04 Aug How to Sell Tours and Activities Quickly and Easily?

Reservations for travel tours and activities traditionally took place in travel agency offices. Brochures were also the main marketing tool. Through these channels, tourists received tour, travel and activity information. Today the situation is different. Digitalization also made an impact on tourism activities, as well. It’s quite difficult to imagine a successful tour business without its own website and an active presence on social networks. Tourists want quick services and access to all information. 47% of buyers who are travel and vacation enthusiasts book at the tour business websites if they are easy to use. Despite some opposing viewpoints about online reservations, they are becoming popular. Over the past 5 years, the number of online bookings grew by 73%. Because of it, tour and activity operators seek out online booking solutions more.

Small Travel Business and IT Challenges

Many small tour and activity operators still don’t use any enterprise solution. Enterprise software satisfies the needs of an organization rather than individual users. Such solutions are too complex and expensive for tour and activity providers. Also, they don’t provide access through mobile devices. This becomes very important when you are on a tour and spend a lot of time outside the office. Further, tour and activity operators can lack e-commerce support or have static websites. This enables any form of revenue through their web sites. Smaller travel agencies don’t have IT support to help them show real time tour status on their website. So, they are not able to track sales made by agents and get insight into the current sale status at any point in the day. They are still spending hours manually tracking information from multiple locations (emails, USB stickers, notebooks, etc.).

Developed Application for Small Travel Agencies and Tour and Activity Operators

The idea about an online application that will make it easier for tour and activity operators come from practical experience. Ivan Ilijasic, the founder of Orioly, had the opportunity to work with smaller agencies. He saw what they were struggling the most about, and what tasks waste their energy. As an IT expert, the solution was evident. Ivan developed an application called Orioly with his team. Orioly helps small travel agencies and tour and activity operators around the world to manage their business and sell online. Orioly is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) . It allows its users to promote and track their tours, activities, contacts, costs, and bookings from any device at any time.

How Orioly can help Small Tour and Activity Business

Orioly automates tour business tasks related to booking and marketing on many platforms. This software also helps with managing business costs. Orioly allows tour and activity operators to integrate online bookings on their own website via the Book Now button. The marketing functionality enables the automation of promotional posts on Facebook and Twitter. Tour and activity businesses can turn their Facebook and Twitter fans and their website visitors into clients. Clients can pay online, without the need for coming to their offices to pay or to wait for the bank transfers. The application is free for tour and activity organizers that started their business or have fewer monthly bookings. While complex market solutions cost $10,000 to $ 20,000, Orioly offers a fixed monthly or annual subscription. Depending on the number of reservations, the price ranges from $0 to $399 a month. Orioly team has started with a focus on international clients. Now, their wish is to help small tour and activity operators in Croatia and the region to work faster and easier. To make tour and activity operators more competitive, Orioly has recently been updated with new features.

Some of new functionalities are for domestic markets:

• Possibility to issue invoices, advance payments and cancel transactions by Croatian standards
• The new version of Orioly supports fiscalization
• It supports online credit and debit card payments via Braintree. Its transaction processing fee is 1.9% + 0.30 euros
• Orioly Online Reservation Software supports 8 different languages, including Croatian.

The goal of Orioly’s applications is to help small agencies and operators save time and money. Help them focus on what they like to do, creating wonderful travels.

We invite you to try the Orioly application for free.

Text and Photo credits: Orioly