Travvia (at the time called Jucy Rentals) needed to ensure its IT systems and networks were appropriate for excellent customer service across Australia and New Zealand.
The green and purple vehicles shook up the rental industry more than 20 years ago, targeting road trip adventuring backpackers first in New Zealand, then Australia.
Travvia Group has 10 Australasian locations and staff dedicated to enabling smooth holiday transport pick-ups and drop-offs for travellers which are underpinned by their IT systems.
“For a while investment in technology wasn’t a priority, but as we grew we knew we needed more resources and expertise”, Travvia’s Head of Technology Shaun Veldman says.
The first step to improvements was to look at support partners that could really support Travvia and help it to thrive. BTG was recommended to Travvia by one of their sister companies. They were familiar with BTG’s capabilities and didn’t hesitate to make a recommendation based on their own experience.
“Travvia was relaunching and growing, we needed to build up the IT environment to support the business success and growth targets and create a platform that we can change and manoeuvre easily,” Shaun says.
“BTG is there to ensure our infrastructure is stable, reliable, available and resilient.”
Once BTG was in place providing day-to-day business support from December 2023, the team was engaged to audit the existing IT environment, recommend improvements and prioritise the upgrades.
In a year of continuous improvements, BTG has made necessary data centre upgrades, rationalised services used by Travvia, modernised the core networking components of the New Zealand infrastructure and is underway with the Australian networking requirements.
The support team migration was seamless. Shaun has had reports on how the BTG team responds to the issues experienced by Travvia employees. The staff certainly noticed a big improvement.
“IT support can sometimes be a tricky, tricky thing.
“I get feedback that our staff had a good customer service experience dealing with the help desk,” he says.
“BTG are a very professional and customer-focused organisation. They are easy to work with. From a technical perspective, everyone I had spoken to is very effective,” Shaun says.
The biggest problem Travvia had when Shaun started his job in 2023 was the under investment in their technology.
“There were a lot of things that weren’t compliant, that were out of date, and BTG created a roadmap to fix that and minimise our risk going forward,” Shaun says.
The changes were focused on improving reliability and availability and consequently building an environment that has more resilience, Shaun says.
“It’s not something that can be fixed straight away, but we’re moving to a more resilient place. It certainly helps me sleep at night.”
During the August 2024 CrowdStrike global IT shutdown, Shaun says BTG prioritised the needs of Travvia and no traveller bookings were lost.
“As a business that runs seven days a week, we were impacted, but it didn’t really affect our customers and that’s the key thing,” he says.
Considering what other international travel companies had to deal with, Shaun says this test of the support structure Travvia now has in place clearly shows that BTG responded well and has become a critical partner.
About BTG
BTG is a New Zealand-based technology service provider creating better connections for growing businesses here and across the ditch. With 80+ staff and 400+ customers across New Zealand and Australia, BTG specialise in expert engineering services, quality IT products and dedicated account management.
