I am struggling to book our summer vacation. This is not new. Every trip we take is a chore to book. Instead of delighting in the possibilities, I am bogged down by the inflexible search, the narrow-minded recommendation engines, the sifting through of reviews. I am thankful for the candid photos and the crowd sourced reviews. I learn a lot. But there are so many choices and the advice is as varied as the number of possible destinations. I want to know what’s the best deal, the best hotel, the best option for what we care about, but this is drowned in the data available. With this experience it was no surprise to me when I heard Gagan Saxena (@Gagan_S), CIO of Apple Vacations, speaking at IBM IMPACT earlier this month, say that more than 90% of vacation shoppers abandon online research and seek travel agents even in the internet age.

To improve the online experience, Apple Vacations set out to redesign the consumer experience by creating a “smart” system that brings the new capabilities of business rules management, analytics, big data, predictive modeling, complex event processing and natural language processing into the organization. To do this, they adopted a decision-centric business design approach. To learn more about customer decision management, Decision Management Solutions will be hosting a free webinar with Gagan on A New Approach to Business Design at Apple Vacations on May 22, 2012 at 10:00 am PT, 1:00 pm ET. Register here. #decisionmgt https://decisionmanagement.omnovia.com/register/13041336506644

{ 0 comments }