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Multi-language travel website

There are 4 key challenges in running a multilingual travel website: TourCMS can help with all of this. Learn what languages we currently support.

Having a website that can be marketed in multiple languages
There are 3 key decisions...

Should you have multiple websites (one website per language) - or a single website that can be "altered" by the end user?
This is really a question about marketing. One consideration is whether it will be easier to search engine optimise (SEO) a single language website - because you could use country specific hosting and domain names (which helps with seo ranking).

If you are going the multiple language single website route, are you going to default to a single language - and then ask your customers to choose their preferred language or are you going to put a "welcome" page as the first page they see letting the customers choose up front?

Operationally, are your customers taking the same trip - or will you run language specific trips?
This isn't an issue for airlines or hotel providers - however if you are running a tour operator you may find that it is easier to have one group of German customers and another group of English speaking customers. They may enjoy their trips more if they are in groups of customers who all share the same language.

If you are running separate trips (per language) you can either setup one tour - and create language specific departures (trips) within that tour - or you could create multiple tours (one per language). The general rule is that you don't want to setup multiple trips per single "actual" trip - because then you will have a problem controlling availability on a trip by trip basis. [SEE BELOW FOR MORE PATTERNS]

Marketplace or language?
Is there a distinction between English speakers (Australia, South Africa, USA, Ireland, UK) - and therefore should you be producing marketplace specific websites - or is it sufficient to be producing language specific functionality?

With TourCMS you can assign a currency to an individual website (as well as a language) so it is possible to create marketplace specific websites, regardless of language.

Documentation
By default, you will want to communicate with your customers in the language that they initially contacted you in. Therefore if they have booked in French you should send them their confirmation email, pre-departure information and invoice in French. TourCMS can handle this for you.

However, just because the customer has booked in French, they may be travelling to Brazil - and you want to communicate with your suppliers in Portuguese (or perhaps English). In this situation, set the language settings (on an individual email or RTF template) to the language you would like to be produced. This document will now be forced to be created in that language.

You will need to upgrade your TourCMS account to support multiple languages
Within TourCMS, you set up one language per website (the default account only has one website) - however additional websites can be added to your base TourCMS account.

However, if you are using TourCMS for a single, non-English, language - it is not necessary to upgrade your account.

Other resources
Product configuration patterns
There are three main configuration patterns that you can consider. The decision between them depends upon your proposed operational processes - and how you are going to market your products:

Style #A
Use when you have all nationalities / languages on all products (i.e. you don't mind having French only speakers on a trip with English only speakers) - or for travel products such as hotels or attractions - where customers don't have to communicate with each other. 

Tour A
  - Departure 1 (All languages)
  - Departure 2 (All languages)
  - Departure 3 (All languages)
At the moment you would have to use the main pre-configured TourCMS fields for one language - and add extra fields for the alternative language descriptions. Coming shortly, this will be handled better by TourCMS (but it is technically possible currently)

Style #B
One way of handling language separated trips (departures). 

Tour 1 English version
  - Departure 1 English
  - Departure 2 English

Tour 1 French version
  - Departure 3 French
  - Departure 4 French

Tour 1 German version
  - Departure 5 German
  - Departure 6 German
Style #C
A second pattern for handling language separated trips (departures). 

Tour 1 (All languages)
  - Departure 1 English
  - Departure 2 English
  - Departure 3 French
  - Departure 4 French
  - Departure 5 German
  - Departure 6 German
Both #B and #C comply with the golden rule - don't have more than 1 departure for 1 actual trip. (Otherwise you are going to have problems controlling inventory on a specific date as the same inventory will be shared across multiple loaded trips. It is possible to do that (using BLOCK to hold back inventory) - but it could easily get out of control as would be a manual process.

The differences between these approaches comes down to marketing - both on your website and channel distribution (via agents for example).

Say you are going to enable a specific agent to sell your tours - and they only want your German tours. With #C they will receive all your departures (from which they can pick the German ones - but they will see all of them). However, with #B, you could only let them promote the German language tours (using a tour filter (collection))

The decision between #B and #C is a fundamental decision - and you need to get this right - otherwise if you build your website and marketing model around one, load up your dates & prices, then change your mind - it will take a while to "unpick".

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