ONE HUNDRED PER cent Kiwi owned and operated, the House of Travel prides itself in providing the best in both customer and employee satisfaction.

Based on the perceptions of 7000 job seekers locally, the Randstad Awards is designed to uncover how the country’s largest 150 employers are perceived by today’s job seekers. House of Travel has consistently been featured in the awards as the top 20 of the most attractive employers in NZ.

IT director Mark Leadbetter says for 2016, key business technology projects will revolve mainly around an infrastructure refresh. Installing kiosks, modernisation of apps, and implementing user-driven business intelligence are technologies the IT team will also work on.

Its greatest challenges are meeting the changing needs of the business, agility, and working within budget constraints in the midst a 10 per cent increase in IT projects this year, says Leadbetter.

Leadbetter took on the ICT portfolio at HOT following the resignation of CIO David Veronese, now technology strategist at cloud services company Inde NZ.

Over the past year, the ICT team has focused their efforts on customer data management, and creating access to customer insights and big data tools.

Other IT initiatives carried out by the IT team were cloud strategy and services, and application delivery.