PRESSRELEASE
10 November 2009

eTRAVELi secures operation, cuts costs with IP-Only

Through the creative use of simple but powerful services, eTRAVELi has created a place for itself on the Finnish market for only a fraction of the cost incurred previously and has built an extremely reliable platform for its core operation: competitively-priced travel deals booked over the Internet and by phone.

IP-Only is one of a number of companies overseeing eTRAVELi’s technical platform. The platform has been built to provide extreme reliability and the best possible customer service. Since the spring of 2009, IP-Only has also provided a smart solution for cutting the cost of running eTRAVELi’s Finnish call centre.

eTRAVELi operates a shared and centralised call centre system in order to simplify its operations. This means that customers who call the Finnish call centre need to have their calls transferred to Sweden. Previously, this transfer was done over the ordinary telephone network, which was extremely expensive. Before the new solution was implemented, eTRAVELi was forced to pay the cost of an international call (including the per-minute rate for the time customers spent on hold before their calls could be answered) for every customer who called. The growing number of calls received made this situation financially untenable.

Dramatically-reduced costs
Together with IP-Only, eTRAVELi’s Head of IT, Robin Francis, created a significantly more cost-efficient solution in response to the problem. IP-Only now provides three access numbers in Finland and receives calls directly into the Finnish part of its IT backbone, where they are then sent using an SIP protocol to Sweden on the other side of the Bothnian Gulf. Once in Sweden, incoming Finnish calls are delivered to one of the three traditional access numbers within eTRAVELi’s call centre platform and then on to the Finnish agents. The result has been a dramatic reduction in costs because calls are now transferred from Finland to Sweden via inexpensive IP, eliminating the need to pay the minute rate.

Apart from providing part of the solution to solve the Finnish telephone traffic problem, IP-Only is also one of three operators responsible for redundant communication to the technical platform, the heart of the operation, which is also duplicated in two different server rooms.

eTRAVELi’s main office in Uppsala, Sweden and its development division located in Gothenburg, Sweden are also connected by a network with a 100Mbps network via the Ethernetport service.

About European Travel Interactive AB (eTRAVELi)
Uppsala-based eTRAVELi has the highest market share of all online travel agency groups in the Nordic region (30%). eTRAVELi offers airline tickets, hotels, hire cars and other travel-related products via multiple brands and is active in six countries. In 2008, the group had sales of SEK 3.3 billion and recorded EBITDA of SEK 43 million. During the first half of 2009, the group had sales of SEK 1.8 billion and EBITDA of SEK 47 million. Projected sales for 2009 are SEK 3.5 billion and profits are expected to continue increasing.

eTRAVELi Dragarbrunnsgatan 40 2 tr, P.O Box 1340, S- 751 43 Uppsala, Org. nr: 556730-1543