Journey Latin America is recognised as the UK's leading travel specialist to Latin America offering a full range of flights, bespoke journeys and escorted group tours. JLA took the decision to upgrade their existing NAVIGAtour installation to Version 3 to help support their business growth needs and increase their consultant productivity, management information and marketing capability.

Full live operation for flights and bespoke journeys began in March 2005 and cut-over of the escorted group tours department was completed in 2006. 

The NAVIGAtour 3 software was developed hand-in-hand with JLA ensuring a complete fit to their business model. In addition to the NAVIGAtour product itself, Damarel provides a full service to JLA including all hardware provision, network installation and management and remote desktop support.

JLA’s NAVIGAtour installation is housed in their London computer room which includes a core Oracle server and multiple web servers delivering the NAVIGAtour application to users via a browser-based interface.

This allows JLA to support working from remote locations including homes and regional offices using low cost commodity telecommunications links. It also enables more rapid deployment of PCs within the London offices and therefore allows JLA to refresh their PC technology more simply to keep pace with change.

The multiple web servers provide additional performance which can be scaled to suit JLA’s growth by simply adding further servers and also provide a high degree of resilience in the event of any hardware problems. The Oracle database facilitates the provision of both operational and management information while providing an industry standard reliable platform for data storage.

NAVIGAtour supports download of itinerary, passenger, fare and ticketing information from the Amadeus CRS. This allows flights and bespoke sales consultants to enter information into one system, thereby reducing keying errors and improving speed of data entry.

In addition to flight bookings through Amadeus, NAVIGAtour provides full support for JLA’s bespoke travel business, incorporating a comprehensive product and pricing database. All consultants have instant access to all products, prices, schedules, special offers and descriptive text for all ground services offered.

Document generation and storage are built-in to NAVIGAtour. This means that all proposal letters, confirmations, invoices etc. are automatically produced by NAVIGAtour as Microsoft Word documents pulling through standard texts from the product database.  Prior to this, consultants had to wait up to two days for documents to be typed and information to be consolidated – an operation which now takes only seconds.

NAVIGAtour uses Royal Mail address and postcode data to look-up new addresses entered into the system and to cleanse existing ones. This has resulted in a massive improvement in the accuracy of address capture from telephone calls, increasing the reliability of document delivery, marketing mail-outs and so on. 

NAVIGAtour’s link to online credit card payment was implemented in November 2006 and has immediately reduced errors in taking payments and rendered the process more efficient.

NAVIGAtour provides full Email integration for sending proposals, invoices and other documents directly to clients without incurring postal charges.  This has not only reduced the company’s postage bill but has also allowed JLA to save considerable time and effort in the post-room.  It has also allowed JLA to carry out vital email marketing functions.

To discuss how NAVIGAtour can help your operation, or to arrange to see it in action, please phone +44 (0)1252 783787 or email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it