Hello, everyone. My name is Jason Hamilton. I work for S-Trip. We're a student travel company located in Toronto. I am officially the director of marketing for S-Trip, although since S-Trip is a small to medium-sized enterprise, my title includes web technology, communications, brand partnerships, and everything in between.
We offer travel to both university and high school students. We target a market that is very much within the digital space, both mobile technology and computer technology.
I would like to give you a brief history of S-Trip to bring everyone up to speed on what we do. In 1976, a man by the name of Inder Handa started a travel agency here in Ottawa called Handa Travel. Out of Handa Travel, Inder's son, Alex Handa, began selling student travel to his friends and to other students within the Ottawa region. In 2007, he moved to Toronto and started S-Trip as its own unique brand. Since then we have developed into one of the largest student travel companies in the country, focused on university and high school students.
That growth has come in large part from some technology improvements that we have been focusing on. I'll tell you a bit about the customer focused IT strategy that we have that has allowed us to succeed in the marketplace, particularly in recent years.
Our IT strategy could be put into a very simple formula. We leverage existing technology solutions to be efficient on the back end, and spend our development time and creativity to create real value on the front end. Recognizing our core competencies in running a small to medium-sized business are not in back end development. We do not have back end developers on staff. That's not something that we focus on. We hire back end developers who have those skills. We also use technologies that exist in the marketplace such as CRMs and content management systems.
Those technologies allow us to have a strong back end, but then we focus more on the front end. By focusing on the front end, we're able to offer a digital experience that reaches directly to our customer, something that reaches them on their terms, something that enables them to experience our product, experience travel in a way that they want to. Obviously, our customers, being between the ages of 16 and 24, are very adept and in tune with technology.
I'd like to highlight three parts of our IT strategy that I think are important for any small or medium-sized business. Number one, we are 100% on the cloud. All of our servers, all of our software, all of our documents, and anything that we would use within our business, all exist on the cloud. That allows everything to be accessible from anywhere. That allows our technology to be shifted easily. It's very easy to add somebody new into the business. Anybody new to a team who needs to find a document can easily find it through the cloud, through a search functionality that allows them to find it in an easy manner. That is one thing that certainly has allowed us to succeed.
We're also very customer focused in the way we manage our web properties. As I mentioned before, we focus very much on the front end of our website and our web properties in order to offer our customers a simple easy experience when they're online. It's amazing how many small businesses I see where you go to their website and you want to find something very simple, maybe a form that you need to download or a phone number that you need to call, and it's a nightmare even to get to that place to find that.
We focus very much on what the customer wants. We do a lot of research and a lot of focus groups with our customers to understand what they're looking for when they're on our website, and how we can best service them. It's amazing to see those businesses that are doing that. They are able to have those much quicker interactions and customers don't need to call us anymore. We certainly encourage customers to find their solutions online themselves before calling our customer hotline. We've seen as a result of that a definite decrease in the number and the length of calls we receive as a result of that focus online.
The last thing is that we have an efficient back office. We have central services located in our head office in Toronto, as well as those services that we do outsource. Once again, we focus on our core competencies and outsource those things in which we do not have a core competency.
There are a couple of business challenges to tell you about that I think are unique to any small and medium-sized business. One is communication. Technology has the amazing capability to enable faster and more efficient communication. However, being a small or medium-sized enterprise, we don't have the funds to invest in the larger IBM enterprise solutions that can often allow bigger businesses to communicate better.
We've done well with Google Enterprise as a strong solution. Google Enterprise has a much lower cost base. A simple thing like Gchat is something that all of our employees use on a daily basis to communicate with each other. We see fewer and fewer of our employees picking up the phone to call each other and more and more of them communicating over Gchat and sharing documents over Gchat. As we've grown nationally and have had to open offices across the country, it has allowed those new employees to have access to all of our resources. It also allows us to communicate with them.
We have also utilized a lot of video technology as we've grown. We have a large part-time contract team, about 500, that we hire every year. Since we are in travel, they go on our trips and run our trips. Hiring those from across the country is obviously a challenge when you can't meet them all face to face. So we have utilized Skype and other video technologies as a way to complete those interviews and trainings. Video technology has become a big part of our business from our staffing side, in terms of training, all the way through to our sales side.
Finally, the last part of our business challenge is communication. This challenge has grown as a result of international challenges. Being a travel company that sends students internationally, the technology and the web infrastructure that exist in some of the countries that you go to are a little bit slower than we experience here. So that was a bit of a challenge that we've faced, and we've been working towards overcoming that by working with local suppliers and trying to build Wi-Fi hotspots and whatnot in the places where we go. But that's a somewhat unique challenge to us because we do operate mostly in an international environment in a lot of countries that just don't have the infrastructure that we have. But as we've been able to grow, we have been able to overcome that through various Wi-Fi hotspots and whatnot.
I think that pretty much wraps up everything that I would share with you.