For users of the TourCMS tour operator ecommerce platform

How do I reserve some spaces for a particular agent?

We are operating tours with fixed departures and generally a fixed number of seats per tour (unless we hire a larger bus).

A new agent with their own booking system has asked us to guarantee them a certain number of places on the tour departure, which may be varied up or down between us in the days before the tour date if required.

It seems as if the Marketplace and all the Agent setups have full access to book all available seats on the tours without nay restrictions which is good for maximising bookings, but does not allow segmenting off a flexible number of seats per departure.

We do not use TourCMS as our CMS, but our booking team use both the online booking engine and the administration login interface to make bookings and update customer details etc.

The only way I can think to do this is to do a dummy booking of say 10 pax for the agent, and then manually reducing that as they book seats approaching the day.

If we could leave the booking open but restrict our own staff somehow from booking the spots reserved for the other agent, that would also achieve what I need.

Can anyone suggest how else we might do this, or if there is some feature that I have missed in TourCMS (hopefully!)?

Thanks

Brad

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Permalink Reply by JP Fortin on February 5, 2011 at 3:47pm

We are doing something similar with the campus recreation office at the local college. They are selling some of our tours but are not using any online system at the moment (they're using an excel spreadsheet...). What we have been doing is using the "Block" feature under "Dates & Prices". We then adjust the number of seats blocked as we get closer to the date if needed.

You also need to enable in "Configuration", "Bookings", "General" for "departure block to count as sale".

That way you don't have to do a dummy booking to restrict those seats.

I agree that it would be nice to have the ability to assign seats to an agent. In our case the college is considering using marketplace in the future but this would become an issue for us then. We could then use the system for tours which can only be booked at their office, such as their annual college ski trip.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

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Permalink Reply by Brad Lowe on February 5, 2011 at 11:06pm

Thanks JP - that is perfect for what we need at the moment!

Brad

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Permalink Reply by Alex Bainbridge on February 6, 2011 at 8:33am

Great! Also, I have noted this request and lets see if we can come up with some improvements on how to approach this issue.