For users of the TourCMS tour operator ecommerce platform

Packages or assets? - your feedback appreciated

Many small tour operators "fly a kite". This means placing multiple travel products for sale and, once a booking is received, you close down products that use the same asset.

For example say you have a single dive boat. You may advertise a group trip as well as tailor made diving. Once you receive a booking on certain dates you stop advertising conflicting availability.

We want to help handle this in TourCMS - but the question is how.

The alternatives are

* Create a concept called "asset". You would ensure that this asset wasn't overutilised on any date. Hence, if a particular booking used that asset - you would cease taking bookings on the same date that use the same asset.

* Create a concept of a package - this would use existing travel products (in particular departures). These products would not be visible to the end customers. However, in a similar way to the asset mechanism, this would stop new bookings coming in when

I am in favour of introducing new functionality than handles asset management..... (as well as packages!).... but if you have some thoughts, please shout now.

[The key difference is in making existing functionality more complex - or introducing new functionality (which may be complicated to setup!)]

Thanks

Alex

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Kristian on June 22, 2008 at 11:17pm: Hi Alex,

Most of my business is built on this concept. We offer a range of "tour" products in addition to customised charter services, that all revolve around 3-4 main assets (a 23 passenger boat, a 6 passenger boat, a Hovercraft and waverunners). In addition we outsourcing other adventure activities (Air Boats, Sea Planes etc.) that we bring in for pre-booked tours. In order to make this work, we separate our offerings into two main types:

1. Scheduled tours - available daily and "per person" (usually delivered by the 23 pax boat or 6 pax boat if less than 6 passengers), or monthly and "per person" (for wine tasting cruises etc); and
2. Charters - available on any of the assets, 2 hourly or daily on a "per asset" basis.

Our aim in using this approach is to ensure that any single asset we own is booked to the highest feasible level of usage on any particular day. In the case of the scheduled tours, we will take these even if we have only 1 passenger, unless we have an alternative and more profitable booking (and no bookings for the scheduled tour). Therefore we will cancel the scheduled tour and take a charter in it's place if there are no prior bookings (even though it has a walk-up availability). This way, we ensure the guaranteed Charter fee income vs. the risk of the walkup income which could be 1 passenger or 23.

For our business asset based allocation would be preferred as we can handle most of our tours with any number of assets. For example: A 3 hour Charter tour, can be delivered via a 6 person boat, a 23 person boat or even guided Waverunners. If the scheduled tours depart at 2pm and we have a client who would like to take the alternative 3 hour charter at 2pm with 6 people, we can take the tour on the 6 pax boat and still run the scheduled tour on the 23 pax boat. However if the client wants 12 people onthe Charter, we have to either cancel the scheduled tour and allocate the 23 pax boat to the charter, or run the scheduled tour with the 6 pax boat instead (limiting the scheduled tour to only 6 people). If the 6 pax boat is already booked for an alternative tour, then we would take the guaranteed charter instead of the scheduled tour (providing we have no bookings for it already) and cancel the scheduled tour.

Using this method, we can setup all of our tours within your system and then allocate to each tour, the assets that "could" be available to deliver the tour. Therefore a client looking online (or booking agent through the management console), could choose the 3 hour charter tour for 12 people if the scheduled tour had up to six prior bookings only (and the system could allocate the assets appropriately, moving the 6 pax boat to the scheduled tour and limiting those bookings to 6 passngers only). Or if the scheduled tour already had 7 bookings, the system could notify the client/booking agent, that for the requested time period, only the 6 pax boat was available and the appropriate price for that (even better, the system could let the client know what departure time/date would be available if they wanted to use the 23 pax boat).

The asset allocation method would also have the advantage of allowing staff to be "allocated" and schedules derived based upon their skill sets. We could enter our Captains in as assets for "non-public" viewing, since some Captains are qualified to run all the assets (Hovercraft, boats etc), while others are only qualified for the Hovercraft or the Hovercraft and the 6 pax boat or just on weekends etc. etc.Also, certain staff are qualified for certain tours (and have the required knowledge) but cannot run other tours. Having the boat available and not the staff or vice versa is as much of an issue as the allocation of the boats themselves.

So for my 3 hour Charter Tour, it would now look like:

Public Asset Viewing:
- Tour Type & Description
- Available Assets, passenger capacity and price
(the assets available for the tour (during the requested time frame) would fall away as other bookings are taken)

Non-Public Asset Viewing:
- Available Staff (as relevant to qualifications for the asset and qualifications for the tour type)

Finally, our tours run hourly, therefore on any particular day, the scenario described above would occur at 2pm (when the scheduled tours run), but providing the booking was for 11am or earlier, the 3 hour charter tour could be accepted on any asset regardless of numbers as it wouldn't conflict with another booking. Therefore, the asset allocation would need to be on a smaller timesacale than "per day". Depending on time of year, we may run 3 - 4 (or more) tours on any particular day without crossover. eg: a waverunner hire, 3 x 1 hour waverunner hires starting at 9am, then at 1pm a 3 hour guided charter tour with 3 waverunners could all be successfully run in the day, finishing at 4pm, providing the staff asset to take the guided tour at 1pm was available.

I hope that makes sense.

Kind Regards,

Kristian...; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by TourCMS team on June 26, 2008 at 9:02am: Hi Kristian,
Thank you very much for your very detailed outline of how you are running your tours. Our asset based control system was going to be based around "morning, afternoon and evening" control..... but I can see that you really need hourly control.

Let us sort out hotel functionality and our generic report builder - and also a new itinerary builder we are working on..... and they we can have a go at sorting out asset control.

In the meantime, can you do this manually? (or are there any quick wins we can do to make it easier to do manually?

Thanks. Alex; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Kristian on June 30, 2008 at 5:28am: Hi Alex,

Short term, the ability to separate bookings by hours would be helpful. Manually we can allocate assets, but to be able to divide up the day on an hourly basis and allow customers to place bookings online at their preferred times would make the manual allocation of assets easier to control.

Kind Regards,

Kristian...; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Actief in Tsjechie on June 29, 2008 at 11:48am: Hello Alex,

Looking at your example of the single dive boat. I fully understand this example but, but what if you want to keep the possibility of outsourcing open for certain terms? There should alway be the possibility to make this decision is my opinion.

Our praxis is: In some terms we accept bookings because we know by experience that we can outsource (e.g. hire bikes at third party) and still make some profit, in other terms we know/decide we can't.

Regards, Luit; ▶ Reply to This