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Group departures and day tours
These style of travel products have fixed availability and fixed start and end date.Multiple bookings from multiple customers will reduce availability for that date
Example travel products:
- A day tour
- A two week tour of a country or region
- A training course
- A one off event
The travel product type (inside TourCMS) to use is a tour departure.
First create a tour (as the base concept) then add a single departure date for every ocassion that you want to run your trip. There are tools to either create many dates (e.g. for a season) or to update multiple dates (e.g. for a season)
For "one off" events, create a new tour for that event - and add a single departure date on that tour.
You can close individual departures by ticking the "close" tickbox on the dates & prices page. Departures can be configured to close automatically when either full or the departure start date is too soon.
Multiple departures on a single day
If you have multiple departures on a single day, you can add multiple departure dates. Each indivdidual departure can be indicated by the departure code OR a time. Times are great because they let you set a cutoff for example "2 hours before the start time" - and the cutoff will be different for morning vs afternoon tours.
Multiple rate types
As a default, TourCMS has a single rate type - however you can, for tour departures, load upto 10 different rate types. This will enable you to handle types such as Adult, Child, Concession etc. On the tour setup you can setup extra rates:
Once you have added extra rate types, additional price boxes will display on the tour departure price / date editing section.
You can choose to either use label #2 for a second description of the rate (that is shown to users) or perhaps to give an indicative price (the actual price will be set by what is loaded on each departure)
If you configure as above, the "people dropdown" (for selecting number of customers on a new booking) will display as follows:
Web booking engine configuration
There are 4 kinds of first screen configuration for tour departures:
- A single departure (a special case - rarely used)
- List "By the month" - so that your customers change month and the list changes
- List "Next 20" - regardless of the month setting, your forthcoming trips are shown
- Availability calendar - a nice calendar "by the month"
If you are selling a trip that has a single date duration (for example an afternoon city tour) and it runs every day - then the availability calendar is probably the best for you.
If you run a tour say once every couple of weeks - you may not want your customers jumping around between months to see when your tours are running - in this scenario we suggest you use the "show next X" departures setting. (You may also like to untick the "show month dropdown" setting as the month becomes irrelevant to you)
If you have many trips, but each trip is multiple day duration, then a list of departures maybe clearer than the availability calendar. In this scenario set to "All departures in user selected month - TABLE".
Tour pricing based on number of people on the booking
If you have pricing that depends upon the number of people in the booking - e.g.
- 1 - 200 GBP per person
- 2-3 150 GBP per person
- 4-6 130 GBP per person
- Use the quantity based pricing for tour departures (1-10 people in a booking)
- Use the TourCMS hotel functionality - with rates - and change the text in the booking engine from hotel to tour
- Setup a tour with a freesale season set to the main price - and use options to do the per person discount pricing. No accurate inventory control using tour freesale - but if you are going to manually check each booking as they come in - and not take online payments - then you may not need the accurate inventory control online as your staff can apply their own common sense!
- Setup using tour departures as normal - and use options to discount the price when more people are selected to book on an individual booking. Customers don't tend to mind seeing a discount on their booking information and they will probably have seen your entire price table anyway, so ge expecting to see the discount from the full price. The benefit of this approach is that you maintain accurate inventory/availability control as tour departures are the easiest to ensure you don't overbook and to close specific dates
Automated day tour bookings
The focus on day tours / group tours is on booking automation (vs efficiency for tailor-made tours)
Settings:
- Channel manager - Deposit - 100% up front (Forcing all tours to be prepaid upfront). If you want, on indivdiual day tours, you can change this deposit setting on a per tour basis)
- Channel manager - Process - Make it so that bookings come in quotation, then, as a result of a successful payment, are converted to confirmed (automatically). This is the default for new TourCMS accounts. Bookings without payment will expire automatically..... and bookings with payment can be issued vouchers etc
- Channel manager - Email templates - Create a CONFIRMED booking email & a FAILED PAYMENT email. Leave the others until you have worked out what you want
This seems a fairly standard agent approach and is supported in TourCMS.
- Channel manager - Deposit - set to 10% upfront (or whatever your % is)
- Configuration & Setup - General booking settings - Full balance due - Due on checkin
ALSO - bear in mind - some distribution deals MAY want 20% commission. So if you are only collecting 10%, you need to think about whether you want to be in those deals or not.... as by collecting commission and letting the supplier pay on customer checkin - this doesn't give you much money to play with when you come to distribute those tours.
Further information
- Using Excel to create a series of dates (Screencast) - how to save time when you want to configure many departure dates efficiently
- Booking engine design & integration - integration, screenshots, API etc
- Quantity based pricing for tour departures
- How to manage large group discounts