International Journal of Computer Engineering & Technology (IJCET)

Volume 7, Issue 3, May-June 2016, pp. 205213, Article ID: IJCET_07_03_020

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ISSN Print: 0976-6367 and ISSN Online: 09766375
IAEME Publication

SMAC TECHNOLOGIES CHANGING THE

WAY WE TRAVEL
Kusum Yadav
P.G. Student, Department of Master of Computer Application,
K. J. Somaiya Institute of Management Studies and Research,
Vidyanagar, Vidyavihar, Mumbai.
Kimaya Ambekar
Assistant Professor, Department of Master of Computer Application,
K. J. Somaiya Institute of Management Studies and Research,
Vidyanagar, Vidyavihar, Mumbai.
ABSTRACT
SMAC is the fifth wave of corporate IT; it is the era of rapid growth of
computing devices and creating data. It is also in the limelight of research and
development. As now a day everything is being given a personal touch
according to the consumers or the customer requirements, SMAC technologies
are a breakthrough for the same. It stands a high chance for improvement in
any industry in which they will be applied. It makes the job for the company a
bit easier as it helps in managing the technologies in the business and thus in
turn fulfilling the demands of the customers. SMAC technologies applications
can help to make the industry more productive, competitive and innovative.
Key words: SMAC, Social Media, Mobility, Analytics, Cloud, Tours, Travel
Cite this Article: Kusum Yadav and Kimaya Ambekar, SMAC Technologies
Changing the Way we Travel, International Journal of Computer Engineering
and Technology, 7(3), 2016, pp. 205213.
http://www.iaeme.com/IJCET/issues.asp?JType=IJCET&VType=7&IType=3

1. WHY SMAC
Many industries are currently working with the technologies like Social media,
mobility, analytics and cloud separately. It is a well known fact that in todays post
digital era [1] which is full of innovations, new technologies and transformations.
Also the customers and the employees are looking for the things anytime, anywhere
and with the help of any device- be it laptop, computer, mobile , tablets etc. They
work as per their convenience which is familiar to them in their personal lives. And
applications like Amazon, Facebook has made their lives easier. In this SMAC era,
the business applications have to embrace the same approach in order to enhance the

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Kusum Yadav and Kimaya Ambekar

end user experience and also to maximize the convenience and productivity with the
help of more and more interaction.

2. INTRODUCTION
We know that the mobile phones and the social media technology is a very integral
part of our lives today. Not just mobile phones it is about mobility, the ease of doing
anything from anywhere using any mobile device. The customers are becoming
intelligent day by day and thus in order to survive in the competition; the industries
need to understand the customer need and act well in advance. Social media has
become a place for hangout for todays customer, and thus it has become a very
important aspect for the enterprises to advertise their products. SMAC technology is
spreading very fast. According to some experts SMAC will account for $5 trillion of
the total spending by customers by the year 2020. [2]

3. UNDERSTANDING SMAC
When these technologies are used separately, they do provide benefit for the business
but when they are combined they can do wonders for the business. Social media is
providing businesses in various new ways in order to reach and interact with
customers, whereas the mobile technologies is changing the way people shop,
communicate and work. Analytics is allowing businesses to understand when, how
and where people will consume certain types of goods and services and cloud
computing is providing a new way to access the changing technology and the data, to
which a business needs to, respond quickly according to the changing markets and
solve business problems. Each of the four technologies can impact a business
individually its their convergence that is creating new business models for the service
providers.
The integration of these technologies requires some clear guidelines and policies
as well as management tools that can be helpful in automating the business processes.
The media company Netflix is a very good example of a business that has harnessed
the power of SMAC successfully. For example, when any Netflix member want to
stream a TV show from the Netflix cloud to his/her iPad, he/she gets the option of
signing into Netflix using Facebook's social login. [3] After the show is over, the
member is given various ways to provide their social feedback. They can rate the
content with stars, or write their reviews and/or just share what they have watched
with friends on Twitter or Facebook. The customer data is stored in the cloud and
Netflix is able to break down its analysis to such a chapped a level that its
recommendation engine can then personalize the suggestions for individual family
members who share the same account. This concept is known as one to one
marketing.
In order to get the full benefit, IT departments will need a capability which will be
equivalent to a user experience engine so that they can provide the SMAC technology
integration, personalization and management by providing a relevant experience to
end users and thus by supporting their new work style. Its not only about the mobile
device management, or any mobile application management, and social platforms, but
it is about integrating such capabilities into a consistent user experience.
Also the IT departments will need to excel the deployment and development of
the SMAC-enabled infrastructures and applications, keeping three things in mind: to
develop the core skills around supporting the new work style of their employees and
customers, to understand how they can assess the business processes for

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SMAC Technologies Changing the Way we Travel

transformation with the help of SMAC technologies, and, to address the upcoming
information inflection point. They have to accomplish the last objective not just by
dealing with the sheer velocity and scale of their data streams, but also by focusing on
the machine-learning capabilities and other intelligent analytics in order to make
smart decisions which are related to this information in addition to the routine
processing.

3.1. Social Media/Networking

Technologies today have completely transformed the way in which the people interact
and communicate with each other and with various businesses. The concept of sharing
the content is no longer just about writing letters, or sending emails or placing any
advertising in print or online media outlets. But it is now about posting the content to
the wall or the website or the blog site, and also texting, tweeting and instant
messaging. The physical meeting and business interactions are rapidly being replaced
by virtual communication: such as the friends circle, business colleagues or family,
which were kept separate in the past, have now been replaced with virtual world and
overlapping communities of person, his business, his family and friends.

Figure: Penetration of leading social networks in India

[4]

3.2. Mobile Technologies

The Mobile technologies have entirely transformed when and where we interact and
communicate with each other, it eliminates the space and time boundaries almost
thoroughly. A person no longer has to be present at home to receive the letter or
phone call or wait until the store opens at 8:30 a.m. to buy the product. Most
importantly, mobile technologies have enabled us to attend the staff meeting from
anywhere.

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Kusum Yadav and Kimaya Ambekar

Figure: Smart phones driving enterprise mobility [5]

3.4. Analytics
Technologies have changed our perspective about how we determine with whom to
connect and on what topics, which all products to purchase or from where we can find
the best deal. The vast net projected by the marketing and the advertising at various
places is sometimes based upon the demographic segments of the readers or the
viewers. This is rapidly being fine tuned. The method of learning how to understand
each person uniquely and then to communicate with them as individuals is referred to
as a segment of one marketing and sales.
Analytics can be used in various fields like Banking (fraud detection, cross-selling
products) [6], Healthcare (preventive healthcare, smarter EHRs) [7], Retail
(inventory management, promotional analysis) [8] and Government (program
management, crime prevention, citizen services). [9]

3.5. Cloud Technologies

In the early stages of mass-market adoption, Cloud technologies have made an
exceptional impact upon how we now acquire the technology and, it also allows us to
be undeterred from the resources we use, whether they are work-related program/data
or play-related music/video. Now we can access all the digital stuff from anywhere at
any time.

Figure: End- users spending on cloud services [10]

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SMAC Technologies Changing the Way we Travel

4. TOURS AND TRAVEL INDUSTRY

Indias travel and tourism industry has massive growth potential. The tourism market
in India is expected to reach US$ 3.9 in size in year 2015 having growth of around
CAGR of 27 per cent in the last three years. [11] The tourism industry is looking
forward to expansion of the E-visa scheme which is assumed to increase the tourist
inflow to India two times. The revenue growth of Indian hotel industry is expected to
strengthen to 9-11 per cent in financial year 2015-16. [12] Also India is expected to be
the fastest growing nation in the tourism sector in coming five years, which clocks
almost 20 per cent gain annually through 2017. [13]
India is considered as one of the top tourist destinations in the world and the
tourist volumes have been registered to grow very strong in the last five years. The
tourist volumes are presumed to grow at the rate of over 11% annually until 2015,
with the health and the wellness tourism recording strong growth because of the high
healthcare costs in the Western countries and high-quality medical facilities that is
being now offered in India also. There are ample opportunities for the capital
investment sector. The air transport in India is still growing, and this rise in demand
and increase in buying power has now made this sector very engaging. The
infrastructure bottlenecks, delays in policy frameworks, poor hygiene standards and
rising crime rates are considered as the major challenges that should to be addressed
before the full growth potential of Indias travel and tourism sector can be utilized.
Now a days consumer is switching to the internet in order to take leverage of ease
of comparative pricing and booking online. Almost 95% of consumers try to search
online even before making any kind of travel purchase.[14] This indicates that many
consumers are comfortable with booking ticket online, but hotels and tour packages
are still booked offline. Thus it is assumed that there is a gap between the expectations
of the consumers and the actual facilities that are promised by hotels when booked
online. The Best deals is said to be important motivation for customers to do online
booking. Also 36% of the consumers make unplanned trips if they are offered some
discount.
The social media is affecting the purchase decision of 48% of consumers but the
personal experience of a consumer is expected to affect the decision more than the
experience of others. According to the research, 41% consumers make a purchase
when they receive a discount offer over email and 25% of the consumers make a
purchase when they receive an offer over SMS. [15]
It is said to be easy for a desktop user to look at more than one websites and
change from one competitor to another. But in case of an app the user is loyal; so the
majority of e-travel companies are trying to promote their Mobile app by giving
incentives to the consumers.

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Figure: Foreign exchange earnings from tourism in India. [16]

MakeMyTrip was started in 2000 which was not at all tech-savvy era. Thus the
challenges faced by the organization in its initial days were very much different to
what Yatra or Cleartrip (found in 2006) had faced. Various challenges faced by tours
and travel industries in the initial days are as follows:

Consumer Acceptance: Consumers in India were not sure about how to use such
platform and how it would work. That time they preferred to do the things in person.
Airlines Trust: The airlines were also prudent of new age travel agents as they were
not aware of how they are going to perform.
Industry Practices: The paper tickets were required to be printed and delivered; the
e-tickets were still not accustomed.
Tech Infrastructure: When they wanted to integrate and load the real time data of
the flight plans onto a platform it became a challenging task because of the limited
tech infrastructure. Many of the hotels didnt have their inventory online, which made
it difficult to bring more players online.

With the increase in the number of internet and Smartphone users, the industry has
evolved, and like other online business is trying to shift its focus to mobile. The
transaction and traffic from mobile is increasing. It is said that the size of transaction
is inversely proportionate to the contribution from mobile. As the size decreases, the
contribution increases.
Cleartrip was expected to get 50% of its traffic from mobile and by July 2015
[17], almost half of the transactions were expected to come through mobile. Some of
the trends and developments are as follows:

The penetration of the credit card usage on mobile phone is quite higher than on
desktop.
Initial discovery rate is still higher on mobile because mobile is the first point of
contact for the internet for many consumers.
The mobile usage is relatively higher on weekends.

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5. CHALLENGES
5.1. Winning Clients over Online [15]
Promoting new business via the Internet is a constantly evolving task. Some of the
large entities tend to command online visibility when it comes to travel. The solution
for this is never stopping telling your story to the consumers. There should be
constant communication with the consumers. In order to attract new customers online,
we should give them facilities like personalization, specialization, telling stories also
inviting them for more meaningful relationship with them.

5.2. Turning Social Media Marketing/Advertising into a Solid ROI [16]

It is possible that in coming years social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and
Instagram will become source of probable sale. But are the industries doing enough
things to make sure that the time spent on the social media actually equates to money
and not just some leads? The solution for this is by learning about Facebooks specific
marketing tools. They need to use the Facebook ads in order to build a list of the
quintessential prospects that can be added as target. Then they can build a relationship
with this list that is prepared by sending e-mails which will help to deliver a highvalue content and in turn will allow the consumers to know the industry. Also these
ads should be managed properly by the back end tools.
The strategies should be created with monthly or yearly goals and the target
audience should be based on the data of the consumers age, sales, location, interest,
marital status, travel types, spend and travel destinations.
The concept of Dark Posts can be used to distribute the newsfeed of the people
who as liked the companys page and it will not be posted on the companys page as
any post, thus it remains unpublished or dark posts. These kinds of posts will allow
the company to target the audience in the same way as an ad or a post on their page. It
is very important that the consumers attention is drawn towards the company, and the
most important way to do that is by making the required changes in the social ad
spend. The content is also an integral part of the social ads. So it should be taken care
of. But the context is more important than content.

6. FUTURE AHEAD
There is still enough scope for growth in the future with the help of the internet and
the smart phone penetration. The airlines look positive as of now and the hotels and
holidays are also looking to grow. As the number of Indians traveling overseas is not
very high, the potential market is still huge.
The applications can be made for the user as per their requirements. One of such
application will work in the following way. When a person wants to go for a trip at a
certain destination, she can become confused by looking so many websites that are
available online. Instead of giving one solution to the consumer these websites can
confuse the consumer even more. As these website will be having hundreds of hotels
with the reviews by many people, yet how the consumer will believe those review it is
doubtful. Now this application will allow the consumer to go to it and search for the
trip on which the consumers want to go. This application will then tie to the
consumers social media sites like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. It will find the
names of friends who can help the consumer in planning the trip. The application will
be selecting such friends who have either been at the place which the consumer has
searched, or lived there or had gone for trip there. Now these friends will suggest the
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consumer regarding the places she should visit, the food that is special at that place
and other things. The suggestions can be seen by other friends who can agree or
disagree with the place suggested. If the consumer finds the place interesting she can
add that trip and thus book it then and there itself. Now the consumer when taking trip
suggested by her friends can tag on the social media sites and thus give feedbacks to
the friends. This application should allow the person to capture all the pictures and
share it when the consumer is finished with the trip. Even if any of the consumers
friends want to do the same trip they can simply copy her trip.
This application will allow the SMAC technologies to be combined and thus
providing benefit to the company which is working towards making progress in the
competitive environment they are currently in. this will give a personalize touch to the
trip that the consumer is planning for herself. It will also take the burden off from the
consumer to reply to any kind of email from any travel site.

7. CONCLUSION
The tours and travel industry is still growing day by day. The availability of more and
more information on the deals and the packages gives power to the consumer and it
increases the way the consumer does his planning, research and buying options.
Therefore, technology has to be utilized properly in order to create the huge repository
of information. Also customer loyalty is sometimes hard to gain, and when the
customers have multiple options available at a few clicks, it becomes trickier to win
the customer. The main attributes which help to decide the loyalty of a consumer are
as follows:

Product: Since the online applications are now replacing the in-person
communications for any booking agency having the travel itinerary, it thus becomes
important that the product takes care of the needs of the consumers.
Customer service: This attribute shows whether any customer will return to the
company next time or not.
Price: The consumers in India are extremely price sensitive. So this attribute should
be kept in mind.
Content: The content should be easy to find, easy to use, and customized (on the
mobile).

8. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I would like to sincere thanks to Prof. Dr. D.G.JHA to giving me this opportunity and
Prof. Kimaya Ambekar and Prof Chinmay Palkar for their precious guidance.

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