Sep 25
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Introducing Internal Notes For Rate Management

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TourConnect has a really diverse customer base. We have companies from well over 100+ countries – ranging from single owner/operator tours or small B&Bs, to ITOs, and large multi-national corporations. And one item that holds true across all is their need to continually be organized and efficient with their time. As we continue to grow the TourConnect platform, we’re focused on ways in which we can drive efficiency across our entire customer base. This is why we’ve added an Internal Notes feature to our Contract Management Tool.

Whether you are a supplier sending your rates, or a buyer using TourConnect to manage all of your static rate agreements, it is important to be able to record information for you and your team’s eyes only. These may be reasons why the commission rate is what it is or a note from a conversation during a trade event about this years rates.

 

These notes stay throughout the lifecycle of the contract and will always be available when it comes time to readdress the rates – during loading time or before the next round of rate updates. Its a great way to keep the right information in a logical and sharable place – for you and your entire team.

To learn more about our Rate Management tool and how it can help drive efficiency for you and your team register to attend one of our upcoming webinars.

Sep 25
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Introducing In-App Messaging

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We feel passionately that partnerships are a core piece to the success in the B2B tourism market. Because of this we are continually building tools to enhance these relationships. We already have great existing offerings which help you better organize your partners, discover new partners, and even a private social network for your partners to post periodic updates for you to easily see on your Newsfeed.

When we looked at our tools to see the next logical step, we felt we could help make conversations and communication more accessible. Within the TourConnect platform, there is already so much you can do to interact and engage with your partners, but we saw a gap of being able to directly reach out to your partners. We’re excited to now be able to allow you to directly message your connections in TourConnect all from within TourConnect!

What this means now is we’ve unlocked a much easier workflow to getting the answers you need – all in a single platform.

We’re excited to be making just some of the following workflows easier:

Suppliers: Uncertain of the deadlines for marketing materials? Just ask, get an answer and send your marketing materials over with just a few clicks of the button.

Suppliers: Did a new partner just accept your connection request? Send them a message introducing yourself – straight from within TourConnect.

Buyers: Missing some rates from a tier 1 supplier. Send them a quick reminder in-app. They’ll then be in TourConnect to send over their new rates.

Buyers: You’ve used PartnerFinder to find new product offerings and now you can directly communicate with them on TourConnect. You and your colleagues will be able to keep up with the conversation…no more shared inbox communication necessary.

 

In-app messaging is available to every account. Simply head to your connections list, click the message button and send your partners a message. This is just one of many upcoming features putting you and your partners at the core of TourConnect.

 

Aug 20
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Introducing TourConnect’s Rate Requests for Groups

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TourConnect is excited to announce our newest feature aimed at making it easier for group tour operators to manage rates for their groups.  Following the success of our rate management tool for static rates, our Group Quoting Tool provides a streamlined process for getting quotes/bids from hotels and day tours for group travel.

As the first release of this tool, our goal was to provide 4 specific capabilities:

  1. Clear, concise tracking of every request sent to suppliers for rates
  2. The ability to capture all conversations/negotiations for each request/quote/bid
  3. Consistent format and data for every quote/bid
  4. Easy access to the final rates and history of a quote/bid for an entire team

The capabilities we focused on have 3 key benefits:

  1. Cut down on general inefficient communications/processes that drive up costs
  2. Minimize errors that cut into profits
  3. Give the power to get additional quotes for more competitive offerings

We are excited about the opportunity to help transform the group touring portion of the tourism industry.

Read More

Nov 03
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WTM 2017 Unofficial Guide

By TourConnect Team No Comments

Yet another WTM is upon us this year – with the TourConnect team, and 50,000 of our favorite people are heading to London for a week of amazing networking, learning, growing and let us not forget about having some fun too. We’ve made this trip an annual occasion, but we know there are some first timers too, so we’ve taken a lot of what we have experienced and learned from our time over the years and created our Unofficial Guide to WTM 2017.

Check it out, we’d love to hear your thoughts and more about what you’d include. Share it with friends and colleagues too! If you’re going to be at WTM, we’d love to see you, we’ll be in the Technology section at booth TT439. Safe travels to all and we’ll see you in London!

Apr 19
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An Open Letter To New Zealand Suppliers

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In our continued mission to change the travel industry, we’ve received the support of many key Inbound Tour Operators for New Zealand. They’ve come together in support of TourConnect’s effort to standardize rate exchanges between suppliers and buyers. We greatly appreciate the support and are humbled by the value they see in what we have created. This is their letter to their suppliers –

To Our New Zealand Suppliers —

We are the inbound tour operators that sell your products, and this year, we are joining together to ask that all 2018-2019 rates be sent to us using TourConnect.

Among other things, TourConnect is a service that will allow you to enter your rates in a universal format that everyone in the travel industry can use. Using TourConnect for your rates will ensure that your rates are complete, and in a format that makes it easy for your products to be loaded, and ultimately sold.

You will still have control over the commissions you wish to give, and there is a free option to send your rates to all of your partners. TourConnect can even store your rates from year to year, so you’ll never have to load them from scratch again.

While your 2018-2019 rates may not be ready yet, we recommend creating a free account now. If you have any questions, TourConnect will be happy to assist.

We believe that TourConnect is beneficial to all of us in the industry. We understand that sending rates in a new method may have some challenges, but we’re trying to improve the way we all communicate and do business so we can all forever get rid of lengthy, manual contract forms.

We appreciate you joining the effort and look forward to selling your great products in the future.

Your product managers,

– Scott Mehrtens – General Manager, Leisure Time Travel
– Katie Hill – Rates/FX Strategist, Australia One
– Graziella Caruso – Product & Business Development Manager, Goway Travel
– Kumar Swaminathan – Managing Director, XperieNZ
– Alberto Rezende – Director, OPS Travel
– Ezequiel Nunez – Director, Pacific Travel Planners