Since January 2017, Umbrella Faces has also been active in Luxembourg. Our client Travel Pro is part of the AMEX Travel Partner Network and a very successful one at that: since 2012 the company has grown by 7-10% annually and has thus conquered the market leadership in the Grand Duchy.
In our interview with the company’s lovely Operations Manager, Cordula Rossi, read about her experience of the introduction of Umbrella Faces and what she has learned from it:
Cordula, you branded Umbrella Faces as a white label solution under the name “Travel ProFiles” and market yourselves as “Travel Arr’angels”. Are these very good, catchy marketing accents part of a larger strategy?
Yes, absolutely. We are very customer-oriented and really value excellent assistance. That is of course reflected in our market presence.
And that is definitely well received. Travel Pro now has a good 25% market share in Luxembourg, making us the market leader – even ahead of international TMC branches.
But Travel Pro is also part of the AMEX Network?
That’s right. On one hand we are an independent party within the Luxembourgian Sales Lentz Group. On the other hand we also belong to the AMEX Travel Partner Network. This gives us access to AMEX’s international client base and allows us to benefit from 24-hour service, for example.
These two components – a local player close to customers and a part of a global network – complement each other wonderfully.
I hope that your angel wings will grow a bit thanks to Umbrella Faces?
Definitely. Thanks to Umbrella Faces we have our profile data perfectly under control. That has significantly improved our speed and precision of service.
Our wonderful travel tech consultant Wim de Graeve recommended Umbrella. It was not only the functionalities that were important to us, but also the fact that the data is stored in Europe.
This is an absolute must-have for many of our customers.
What was the most important thing you realised over the course of the project?
Defining a standard profile for all clients needs to be well thought-out. We underestimated that at the beginning. Accordingly, fine-tuning the mappings took much longer than expected.
But Yasmin Strahm and Wolfgang Schuller from Umbrella assisted us wonderfully in this difficult task.
For this reason, everything now functions without any problem and new clients can also be entered quickly. Since I started working with Faces I have really been enjoying the topic.
Most of our clients use an OBE anyway and were familiar with doing their own data administration. So they were very easy to convince.
The majority of our customers maintain their profile data directly in the OBE. Some, though, prefer to do it directly in Umbrella Faces. Thanks to the real-time data syncronisation, this makes no difference at all.
And lastly, a personal question: what makes a native Tyrolean from the picturesque village of Navis move to Luxembourg?
It is a very romantic reason: my husband – who is actually also from Tyrol – has worked here for a financial institution for 11 years. And so of course I happily joined him.
We really enjoy the international environment and the high quality of life in Luxembourg. But of course we do miss the mountains and wintry Tyrol. For this reason we spend almost every holiday back home in Austria.
Thank you very much for the interesting interview!