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Group departures and fixed date trips
These style of travel products have fixed availability and fixed start and end date.Multiple bookings from multiple customers will reduce availability for that date
Example travel products:
- A two week tour of a country or region
- An afternoon city tour
- A harbour cruise
- A training course
- A one off event
The travel product type (inside TourCMS) to use is a tour departure.
First create a tour (as the base concept) then add a single departure date for every ocassion that you want to run your trip.
For "one off" events, create a new tour for that event - and add a single departure date on that tour.
You can close individual departures by ticking the "close" tickbox on the dates & prices page. Departures can be configured to close automatically when either full or the departure start date is too soon.
Multiple departures on a single day
If you have multiple departures on a single day, you can add multiple departure dates. Each indivdidual departure can be indicated by the departure code (so you could state 9am, 11am etc). Some customers use the 24 hour clock for departure codes - for example 0900-1100 (If you use this style, and you have multiple departures on a day, TourCMS will order correctly by time)
Multiple rate types
As a default, TourCMS has a single rate type - however you can, for tour departures, load upto 10 different rate types. This will enable you to handle types such as Adult, Child, Concession etc. On the tour setup you can setup extra rates:
Once you have added extra rate types, additional price boxes will display on the tour departure price / date editing section.
You can choose to either use label #2 for a second description of the rate (that is shown to users) or perhaps to give an indicative price (the actual price will be set by what is loaded on each departure)
If you configure as above, the "people dropdown" (for selecting number of customers on a new booking) will display as follows:
Web booking engine configuration
There are 4 kinds of first screen configuration for tour departures:
- A single departure (a special case - rarely used)
- List "By the month" – so that your customers change month and the list changes
- List "Next 20" – regardless of the month setting, your forthcoming trips are shown
- Availability calendar – a nice calendar "by the month"
If you are selling a trip that has a single date duration (for example an afternoon city tour) and it runs every day – then the availability calendar is probably the best for you.
If you run a tour say once every couple of weeks – you may not want your customers jumping around between months to see when your tours are running – in this scenario we suggest you use the "show next X" departures setting. (You may also like to untick the "show month dropdown" setting as the month becomes irrelevant to you)
If you have many trips, but each trip is multiple day duration, then a list of departures maybe clearer than the availability calendar. In this scenario set to "All departures in user selected month – TABLE".
Further information
- Using Excel to create a series of dates (Screencast) - how to save time when you want to configure many departure dates efficiently
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