The best of both worlds in quoting & presentation.

Great news for Tourplan users. Wetu has successfully integrated with Tourplan; so you can now not only produce your itineraries quickly but also provide a far superior sales experience. With Wetu you can produce professional, content-rich interactive itineraries (like this) from your Tourplan system that will enable you to work smarter and convert business more effectively.

Leading Botswana Destination Management company, SAFARI DESTINATIONS, took the leap in 2015 and have provided some valuable insights in this case study for us to share with you. Read further to learn how you too can benefit.

Summary

Safari Destinations’ original motivations for signing up to Wetu were to empower their agents to sell more effectively and provide them with a more professional, improved service.

They understood the modern traveller and recognised the importance of improving the sales experience and the critical role content plays in this. Wetu provided them with existing supplier and destination content that could be customised and the tools to distribute the content in an interactive, engaging way that travellers would react favourably to.

Safari Destinations understood the value of Wetu, so the decision to sign up with Tourplan was influenced by the fact that there was an existing integration with Wetu. They went through the lengthy process of setting up Tourplan and linking with Wetu simultaneously. Wetu was the easy part.

Wetu worked closely with Safari Destinations to facilitate this process and used the opportunity to improve upon the Tourplan integration process for future Tourplan clients.

Problem

What Safari Destinations wanted was the best solutions available to provide their agents with better tools to sell with, namely a modern, interactive sales solution. In this business, content is crucial and the way they had been managing content was time-consuming and costly. Previously they had a dedicated staff member updating lodge descriptions. They were also unhappy with the quality of their main sales document, the itinerary. Wetu solved both problems.

With the other systems they had used, they had to manage their own language libraries and producing itineraries in other languages was a laborious search, cut and paste process. They identified that Wetu would be better at managing and distributing content, and provided a solution for languages.

Existing Tour Operator Software allows you to quote quickly and provides the business tools that help run the business successfully. However, most provide limited itinerary outputs and having worked with different systems, Safari Destinations weren’t satisfied with the documents generated by their reservations system.

“They were impractical to our agents and so were not even used by our agents… they would generate their own documentation.”

Agents had complained to them that their travel documents could not be edited; they found them ugly and uninspiring. Essentially Safari Destinations needed a system that could produce quotes speedily (Tourplan provides this) and generate stylish itineraries (compliments of Wetu).

Solution

The two solutions run parallel with each other in one seamless integration, each system specialising in what they’re good at. Tourplan runs the business through quoting, pricing, reporting, financials, etc. while Wetu provides the itinerary outputs and supports the sales and marketing efforts. The rates are managed in Tourplan while all content is managed in Wetu, with the facility to produce high quality paper and digital itinerary outputs, and to make use of the Wetu Itinerary App.

Wetu provides a simple content management system with detailed Supplier and destination content (images, descriptions, videos, virtual tours, activities), which can be customised. This gave Safari Destinations access to awesome content that they could distribute using the Wetu tools.

Safari Destinations support agents in many countries with different languages and Wetu provides them with the tool to manage the languages and produce multilingual itineraries. The result is that managing languages is now a lot simpler and less resource intensive.

While paper documents are still used, they are limited and outdated – with Wetu, Safari Destinations have both options but the interactive digital itinerary proves far superior as a sales tool. Overall the new system provides a better service to agents.

INTEGRATION PROCESS

With the integration process, once they had a service line in the Tourplan database, it simply needed to be linked to Wetu – Wetu provides the mapping tools to enable this, making it a fairly easy process.

During the Integration process linking Wetu with Tourplan, Nicky of Safari Destinations says that there was not a single bump in the road!

“Between Wetu and Tourplan and the API’s – I was given a link and voila!”

As Wetu specialises in managing content, there was no need to load content into Tourplan. This simplified the integration process significantly.

Where there were limitations in the system, Safari Destinations found the Wetu team very helpful in solving these where possible, keeping in mind that the system is still a work in progress.

Outcome

The time and effort invested in the integration process have definitely paid off. Safari Destinations were very happy with the outcome – they got the speed and style they wanted from the combination of Tourplan and Wetu. Nicky explains:

“…we improved the product we deliver to our agents and they in turn to their clients, providing a more visual and exciting presentation to get the travellers excited about the destination, and it makes us stand out from our competitors…”

The overall consensus is that their agents love it! From a business perspective, it may be too early yet for Safari Destinations to measure increases in sales in the current unstable market, but we know that better sales tools result in better sales figures.

Conclusion

The challenge of tackling Wetu and TourPlan simultaneously may have seemed a daunting prospect at first glance, but implementation went smoothly for Safari Destinations and they have achieved the goals that they set out to. They now are able to provide their Agents with itineraries that they can forward to their clients that will grab their attention and inspire them to travel.

Safari Destinations are now providing a level of service and quality of documentation that is world class and they’re no longer worried about being ‘left behind’.

Managing Director, Lorraine Potter, loves the Wetu system and working with the Wetu team.

“I was inspired by it when I first saw it years ago…You guys are open-minded and willing to put in the work, so I have no doubt that you will take us places. Well done you!”