Partners on TravelAccel

The Client

A mid-sized river cruise charter company with yearly average sales of $5 million (pre-Covid)

The Challenge

The client employed both in-house and outside staff to operate its organization. Its staff overhead of 15 employees was required to operate its numerous, separate, non-communicative, labor intensive processes and systems.  The client averaged an industry standard staff overhead cost of approximately 20% of sales at approximately $1 million per year.  With the client’s fragmented approach to operations and marketing, an inordinate amount of time and resources were spent attempting to piece together and evaluate its operational processes, reporting and focus.

An example of the client’s fragmented division of labor and operational processes and systems:

• CRM and sales -Salesforce
• Accounting – QuickBooks
• Communications, Applications, Storage – Outlook 365, GoDaddy web-based email system
• Outside web designer / manager
• In-house contact management, database and email marketing – Constant Contact
• In-house digital social – Instagram and Facebook
• Outside SEO and AdWords campaign
• Outside graphic design
• Manual input and export for tour costings, operational lists and reports – Excel
• Passenger communication and information transfer – Email & snail mail

The TravelAccel Solution

After identifying the client’s operational and marketing needs, TravelAccel Management team:

• Customized and implemented the TravelAccel platform, combining under one integrated system, all internal and externalsales, operational, and communication processes
• Customized and implemented TravelAccel Digital, combining all design and digital marketing efforts under a unified, integrated, managed campaign
• Identified and implemented a new FIT / small group product using the new TravelAccel integrated system

Benefits Delivered

• Streamlined resources and reduced operational expenditures by 60%

• Focused and streamlined marketing efforts with measurable real-time reporting and results:
• Email Marketing:  Went from industry average 7% open rate / 1.5% click rate to over 20% (unique) open rate / 14% click rate
• Email Contact / Database Optimization: Bounce rate from over 40% to less than 1%
• SEO Google ranking from unlisted in the top 100 to top 10
• Average site visit increase over 500% with 300% increase in time spent on site
• Increased Facebook visits over 700%
• Cut need for physical marketing expenditures (postcards & brochures) by 70%
• Optimized product mix
• Fine–tune products based on real–time data (with our dashboard reporting, client was able to focus and pivot, in real-time, on increasing load factors on more profitable departures while cutting less profitable departures
• Achieved a 20% average increase in load factors while offering fewer departures.
• Organized and streamlined tour operations
• Decreased overall costs and costly mistakes, while increasing revenue on tour add-ons.
• The TravelAccel cloud-based system offered teams in multiple worldwide locations the ability to work efficiently in tandem.
• Decreased onboard staff and per passenger tour expenses on average of 25% while increasing revenue on a la cart tour additions.

About TravelAccel

TravelAccel eliminates the usual fragmented approach to the travel business (combining a number of separate operational, marketing and sales systems to run the business) and offers a single, comprehensive, streamlined, customizable, cloud based, tour operator business application platform that engages, recruits, organizes and operates the company. The result is a travel company the runs more effectively and efficiently, saving in overhead and increasing revenue.