The Greenspot turns over four times the booking volume with the same eight-person team after rebuilding operations in Tourwriter

Overview and background

When Kerryn Ralston-Boyd, General Manager and co-owner of The Greenspot, stepped into the business in September 2023, she found a high season already running and an operation held together by copy-paste Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. Every itinerary item, from driving directions to hotel descriptions to activity details, lived in a library of Word files. Assembling one client itinerary took between 40 and 90 minutes of manual copying, depending on trip complexity. For a company where the average trip runs 30 days and includes dozens of individual products, that per-itinerary time cost meant consultants spent the bulk of their working hours on assembly rather than on the client care that defines the brand.

The Greenspot is an inbound FIT tour operator specialising in tailor-made self-drive itineraries across New Zealand. Founded over 30 years ago by Jan Gerritsen, the business changed hands when John Gregory and Philipp Schacht took ownership in September 2023, with Kerryn joining as the third owner a year later. The team of eight operates from offices in Christchurch and Taupo, with sales manager Lucas Menius based in Palmerston North and two additional remote consultants. The company serves travel agents across Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the UK, producing all content in German, Dutch, and English. Ninety-eight per cent of their travellers are FIT clients on self-drive trips of 25 to 35 days, most arriving from Europe for a once-in-a-lifetime trip around New Zealand.

The vision of The Greenspot is to be “the best and biggest little inbound operator in New Zealand.” That means staying small enough to know every client by name, to follow up when a transfer goes wrong, to put a little something in a guest's room when a problem has been fixed. It is the kind of detail that cannot be delivered when consultants are spending 90 minutes assembling a document before they can even start caring for the people in it.

The reliance on Excel created a compounding problem beyond speed. The spreadsheet that tracked each booking required a manual column update at every stage: itinerary created, invoice issued, supplier payments completed. There was no way to see whether a consultant was falling behind or had taken on too much. Finance, operations, and sales all worked in separate tools with no live connection between them. Supplier payments were processed through manual CSV uploads into Xero, with no visibility into what had been reconciled and what remained outstanding. Every system operated in isolation, and the work of reconciling them consumed hours that could have gone to client care.

Kerryn describes herself as “all about efficiency.” She had come into the business from another company she co-owned with John Gregory and Philipp Schacht, and she had seen what the right systems could do. She evaluated the situation at The Greenspot clearly: the team was hitting the limit of what they could handle, not because of a lack of skill, but because the per-itinerary time cost left no room to grow. The answer was to fix the processes rather than hire more staff.

“We were handling business prior to this, but we were hitting a ceiling of what we could cope with because it took so long to do everything.”
Kerryn Ralston-Boyd, General Manager, The Greenspot

Rebuilding operations from Word documents to a single platform

As soon as high season ended, Kerryn launched the transition to Tourwriter's online platform. The Greenspot had been a Tourwriter customer for over 20 years on the legacy desktop version, but the new cloud platform required a full rebuild: every supplier re-entered with descriptions in three languages, every product reloaded, every workflow reconfigured. The process took approximately 12 months. Kerryn describes going “really donkey deep early on,” diving into every configuration and workflow before the team was live under high-season pressure.

Kerryn divided the migration by playing to each team member's strengths. Staff who worked quickly became the loaders, entering product data at volume. Team members with a sharp eye for detail followed as a second wave, checking and correcting everything. Getting the full team involved meant the workload was distributed rather than bottlenecked, and every consultant arrived at the new system with direct familiarity before high-season pressure hit.

“I actually got all of our team involved and it was such a big task that it was impossible for one person to do. We broke up the tasks between team members with certain skills.”
Kerryn Ralston-Boyd, General Manager, The Greenspot

The result was a centralised supplier database with every product loaded in German, English, and Dutch. English-speaking consultants can build an itinerary in Dutch by viewing all three language versions side by side, then switch the output language with a single action. For a team serving agents across four European markets, this removed the translation bottleneck that had previously slowed quoting. Consultants also gained the ability to duplicate sample itineraries and use drag-and-drop assembly, replacing the old copy-paste workflow entirely.

“Because we have every product loaded in three languages, an English speaker can put the itinerary together in English and then change it over to Dutch and it goes.”
Kerryn Ralston-Boyd, General Manager, The Greenspot

The team replaced the Excel booking tracker with Tourwriter's built-in task management system. Automated task templates now trigger for every booking: final invoice issued five to six weeks before travel, documents dispatched four weeks prior. Over 8,500 tasks have been completed. Kerryn has live visibility into each team member's workload and can redistribute when someone is falling behind, whether from a high volume week or a low motivation spell.

“With the tasks, it helps everyone know where they're at, and it helps me know if one of our team is way behind. Either they're having a bad day, or they've got too much work, and we can redistribute it.”
Kerryn Ralston-Boyd, General Manager, The Greenspot

The team also adopted agent branding within Tourwriter, allowing proposals to carry the agent partner's identity rather than putting The Greenspot front and centre. Some agents send a detailed brief and just need fast execution. Others lean on the team for destination knowledge and need a curated itinerary built from scratch. Either way, the proposal goes out under the agent's brand, keeping their relationship with the traveller intact. It is a small operational detail with a significant commercial effect: the agents look better to their clients, and The Greenspot keeps the business flowing through that trust.

Tourwriter was founded in 2004 by tour operators frustrated with software that did not understand their business. More than twenty years of development, shaped directly by boutique DMCs and inbound operators, has produced a platform that fits the commercial reality of a specialist travel business rather than a generic CRM.

AI trip-planning tools and OTA recommendation engines are improving at the mass-market end of travel. Boutique operators using purpose-built software hold a different kind of advantage: depth, personalisation, and response speed that no generalist algorithm can replicate.

The results

The Greenspot now turns over almost four times the volume of business with the same number of staff. In the 12 months since completing the rebuild, the team confirmed 728 itineraries with a confirmed revenue of nearly $7 million. Average confirmed revenue per consultant reached approximately $1.16 million, roughly double the typical benchmark for operators of this size. Those figures came from a team of eight that had previously been capped by the sheer weight of manual assembly.

The impact on the business has also spread to the sister company. John Gregory and Philipp Schacht also own Terra Nova Tours, a coach touring company running on Tourplan. Watching what Tourwriter did at The Greenspot prompted the owners to bring the same efficiency mindset into that operation. The tools are different, but the approach is the same: stop absorbing manual work and build systems that scale.

The Xero integration replaced a manual CSV upload process for supplier payments. Previously, the team uploaded payment files into Xero with no way to verify what had been reconciled and what remained outstanding. Supplier payments sat untracked, creating a tangled picture at the end of each financial period. The certified integration now syncs supplier bills directly between Tourwriter and Xero, and the team can see at a glance whether bills have been uploaded or remain outstanding. Kerryn expects the business to spend significantly less on accountancy this financial year as a result. For operators who have experienced the hidden cost of double entry across disconnected systems, the shift from manual CSV uploads to live synchronisation removes an entire category of administrative overhead.

“We can now really easily see when we haven't uploaded bills. It's a very efficient system in the back end now with Xero. This financial year we look to spend a lot less with our accountant, because Xero is very tidy, as opposed to previous years where there were supplier payments floating around in the abyss.”
Kerryn Ralston-Boyd, General Manager, The Greenspot

The Postcards feature changed how The Greenspot supports its agent partners. Instead of sending text-heavy documents, the team now shares image-rich web links that help agents close the sale with their end clients. For a B2B operator that depends entirely on agent relationships, giving those partners a polished, visual tool to present itineraries to travellers strengthens the entire sales chain.

“The link we can send with the Postcard really helps them to close the sale because they're showing the client something really image rich and enticing, as opposed to a bit of paper with a whole load of words on it.”
Kerryn Ralston-Boyd, General Manager, The Greenspot

For Kerryn, the shift goes beyond the numbers. The Greenspot's vision is to be “the best and biggest little inbound operator in New Zealand,” a company that never gets so large it has to refer to clients by file number. Tourwriter has given the team the capacity to grow volume without sacrificing the personalised attention that makes the brand worth choosing. Consultants now spend their time on the work that actually differentiates the business: curating itineraries, responding to agents quickly, and remembering that Mr. and Mrs. Telemans are the ones whose transfer went wrong on day three.

Kerryn's advice to other operators still spending 90 minutes on a single itinerary is direct: rebuild. The process of pulling the business apart and reassembling it inside a single platform is demanding, but the other side of it is a different operation entirely.