Small travel company reservation system technology doesn’t capture the imagination (nor the headlines) as much as other sectors attracting online travel entrepreneurs such as metasearch, consumer reviews or mobile/location services.
But bubbling under the surface there are products launching that are changing the way small travel suppliers work with their customers and suppliers.
Hotels have long had web based PMS systems but niche tour operators and activity companies are fast catching up.
Leading companies include Rezgo (presented at Phocuswright Travel Innovation Summit in 2008), TouristWay (pitched at GetFundedShow 2009), AdventureEngine, AdventureLink and TourCMS.
TourCMS has today launched a new service that it says has the potential to be game-changing in the niche tour operator/activity company sector.
Built on top of their existing web based reservation system used by approximately 60 specialist tour operators is a new service called the TourCMS Marketplace.
The service enables tour operators to load tours, dates, prices and availability. Travel website partners can sign up and form content relationships with those suppliers and have then direct access to live pricing/availability content via an XML API.
Managing director Alex Bainbridge (disclosure: also a Tnooz node) says:
“One problem that small tour operators face is that they have to work with so many different travel website extranets keeping dates, prices & availability information current.
“The TourCMS Marketplace enables the niche supplier to manage their information in one place. It is not unlike RateTiger from the hotel sector merged with a conventional flight/hotel GDS approach.
“Uniquely in our sector the TourCMS marketplace supports end point contracts. By this we mean that the supplier contracts with the OTA or travel website directly.
“Some may choose to work on an PPC basis, others on an affiliate basis, others on a advertising listing basis. The marketplace supports all of that as well as DMO style concepts where a regional website may want to list all their local companies in one place but not have to go to the effort of building yet another administration extranet that no one wants to update.”
Launch partners include Adventure Networks, which is launching a series of commercial DMO websites, and Adnet from Worldreviewer, an online advertising platform used by around 300 advertisers on 25 travel websites.
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Congratulations Alex and TourCMS! The marketplace is a brilliant idea and one that you know I have been advocating for the industry for a long time. When we launched RezgoConnect, the Rezgo supplier & reseller marketplace a year ago, it was with the hope that other leading providers like TourCMS would follow. Anything we, as technologists, can do to make distribution for small providers easier and more efficient is good for the industry as a whole. I look forward to following your success with this new initiative.
Nice post Kevin and congrats to Alex and TourCMS!
I agree with Stephen that as technology suppliers you’re in a key position to add value to both your TourCMS operators partners and to the websites that sell their products by providing distibution functionality that simplifies the data and the acquisition process.
At Tourabout we’ve been acquiring and aggregating tour data directly from 150+ different tour operators globally from smaller local to large multinational and global suppliers for a number of years. Now with close to 30,000 tours one of the main things we found that adds to the complexity is the quite varied stages operators are at technically. They have very different data formats and structures as well as a wide variety of activity type and category type descriptions that exist for sometimes quite similar products.
Anything that can be done to streamline, simplify and standardise the data and the process is a welcome addition and I look forward to seeing more.