Libgo, a holding company for Liberty Travel and GoGo Worldwide Vacations in the increasingly competitive travel industry, approached us to solve what appeared to be a problem created by a long series of missteps by previous consultants.”

Both Liberty Travel, the inventor of the “travel package,” and GoGo Vacations, a wholesaler of leisure vacations, are widely recognized as industry leaders in their segments.  As a result, both have valuable brands which require scalable technology to handle, in the case of Liberty Travel, 200 locations in 25 states with 3000 agents, and, in the case of GoGo Vacations, agents from more than 18,000 agencies. 

GoGo Vacations provides private-label vacations for four major airlines, including all the packages and technology for American Airlines Vacations.

Libgo had committed to improving its systems even as new competitors, entirely web-based, put up sites designed to lessen the importance of human contact and travel agents in the industry.  The Libgo directive was to build a state-of-art system that would be acknowledged as industry-leading for direct selling to consumers, to support travel agents and to provide technology and other travel products to third parties.

An enormous undertaking--one that over several years and with expenditures in the tens of millions of dollars--had initial successes in moving to a modern ERP solution, but the overall program was taking too long and had gone over budget.

The executive team brought Inventivity on board to get the project back on track.

Cathy Peleaz, President of Liberty Travel, said, “The Inventivity team provided our executives with feedback that was unbiased and refreshingly candid. Their recommendations and clear action plan gave us the strategic vision we needed to bring the project back on track and realize successes.”

Our Inventivity team took on the role of de facto CIO and CTO, with responsibility for a $40 million annual budget and 200 staff members.  In short order, Inventivity revamped technology strategy, renegotiated contracts, purchased code and put the company back in charge of its own systems and processes destiny.

We were not ‘travel experts,’ but we knew that this was a ‘partnership-driven’ industry, so we enlisted customers as well as the Liberty teams' knowledge and identified the highest value features and we went to work on them immediately.

Inventivity’s team improved IT morale by supporting the folks in the trenches and hired senior IT staff to provide leadership.  The result was refocused and simplified processes, improved processes and the creation of a realistic path aimed at value creation for the department.