Travel agency consolidates outsourcing providers

Travel Authority goes from eight vendors to one for voice and data management

The Travel Authority used to pay about eight to 10 vendors to provide local phone service, long distance and data services to the company’s few dozen branch offices across five states.

When there were interruptions in service, “our long-distance provider would point the finger at the line provider, and the line provider would point the finger at the long-distance provider,” says Lee Thomas, vice president of finance and technology for the travel agency in Jeffersonville, Ind.

The Travel Authority solved that problem by finding a vendor named Smoothstone IP Communications, which could supply the phone services and a data communication network for all of its 47 branch offices. The switch cut the travel agency’s costs by $10,000 a month and gave it the proverbial “one throat to choke.”

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The Travel Authority used to pay about eight to 10 vendors to provide local phone service, long distance and data services to the company’s few dozen branch offices across five states.

When there were interruptions in service, “our long-distance provider would point the finger at the line provider, and the line provider would point the finger at the long-distance provider,” says Lee Thomas, vice president of finance and technology for the travel agency in Jeffersonville, Ind.

The Travel Authority solved that problem by finding a vendor named Smoothstone IP Communications, which could supply the phone services and a data communication network for all of its 47 branch offices. The switch cut the travel agency’s costs by $10,000 a month and gave it the proverbial “one throat to choke.”

“I like having one company responsible for all of that,” Thomas says.

Smoothstone allows customers to outsource business communications in the software-as-a-service model. The vendor has dubbed its set of products “Converged Communications as a Service” to reflect the consolidation of voice, data and video onto one network.

“We are a total 100% IP provider,” says Russ Maney, vice president of marketing at Smoothstone. “Everything we do is provided over our own nationwide network.”

Smoothstone offers one suite of services tailored especially for the travel industry that includes support for telecommuters, toll-free connections between all client locations and between all Smoothstone travel industry clients, disaster recovery features to restore lost service, and access to global distribution systems that allow agents to book and sell plane tickets.

The Travel Authority, which has offices in Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee and Florida, began using Smoothstone about a year ago and recently finished implementing the services across all its offices. Previously, the travel agency used about eight to 10 vendors for phone service and data because some of them do not operate in every state. BellSouth, for example, wasn’t available in Indiana, Thomas says.

The Travel Authority now pays $42,000 a month for both voice and data. Previously, the business spent $52,000 a month for the same services, and another $10,000 a year for maintenance, according to Thomas.

Any time there is a local phone outage today, Smoothstone can route calls to a support center and restore service, he says. “In the old days, if someone hit a pole [cutting a phone line], that facility was out of business until it was repaired,” he says.

When the agency changed vendors, it also implemented automated call director systems in every location. The systems route incoming calls and are typically used by offices that handle large volumes of phone traffic. Previously, the Travel Authority had this technology only at its three major call centers.

The agency does not use the video conferencing services supplied by Smoothstone, but does take advantage of the fax service, including a feature that directs faxed documents to e-mail.

A bigger advantage, though, is not having to manage communications and data services in-house.

“In our old world, it was really an unmanaged solution,” Thomas says. Smoothstone is “now my telecom manager. We don’t have a telecom manager on site.”

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