Dear Industry colleagues,

As we reach the end of this eventful year, it is time to review the year gone by and to look ahead at how we can continue to enable the success of our customers and add value to the industry in the coming years.  

For Mercator, 2007 has been a year of consolidation of our successes and of preparing ourselves for meeting the challenges of the future successfully. As you may know the Emirates Group’s strategy is to diversify and to significantly grow some key business areas outside its core airline activities. Mercator has been identified as one of its businesses that the Group wants to grow. We have therefore embarked on a growth initiative to increase our market share and to reduce dependency on the Group. In the coming years you will see Mercator become much more active in promoting high quality IT products and services to the travel, transportation and leisure industries. We will invest heavily in new products; grow and renovate our existing products; grow our services business with bureau, hosting and outsourcing services; and introduce new offerings such as consulting services.

This year we realigned our organization, mainly driven by this strategy to grow the business, to get closer to our customers and to improve our service delivery to them. We have become a more responsive and agile organization in order to meet and exceed our customers’ needs and expectations in a cost effective, quality and timely manner. We completed this challenging exercise earlier this year and have been pleased with the feedback from many of our customers that they are already seeing a positive impact of these changes on our ability to serve them even better.

In recent years, like most global organizations, we faced the challenge of keeping up with the demands of high quality IT resourcing to meet the ever growing needs of our customers. Since we are not ready to compromise on quality we created a Strategic Sourcing & Development unit to specifically address this important issue. As a result of this focussed effort, we recently opened our off-shore dedicated development centre in Bangalore, India. We also have a few other strategic initiatives planned in this area that we will share with you as we progress them in 2008. We are confident that these measures for augmentation of skilled quality resources beyond our current strength of 1,600+ professionals in Dubai will help us serve you better and deliver high quality products and services to the TTL industry.

In parallel to these initiatives we have continued to invest in innovative IT solutions that will make a difference to the aviation world in the coming years. This year we successfully introduced SkyChain, the next generation cargo management system, which is already making waves among the airlines who take their cargo business seriously. We also introduced other smart products such as TRIPS - to make personal and duty travel easy for airline staff, DaeX - a smart B2B internet portal to automate the interactions between tour operators and hotels, and many more. One of the key new initiatives that we started this year is the next version of our very successful revenue accounting system RAPID. This futuristic next generation system will serve our revenue accounting customers for decades to come and will further strengthen our position as the industry leader in that segment.

The year 2007 saw our 100th customer joining the Mercator family. We are thankful to the industry for continuing to express its confidence in our solutions and services. With our impressive customer base that constantly invests in enriching our solutions and the fastest growing aviation group in the world with a sound financial base owning us, we feel we have a unique position in the market and we can guarantee to be a long term sustainable partner for your IT needs. Unlike many private equity owned companies we are not driven by short term profits but are ready to heavily invest in the future with our people, products and services to contribute to the air transportation industry in its growth and in meeting the challenges of the future successfully.

Wish you a very happy holiday season and a successful new year 2008.

Thank you.
Patrick Naef

Mercator has just announced the recent adoption of DaeX, the unique trade automated booking channel, into their portfolio of services and solutions. After the successful launch and implementation by leading hoteliers/tour operators in the UAE, DaeX made its international debut at the 2007 World Travel Market (WTM) in London.

Built on world-class, leading technologies DaeX is a unique web service that delivers an allocated or best available rate booking direct to the PMS or CRS of a hotel, which then provides a confirmed booking reference number (directly from the CRS/PMS) for the wholesaler, tour operator, travel agent or corporate to use. This is done without the use of faxes, emails or telephones thereby bring cost efficiencies for both the supplier and the users.

Whereas the GDS or wholesaler stores rates of a property, DaeX does not. It simply makes a dynamic call to the CRS or PMS based on a block code or best available rates supplied by the property. This allows for accuracy, speed and real-time availability plus reduced man-hours when managing that booking.

“At WTM we introduced DaeX to an international audience of hotels and tour operators. We utilised the event as a platform to demonstrate the benefits of DaeX to major players in the hospitality industry,” said Robert Kane, Product Strategy Manager, Mercator.

“We have been impressed with the universal praise that DaeX has received throughout its testing phases across both the hotel and tour operator sectors. We know that because DaeX is able to excel in the UAE, a market with one of the highest revPar’s in the world, it will succeed anywhere,” Kane continued.

Prior to marketing DaeX globally, 54 leading hotels in the UAE have approved implementation of the service and are now ready to connect to it. The solution has proven its ability to facilitate the management of room allocations, such as tentative and cancelled bookings automatically, helping hotels to maximize revenue, better manage their room rates and control booking costs.

DaeX also provides hotels with a unique web based Hotel Information Management System (HIMS) where all information about the property's products, services and policies can be managed dynamically. This allows the information to be distributed via a web service thereby reducing costs on managing collateral.

DaeX has demonstrated its worth to tour operators as well, enabling them to successfully manage allocations to sub-agents. This gives the operators the freedom to allocate rooms, rates and share up to date information with each of these sub-agents using a single tool in real time, maximizing their distribution channels and cutting down the time needed to contact and update each of them.

What do Singapore Airlines, Qantas, Air New Zealand, British Airways, MASkargo, Philippine Airlines, Emirates, Kenya Airways, Jet Airways and Yemenia have in common?  They all use the same system for cargo revenue accounting – RAPID.  Developed by Mercator, RAPID currently has more than 50 airline customers and has firmly established itself as the market leader.

The dramatic growth of the airline industry, business complexity, differing business models and a strong emphasis on cost reduction have defined the following key business drivers for a revenue accounting system:

RAPID undoubtedly meets these criteria with powerful functionality:

The system can be used for both passenger and cargo revenue accounting either separately or together.  

Air Astana and Virgin Nigeria, the respective flag carriers of Kazakhstan and Nigeria, have signed up for Mercator’s CRIS frequent flyer and customer relationship management solution.

CRIS will revolutionise their frequent flyer programmes, bringing in a broad range of innovative, appealing and user-friendly new features. The airlines’ more regular travellers will be transformed into their most loyal customers.

At Air Astana, CRIS will power the “Nomad Club” frequent flyer program. Nomad Club members will be able to access CRIS functionality via Air Astana’s website www.astana.com. The system’s extensive customer relationship functionality will allow timely access to quality passenger information, which will help Air Astana to better understand their customers and deliver services to match their customer expectation.

Mr Ashendra Liyanage, VP Sales and Marketing of Air Astana, said: “We are currently experiencing rapid growth and Air Astana is becoming a major player in the CIS region. Nomad Club will continue to foster our setting of quality standards and will further augment our goal of establishing the Air Astana website as “a one-stop Travel Shop for Kazakhstan.  

“CRIS will be one of the key enablers for the success of Nomad Club and we’re looking forward to launching this to our customers in December 2007. We are confident that it will give us a key competitive advantage.”

At Virgin Nigeria, CRIS will power the airline’s EagleFlier FFP. Virgin Nigeria has opted for a hosted version of the CRIS solution. Mercator will maintain the system at its state-of-the-art facilities in Dubai, and Virgin Nigeria will access this via a dedicated web link to perform all frequent flyer programme activities.

Yemi Osindero, Chief Operating Officer, Virgin Nigeria, said: “We’re passionate about our customers and we always try our best to give them the best travel experience whenever they fly with us. It is one of our top priorities to recognise and thank the support of these most loyal customers.

“Mercator’s CRIS will give us everything we need to make EagleFlier a truly unique loyalty reward programme. Our customers will enjoy a wide range of benefits, never seen before in Nigeria, and we look forward to building a strong Virgin Nigeria customer family.”