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TourCMS Marketplace overview
Joining niche tour operators / activity companies with online travel agents and media model sites
The TourCMS Marketplace addresses two key problems:
- Travel websites / OTAs can access live marketing and product availability data from many small tour operators in consistent way using a standard data format
- Niche tour operators can maintain their content in one place. This is then available to all partners and they only have to access one site to update many
Looking to jump into the detail? Read about how the marketplace works from the 3 key perspectives:
Background and business case
Niche tour operators / activity organisers have been left out of the distribution revolution that has taken place in flights / hotels over the last few years. One reason has been that the products are not homogenous unlike hotels / flights. One hotel with 50 rooms has pretty much the same requirements as another hotel with 50 rooms. However a motorbike touring company will have very different needs to a tailor-made angling holiday company.
The sales volumes of specialist products is low against commodity products (like flights / hotels). This has meant that agents that sell these products have not been able to learn the products in as much detail as required in order to sell without involving the niche supplier in the sales process. Therefore historically most niche tour operators focus on taking the sale themselves but pushing their content (tour descriptions, dates, prices & availability) out to as many partners as possible and paying for this marketing on a pay per click or affiliate basis.
With so many travel websites wanting niche tour operator product content the process is now broken. Tour operators have to spend way too long visiting many extranets to update content descriptions etc. When they inevitably fall behind the OTA websites then end up overbooking and other avoidable issues. The TourCMS Marketplace solves these problems.
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