The US-based educational travel organization, Road Scholar, has partnered with UK technology specialist Open Destinations to launch a new tech strategy, known as Travel Studio, which has been specifically designed for tour operators.

The Boston-based Road Scholar is a leader in not-for-profit educational travel in the U.S., offering 5,500 learning adventures in 150 countries and all 50 states to around 100,000 people annually. Thus the company was looking for a technology platform that had the flexibility to work with their existing systems while providing advanced functionality for their wide range of land and cruise experiences. After a lengthy worldwide search Open Destinations was chosen and a long-term license agreement for their flagship software Travel Studio, currently live in more than 30 countries, was signed.

‘Travel Studio is providing us with a business framework for the long term,’ says Eric Bird, Senior Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer at Road Scholar. ‘We think of our application portfolio as a jigsaw puzzle, with the Travel Studio back office solution at the centre of that puzzle.’

Open Destinations is a leading independent software and services provider to the travel sector headquartered in London with a support office in Goa, India. Since its inception in 1999, Open Destinations has successfully implemented their software in more than 30 countries, with a system that supports in excess of 85 million searches per day. The company has a combined staff of over 400 people.

“We are delighted to be expanding our footprint in North America,” says Open Destinations CEO Kevin O’Sullivan. “We’ve been providing software to tour operators and wholesalers in this market for over 15 years, and we have a deep understanding of their needs in the marketplace.”

Bird says that it was Open Destinations’ extensive experience with complex projects that played a key factor in Road Scholar’s selection of them as a technology partner.

With the new software, Road Scholar will be utilising a wide range of functionality within Travel Studio, which Bird says will help streamline their business processes. Some of the areas of the technology include complex travel packaging, a contracting module and a number of powerful Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) that integrate with a 3rd party systems such as Expedia, Miki Travel and Travalco.

The implementation of Travel Studio is now underway across the offices of Road Scholar, which include the headquarters and call centre in Massachusetts, a travel services division in Vermont and several satellite offices around the U.S., UK, Australia and New Zealand. Completion of the project will result in an additional 300 users of Travel Studio, which currently hosts more than 10,000 users per day.