All Blacks Tours Successfully Using Tourwriter
David Caldwell is the Managing Director of All Blacks Tours – a dedicated travel company exclusively appointed by the New Zealand Rugby Union to manage all official All Blacks supporters travel. Being a relatively new company, and with the 2015 Rugby World Cup just around the corner, David was looking for an itinerary software system that is capable of handling a large capacity of bookings, and has the flexibility to integrate with his booking systems. After carrying out detailed market research, David decided that TourWriter was the best option to meet his travel software needs.
“At the end of the day, having spoken to a number of people in the marketplace and evaluating what the Tourwriter system could do for us, we felt it was the best option and that it certainly met our needs from a functionality perspective.”
Through the trial phase, the Tourwriter software proved to be user-friendly for David and the All Blacks Tours team.
“It has a very clean interface, is very logical, and it is a very practical ease-of-use type system. It had lots of familiarity and is very much a point and click type system. That is what really attracted us in the first instance.”
Once David had made the move to sign-up with Tourwriter, getting started was simple.
“It was pretty easy from my perspective. The icon turned up on the desktop one day, the team downloaded it and from there on it was really well managed by TW. There was a bit of input from my team but really, it was a pretty effortless process in terms of implementing the software.”
The Tourwriter implementation staff made sure that All Blacks Tours were able to get up and running as soon as possible, and provided support along with way.
“From there we had TourWriter support us in getting everything in there that we needed to, to get us up and running. So yeah, pretty easy, pretty seamless, just as we hoped.”
One of the main purposes of Tourwriter is to help our clients be more efficient. We want to take the time out of creating itineraries, and believe that the daily travel itinerary process should be simple, fast and agile. This is what David was looking for too, and the use of TourWriter made it possible.
“To be more efficient it’s about eliminating the manual process, which requires more people, more headcount, and more time. These are the sorts of things that we were really looking to eliminate from the business by implementing TourWriter. Using the product has been a real efficiency gain for us.”
TourWriter prides itself on being customizable, and catering to the needs of our clients. For David, one of the critical areas he wanted the software to handle was integration with his website (where the majority of his bookings are made).
“We want to move away from spreadsheets, away from human interaction if you like, as with that unfortunately comes error and financial exposure – especially when you’re managing large inventory blocks of rooms and flights. The ease of integration with our website and the managing of any inventory allocations in the back-of-house is really important for us.”
Tourwriter succeeded in being flexible enough to accommodate this for the client.
“For us it was about integrating Tourwriter with some technology platforms that we were implementing at the same time. Our website system, our financial system, all of these things integrate quite seamlessly with TourWriter. At the time we were starting the business there was only four of us, we’ve now grown to 13. We’re looking to have more and more people involved using TourWriter as our back-of-house system.”
Another critical area that David was concerned with was the ability of the software to evolve and grow with his company.
“As we were a brand new business we wanted a product that was flexible enough to continue to grow with us and continue to service our needs.”
The experience that All Blacks Tours have had with the software so far has given them the confidence that Tourwriter can lead them into the foreseeable future – not to mention get them through the Rugby World Cup in 2015!
“We’re looking for TW to manage a lot more capacity than it did for us last year. We’re pretty confident that with the way we’ve been developing and evolving the product for our needs, it will deliver those things for us in 2015.”
