TourConnect Aims to Make Travel Agent's Administration Work Easier

Being a travel agent comes with its difficulties. You may be a pro at customer service and planning trips for your clients, but often, it’s the business side of the job – managing contracts, tracking emails with partners, even looking for reputable tours in places halfway across the world -- that can bring with it challenges.

It’s a good thing that companies like TourConnect exist. Where Agent At Home connects agents in an online community to share experiences, advice or ask questions, TourConnect connects travel agents and wholesalers with tours and hotels that your clients seek all around the world.

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As an instructional video on TourConnect’s website says, “You can think of it as an online trade event available all year round.”

TourConnect is based in the Dallas area and was started by Mike Hermann, owner of Bonza Bike Tours in Sydney, Australia. After starting his tour company in 2004, he quickly saw how difficult it was for him to find tour operators and travel agents and how hard it was for them to find his tour company.

Even worse, communicating and drafting contracts with these partners were cumbersome tasks with the tools available and he found it exhausting trying to share his rates and photos of his tours with the people who needed it most – travel agents who would sell his tours to their clients.

Hermann quickly realized that the administrative side of the tourism industry was lacking a way for tour operators and travel agents to communicate and work together more efficiently, and he wanted to change that. So he started TourConnect.

As the website says, “TourConnect intends to eliminate the rate emails, spreadsheets, and company-specific websites that create so much duplicate effort for our industry.” Instead, they’ll give you – travel agents – the tools to communicate and do business all in a quick and seamless online platform, that’s been described as a LinkedIn for the B2B industry.

“Imagine discovering a partner, finding great products, exchanging rates, and seeing new offers – in minutes,” the website reads.

The first tool in the TourConnect arsenal is the PartnerFinder. They currently have 8,000 company accounts on the platform with about half of those accounts being suppliers -- hotels, hotel chains B&B’s, tours, activities, attractions, etc. Note that of those 8,000 companies do not account for the multiple properties within a hotel chain or locations of a tour company, so for instance, Wyndham Hotels is a company account, but they have 40 properties in Australia alone.

The rest of the 8,000 users are made up of people in the travel agents industry and even some travel media, too (which you can also connect with). The company has users in over 100 countries and have helped make over 34,000 connections in the tourism industry.

Travel agents will be able to search these company profiles, connect via messaging, set up contracts much faster than normal, grab the marketing materials of hotels or tour companies quickly and efficiently to post them on your website, and see when tours and hotels offer new products or deals.

Hermann’s goal with TourConnect is to make the lives easier for people in the tourism industry. He said, “TourConnect helps travel agents find quality suppliers, wholesalers, and tour operators to work with - much like a trade event, but online and available throughout the year. We then help manage those relationships all in one place, similar to a CRM.”

“For example, let's say a client asks an agent to put together a trip to a destination that agent hasn't sold before. The agent can use TourConnect to find quality partners on TourConnect to help deliver that experience - whether that be a wholesaler that specializes in, or the hotels and tours located in, that destination,” he added. “Once connected, the agent has those partners stored online and can access product info, marketing images, product updates, and contact information, forever - no more 'I know I used a company for that a few years ago' email searches!”

Right now, TourConnect costs $420 per year for their Sales & Marketing Management tools package which lets you reach out to new partners in their network. Their Rate Management tools package starts at $980 per year. It costs nothing to create an account and explore TourConnect and all of its possibilities so you can get a taste of what TourConnect has to offer without making a financial commitment.

So if you're tired of managing your business in spreadsheets or over thousands of email folders and not being able to find and connect with the local tours and hotels your client wants and loves, try TourConnect. It doesn’t hurt to see what it’s all about.