RWA, a leading software solutions company, have launched a revolutionary online solution designed specifically for tour operators. The å“Sell-It Suiteå” is a comprehensive, competitively priced online selling solution that will enable Tour Operators to sell a wide variety of their holiday products online.

The Sell-It Package software is the first member of the family that will be available, consisting of a fully-featured package booking engine. This software uses a sophisticated holiday search capability, and a powerful holiday browse capability, that enables offers to be presented based on destination, departure airport, or both.

Mark Bradbury
, Director of RWA told Internet Travel News that this solution is the result of RWA’s extensive experience through working with Tour Operators throughout Europe. He is convinced that offering a flexible choice, the solution will encourage tour operators to go online: “Talking to tour operators we have found that many solutions that would enable them to get online are quite expensive to run. I think a lot of tour operators have probably hesitated”. He added “The Sell-it Package is deliberately designed to give tour operators that don’t have online capabilities the ability to get online and sell their products in a very reliable way, without having to make a massive investment”.

Mark claims that the main advantages of this solution for tour operators are its reliability and its re-brandable booking capability. He comments, “If you look at the solutions available in the marketplace today, they tend to be fairly hit and miss. The booking engine component of our Sell-it-Suite is an evolution of our highly successful booking internet engine, which is deployed in over 650 websites in Germany, so it’s proven, tried and tested”.

Mark considers the branding feature to be a unique selling point: “We are the only company that provides a branding capability, allowing tour operators to have a number of different instances of this booking engine available that will all appear in different brands. This means that tour operators can sell under different trade names. They can have one version of this solution and the booking engines will render themselves in the branding and colour schemes for those particular brand names”. He added, “This facilitates tour operators selling direct, or selling through travel agents in a travel agent friendly way”.

Additionally, Mark informed me that the solution is based on web services and XML standards providing an open, extensible and flexible infrastructure. He commented “This infrastructure also enables the incorporation of additional 3rd party content, for example travel guides, weather information, visa and health information. Using low cost, open technology, Sell-It can be deployed on a range of operating systems and application servers”.

I asked Mark to comment on the recent upsurge of the vacation package market. He stated, “I think the trend in the travel industry is now for people to take shorter breaks more frequently. The city break type concept is now a very popular one and with the advent of cheaper flights to Europe, a lot more people look to travel for a long weekend, or a city break and they lend themselves very naturally to being booked online.

“I think that tour operators are trying to respond numerous challenges that they are faced with. Even since the events of 9/11, people are still deciding going away, they are just modifying where they are going to go”.

“The travel industry is still a very robust environment. The last 12 months have seen a move to later bookings and a deconstruction of the package holiday, but I think people still want to go away on holiday and still need people to provide traditional information”.

 

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