TourCMS 4 step project plan

We advise that you break your project into 4 distinct phases:

1. Initial configuration / learning TourCMS
2. Product loading (adding tours & options, and then dates, prices & availability)
3. Website integration
4. Documentation (invoices, letters etc), reports & bookings transfer

STEP 1: Initial configuration / learning TourCMS

 Configuration & setup manual

The key part of this phase of the project is for you to understand how TourCMS works. You need to get a fairly good understanding to enable to you make the right decisions on how your travel products are going to be configured and how you are going to run your business.

In particular:

• Should you setup your products as tours or options?
• If your product is a tour, should you use departures or freesale functionality?
• Will the concept of quote, provisional then confirmed booking work for you?

STEP 2: Product loading

• Loading tours & options, and ensuring they are correctly configured (Estimate 30 minutes per tour)
• Loading dates, prices & availability (Estimate 1 hour per tour)

• Configuring your suppliers (Estimate 5 minutes per supplier)

STEP 3: Website integration

• Writing and sourcing all content (text, images) for each of your tours
• Designing a template that has the appropriate fields (within TourCMS) for you to store this data
• Loading your content (could take you upto 30 minutes per tour)

STEP 4: Documentation, reports & booking transfer

• Physical documents (templates) such as letters, accommodation vouchers, envelopes, invoices etc
• Virtual documents (emails)

• You will want to backload as many bookings as you can - because then you get a good picture of your previous customers and their booking habits. This is particularly important if you have regular customers
• You may need to backload your products in order to bring in historical bookings. This will therefore mean you take longer to do product loading (historical bookings need historical products)
• If you choose not to transfer historical bookings (that have yet to travel), but you have some - then don't forget to reduce your availability by the number of the previous bookings - otherwise you could over sell
• Booking transfer will also require you to set up appropriate travel agent records and customer records
• It probably will take a little longer to enter a booking into TourCMS while "transferring" than when you are trading for real. This is because you are going to need to double check all sorts of values - and make sure they are the same as the existing booking (For estimation purposes, take 20-30 minutes per booking - although you will get much much quicker than this)
• Before you start backloading any bookings, make sure the booking reference count is set where you want it. By default the first booking in your account is number 1. You can change this.