Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Zuji

Website: http://www.zuji.com/


ZUJI, Asia-Pacific’s most comprehensive online travel company, puts the world of travel at your fingertips. It is a well established travel coordinator that organizes tours on well trodden path to the road that are rarely used by; popular tourist spot or an unusual destination. With their wide network of global partners, ZUJI makes traveling easy. Gain access to over 400 airlines, 77,000 hotels, 50 car hire companies plus 3,000 activities and attractions. They provide helpful travel planning tools and destination information that make your trip wonderful and well planned for. However, the most apprehensive matter that clients or customers may have is probably the online security done for Zuji, as many of their transactions are done through the internet. Customers are assured by them as they have engaged themselves with Verisign, which is the global leader in online security for e-commerce payments. Customers’ interests are well vested of. Although Zuji is operating through the web, they still provide excellent customer care as they are well reached and accessible through email, phone and fax – 7 days a week if there are any queries with their online booking. They provide value-added service, the price guru, for customers to tracks the lowest return airfares for up to five chosen destinations and alert the customer via e-mail when it hits or betters the amount specified by the customer. In the following paragraphs, we’ll provide more information on the online agency provider.

Zuji is a website that allows the consumer to plan their own overseas trips with best economical prices. However, they do not cater to the consumers who wish to take budget airlines. Zuji provides consumers to view different ranges of airplane tickets, hotels, railway tickets, cruise, car rentals, packages, deals, activities, insurance and travel tools. In addition, they also have a market place that allows consumers to buy gifts on the run, learn scuba diving, etc… Hence, Zuji is a transaction broker. Zuji approaches in a business to consumer (B to C) and business to business (B to B) function. On its upfront, Zuji is a B to C company as consumer directly purchases their air ticket from them. On the other hand, Zuji deals with the airline companies, hotels and many others. In short, Zuji is an agent that links up consumers’ wants and needs to their preferred airline companies, hotels, transportations, activities and insurance. Zuji shows many different packages, promotions and deals around the year. It also associates with car rentals companies and railway tickets. For instance, if the consumer is going to Europe, he or she might want to buy Euro rail tickets for easier traveling in Europe. Conversely, if the consumer is going to America, he or she might want to rent a car for travel convenience. This allows the consumer to have everything pre-planned and organized before he or she reaches the destination. The consumer does not need to worry about traveling methods when he or she just arrived at the destination. Zuji promotes its packages by lowering the total cost of hotels and flights fees. This enables the consumer to save a sum of money. Therefore, they are customer-orientated, which illustrates that Zuji possesses a behavioral approach. One of the evidences that Zuji possesses a behavioral approach is that it also offers activities like sightseeing, tours, attractions and events to be booked online. For example, if the traveler decides to tour in Singapore, he or she would like to go sightseeing at the zoo, night safari, sentosa, etc. Zuji caters to these events by selling electronic tickets (e-tickets) to them. As a result, Zuji cooperates with tour agencies from all over the world to organize these activities. One of the essentials to purchases before the tour is insurance. Zuji make the purchasing of insurance convenient to the customers. They even separate the insurance into different category like medical and comprehensive insurance. The ability of purchasing insurance online is a great advantage to Zuji as it suits the working theme. Travel tools such as arrival/departure information, currency converter, weather information, and visa requirements are provided in the Zuji website. Last but not least, these transactions are made by VISA or master card (credit card) payments. Thus, Zuji have to collaborate with banks to ensure both tight security and smooth transaction to take place. In the Zuji website, it presents both privacy and security policy therefore; it gives the consumer a sense of security when purchasing through the internet. On top of that, Zuji’s website gives help and customer care, to support this feature; they even have hotlines and emails provided.

With Zuji’s well designed and user friendly website, this enables consumers to have a well navigated experience while surfing their website. They have designed the website in such a way that it caters as a one-stop-site for all purposes to satisfy those traveling consumers. Hence, with its easy accessibility, this creates convenience for their potential and existing customers. It has installed tight security measures and a third party secure transaction provider such as VeriSign to enhance their security system. This has thus make their customers feel safe to do transactions online. Moreover, they are well recognized by the awards they proudly presented on their websites. As their well-established business-to-business relationship, they are able to create and offer attractive promotions and packages to their consumers. Clear and well-defined interactive efforts for example feedbacks and polls are put in to engage with the customers. Zuji is competent to create the “flow of spaces” for its clients as everything is done online. Clients made transactions online, they will sent them the paid air tickets via mail to them. This saves a lot of hassle for their consumers to be physical there to make payments or collect their tickets. Zuji has made an effort to understand their customers by creating a customer care page to gain feedbacks from their consumers and also to answer any enquiries posted by them. Enhancements or add-on services are provided for instance car renting or booking. Once the consumers named their requirements, they will handle properly and settled the administrative work for them. Lastly, a good website is one that has a sitemap. Zuji provides a good, well-defined and helpful sitemap to assist their consumers while browsing their website.

Although, there are many positive points of this website, we noticed a few down sides of the zuji website. For instance, some pages requires much longer loading period then others, hence for those who are rushing for time may find it as convenience in this case. On the other hand, we also discover that it does not cater for lower tier or those who have budget constraints, there are no packages or airlines found on the site that caters to this needs. Moreover, there are also certain advertisements that are quite misleading, for example prices are not stated clearly even until the stage of payment. Therefore, this should be clarified in order to curb more confusion and misleads. Hence, all of the negative factors that are mention above should not be over looked and we think that the website have more room for improvements and that they should act on it to improve the quality of the website so that both their customers and themselves can benefit from it!

With Zuji’s well designed and user friendly website, this enables consumers to have a well navigated experience while surfing their website. They have designed the website in such a way that it caters as a one-stop-site for all purposes to satisfy those traveling consumers. Hence, with its easy accessibility, this creates convenience for their potential and existing customers. It has installed tight security measures and a third party secure transaction provider such as VeriSign to enhance their security system. This has thus make their customers feel safe to do transactions online. Moreover, they are well recognized by the awards they proudly presented on their websites. As their well-established business-to-business relationship, they are able to create and offer attractive promotions and packages to their consumers. Clear and well-defined interactive efforts for example feedbacks and polls are put in to engage with the customers. Zuji is competent to create the “flow of spaces” for its clients as everything is done online. Clients made transactions online, they will sent them the paid air tickets via mail to them. This saves a lot of hassle for their consumers to be physical there to make payments or collect their tickets. Zuji has made an effort to understand their customers by creating a customer care page to gain feedbacks from their consumers and also to answer any enquiries posted by them. Enhancements or add-on services are provided for instance car renting or booking. Once the consumers named their requirements, they will handle properly and settled the administrative work for them. Lastly, a good website is one that has a sitemap. Zuji provides a good, well-defined and helpful sitemap to assist their consumers while browsing their website.

Zuji being one of the most trusted online travel company has own its success to its wide network of partners. This is also the reason why they can still have gain hold with competition from many others players in the industry. They provide one of the cheapest service due to their economies of scale from their vast customer base. Zuji also gained its popularity through all the prestigious award that they received from; for example, No.1 on hitwise company, the world’s leading online competitive intelligence service and many others. We can see from the above that Zuji with its successful events, they too have their downsides of the service. It is both an informational and behavioural system, however, it slants more towards behavioural system. As their activities are mainly performed online, their transcation involves reading and accepting of terms and condition stated to the customers. Lastly, to conclude, with the massive competition around, Zuji has to keep up with the latest technology and try to source for the best low prices for their customers.

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