selected Oracle Partner ITX360, an Expolanka company responsible for all group IT support and development.

ITX360 seamlessly deployed Oracle Analytics and OCI to the high satisfaction of Classic Travel’s operational teams. Due to the success of the project, ITX360 is expanding the solutions both within Classic Travel and across other Expolanka Group companies.

“We have partnered with Oracle from the inception of ITX360 and we value the continuous innovation and best practices that Oracle offers on all its solutions," says Silmy Ahmed, CEO of ITX. "We have over the years enhanced our partnership with Oracle and have successfully concluded multiple projects across product verticals. With this success story, we are confident that these solutions can be replicated within the group and externally.”