Companies that run series tours face interesting challenges. Here’s an example.
You may run a series of tours through southern Africa and they are designed so that people can buy a whole multi-country program or they can just buy segments of the whole. The capacity of your tour is governed by the size of the vehicle, and whether the same vehicle is used throughout, and the number seats you allocate to each segment. So technically you could start with a 20 pax vehicle and 8 pax; pick up 14 and drop two at the first point, and have no availability at the third point, but at the fourth point 3 pax drop so the last segment can take 3 more to the end.
Summit, with the shared inventory module, is designed to handle complex seat management like this. It will automatically take seats out of availability on all overlapping segments that are purchased and prevent overbooking. Simple, but complex.
If you don’t run these types of tours with overlapping segments, then all you need is Summit as there is no shared equipment. This is what we mean when we say that our system is adaptive. It has the complexity of design, but you don’t need to pay for it if you don’t use it.
Multi-day tours are also often sold through two channels: travel agents and direct to consumer. Typically, this means setting up two login areas, one that is consumer facing and allows bookings, and a second area where agents have to log in. Agent areas are functional and lack a lot of the descriptive and graphic content that consumers have access to. We were asked to create a really simplified way to allow agents to make reservations more quickly.
All the features of a regular tour booking had to be there: pre-set agent ID so commissions could be tracked and paid plus guest info, prices, dates and availability. Options for payments was needed so agents could take bookings that were net or gross.
We accomplished this with a very elegant solution and set it up with Milhouse Hostel in Buenos Aires. The result is a fast and handy way to generate more sales easily
If you’d like more information on selling and managing multi-day tours sales use the contact tab on the right to go to our contact page.