Monish Luthra: A Pioneer

Monish Luthra founded Odysseus Solutions in 2005 with the aim to fill the industry need of an online travel booking engine that automates processes and is easily customized to support a client’s unique requirements and brand identity.

Monish started his career in the travel industry in 2001 at Cruise411.com where he played a vital role in keeping the operation running smoothly while helping the management team, suppliers, and customers to work together and understand each other’s needs or requirements. His collaborative approach allowed for all parties to meet the needs of the ever-changing marketplace and deliver an online cruise product that exceeded the expectations of all involved. After working at Cruise411.com for several years, Monish saw the broader industry opportunity for an online travel booking engine. Using his signature collaborative approach, Monish organized a working group of developers, suppliers and travel agents and set out to design and develop the ultimate travel booking solution. The result was the Odysseus Booking Engine, one of the most complete and advanced online travel booking engines available today.  Fully customizable and multifaceted Business to Business (B2B), Business to Consumer (B2C), and Business to Business to Consumer (B2B2C) application helps automate processes and increase revenues while it reduces the time and efforts required to complete a transaction.

Odysseus Solutions: Providing Innovative and Affordable Solutions Globally

The Odysseus Booking Engine provides Live access to content so the most up to date availability and pricing is used. The Booking Engine’s Supplier Connection Gateway provides access to content from various sources, and additional connections can be added depending upon the customer’s requirements. Clients maintain their relationship with Travel Suppliers such as airlines and cruise lines as the application uses their specific agency ID as a point of sale for all bookings.

Their Revenue Management Tools include the ability to adjust a product’s selling price, and there are even optional features that run fraud checks or inform clients if a credit card is declined.  Odysseus applications are designed to meet the unique requirements of Global Marketplaces and can easily handle multiple currencies as well as multiple languages and cultures. In addition to North America, Odysseus provides online booking solutions to clients based in South America, Australia, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

The Odysseus Air XML option is a “smart” API that provides much more than a simple “live” connection to check airline pricing & availability or to book a flight. This innovative product allows clients to take advantage of the powerful business logic and processing capabilities of the Odysseus Air Booking Engine while customizing the look & feel of their user interface at their convenience. Customers can host all air booking user interfaces on their servers while using the Odysseus Air XML for business logic as well as live pricing, availability & booking. This simple XML interface can also combine multiple sources into a single interface, eliminating the need to maintain multiple connections.

Some of the tremendous success that Odysseus has experienced may be attributed to the state of the art technology used and innovative features developed, but the strong customer support they provide and ongoing collaboration with clients is what has given Odysseus the most success stories.

Winning Strategy

Monish’s plans for the company moving forward include a steady growth in customers and support staff while continuing to collaborate with clients and suppliers to enhance existing products as well as develop new products and services clients are looking for.

Monish confirms that the company is all set to introduce new products and services like;

New content sources: Odysseus is in the middle of integrating content from several new content sources including more cruise lines, tour & activities API’s, and additional GDS’s.

Dynamic Packaging:  Odysseus will release dynamic packaging that includes; Air+Hotel+Cruise bookings by early 2017.

A Global Presence: Odysseus has been steadily gaining traction outside North America and they expect to take their biggest leap in the global marketplace in 2017!

“No two clients sell the same product the same way and the fact that we understand that and are willing to adapt our product to their requirements is a key factor to our success. To put it simply, we listen, we put ourselves in the client’s shoes and challenge their requirement and then plan our development,” asserts Monish.

Dreaming Big, Aiming High

Monish has had an eye towards the company’s global presence, more streamlined operations, development team, and enterprise level infrastructure. Monish has been working towards achieving those goals for a few years now and here are some of the things they have accomplished: Investing in new technology to track and monitor issues, server activity, etc. to proactively resolve issues before they even occur; upgrade existing functionality to the latest versions to be ahead of the demands of the market; continually adding new content sources, direct connect to Norwegian Cruise Line, Viking River & Viking Ocean for example, in 2016; hiring representatives in other parts of the world to establish the right presence.

“While change is good, and I want Odysseus to always be growing, it is important to me that I remain fully accessible to our clients, and we provide or exceed the quality of service to our existing clients that I personally promised when we signed them. To that end, I personally continue to monitor and stay tuned to all service requests and grow the support team,” confirms Monish.