Travel Manager
sign-up now!



March 6, 2009 – 12:16 pm

I read a great article in Fortune Magazine yesterday that really captured the conflict that nearly every business finds itself today regarding pricing for 2009. By using a Pricing Power Matrix smart companies are using this tool to analyze their customers perception of their product or service.

Getting your customer to pay more

Getting your customer to pay more

It works by identifying two things are your services a Commodity or Unique and are they Discretionary or Necessary?

With a lot of uncertainty for 2009 it’s so important that the Motorcoach Industry resist the pressure on pricing. Short-term pain of falling revenue is leading Motorcoach Operators to discounting, which can impact long-term effects on customer perceptions.
So what do you do to increase your pricing when everyone else is dropping them? You need to looking becoming more:
1.    Unique: Make your Service as unique as possible with lots of value add that your competitors are not willing or capable of doing
2.    Necessary: Focus on the customers or sectors that need your service more than ever
As TravelManager focuses on Customer Facing side of your business we can help you do both by marketing more effectively, increasing the understanding of your customers needs, identifying new opportunities for your business and more..

So are up for the challenge? By updating the software every week we can make you more UNIQUE :-) not to mention with all the rising costs of Travel (environmental and financial) the Motorcoach can become very NECESSARY!

February 7, 2009 – 8:45 am

This morning we rolled out the following functionality:

[1] IMG / GPN Member Profiles. This can be found under the MyAccount -> Profile Builder section.

[2] Customisable vehicle types for the quotation widget. You can now add your own vehicle types under the “Charter Settings” screen and these vehicles show up in your quotations widget as options for users to choose.

[3] Documents created as PDF files now have a more obvious naming convention . The file name is the quote or invoice number. eg. Quote 324 will create a PDF file Q000324.pdf etc.

Regards

Dean

November 10, 2008 – 10:11 am

Times are tough.  Everyone is talking the market down and the man on the street is feeling the pinch.

But what about you?  Are you having issues? Do you need help?

If you do – let us know what help you need and we’ll see if we can help.

We at TravelManager aim is to help you lower costs and drive revenue – so let us know where you need help and we will try and assist as much as possible.

Regards

Mike

November 5, 2008 – 4:37 pm

- We have a number of improvements to the ChauffeurManager solution over the next couple of weeks. These include.

- SMS alerting to drivers / customers at different stages in the quotation / allocation process

- Ability for drivers to log in and see their own jobs, print off job sheets and if they are freelance – create their own bookings for themselves.

- Ability to allow customers to request for a quote online

- Ability for customers to log in and see a complete history of their bookings and print off invoices etc..

- Video tours & tutorials of the application

- plus much much more…

In the new year – we have a very ambitious roadmap ahead which will keep it and those businesses using it firmly in the driving seat online ;-)

As always you can take a look at the solution over at www.chauffeurmanager.com

Regards

Mike

October 9, 2008 – 8:12 am

TravelManager has a number of functions to ensure that you never loose track of important dates. Daily Summary emails are sent out each morning with information pertaining whats happening today and tomorrow.

We have now introduced a new piece of functionality called My Alerts which enables you to set up your own alerts on your own timescales.

eg. If you have numerous vehicles with MOT required each year and you want to be alerted to them 21 days in advance of them due or you have insurance due on the 3rd August each year and you want to be reminded 29 days in advance then you can now set this up.

Emails are sent out 6am each morning if you have an alert scheduled on that particular day.

The functionality can be found under MyAccount -> MyAlerts

MyAlerts

MyAlerts

Regards

Mike

September 20, 2008 – 4:24 am

Its been a while since we shared our roadmap so we thought we would re-post.

2008 Focus: To develop the processes and procedures that allows businesses to engage online.


Area: Sales & Marketing

Click to Call

  • 0800 on Steroids. Customer visits website, enters their phone number and when they would like the call, clicks button to submit. When required time is reached, system initiates call between the 2 parties and starts the call.
  • Capture Phone Numbers and Names into TM for business to market to

eMail Campaign Tool

  • Ability to send marketing emails to customers / prospects and report on click throughs etc.
  • Video Marketing capability where a member can send video clips via email and monitor how customers engage with the content to establish if one video sells more than another video etc.

Customer Surveys

  • Auto send of online surveys to customers / prospective customers on satisfaction etc 7 days after they have filled in a quotation request.
  • Ad Hoc sending of surveys where members can send out surveys on demand.

Online Video’s

  • Video’s of tours / vehicles integrated with online quotation / tours widget

Micro Formatting

  • Enhanced Search Engine Optimization of all online content with automated micro-formatted content

Area: Integration

API’s

  • Payment Processing. When a payment has been made through the system it can exchange the data with 3rd party applications.

XML Export

  • Export of Key data in XML format to allow import into 3rd party applications (eg. Quicken, Sage, MS Money, Excel etc.)


2009 Focus: To develop the websites that aggregates all of the content and widgets available and provides an end to end sales journey for customers and business owners.

Area: Sales & Marketing

Payment Gateway

  • Take “Deposits” & “Payments” online
  • Referral System between members / partners. Eg. One member can resell another members products and services and take a commission on the sale.
  • Discounts and “Special Offers”

Foreign Language Translations

  • Online tours auto translated into French, German, Spanish etc.

Community Site

  • Aggregation on customer feedback, online reviews, tour info, operator info and discussion forums to create online community site

Area: Integration

GPS

  • GPS system for vehicle tagging and real-time tracking
  • Route Optimization, Fuel Optimization, Breakages etc.

SMS / Texting Services

  • Improvements to the SMS alerting system so that customers can receive SMS on status of orders booked online
  • Ability to SMS customers on location of vehicle and marketing material “Special Offers” etc.

As always – let me know your thoughts.

Regards

Mike

September 17, 2008 – 6:05 am

We are developing some new functionality to allow you to capture feedback from your customers / prosective customers 7 days after they have requested a quote from your website. So the process is as follows:-

  1. Customer visits your site and fills in quotation form
  2. You get sent an email / SMS and respond to the quotation
  3. 7 days after quotation form filled in customer recieves an email asking for their feedback on the process and how you can improve it
  4. Customer fills in questionairre and you recieve the feedback
  5. We improve the process based on your requests

So there are a number of benefits with regard to doing this. Namely, [a] you get to keep in contact with customers / prospective customers without having to do anything, [b] the customer identifies you in the market as someone who cares about customer satisfaction and [c] we can improve the process for you so you generate more leads and hopefully more sales.

We anticipate this functionality being live within the next 2 weeks.

As always – feedback appreciated :-)

Regards

Mike

September 14, 2008 – 6:00 am

The new servers have now been put in place and are ready to use. You dont need to do anything different – you will now be serviced from them. Total downtime this morning was less than 3.5 minutes :-)

We think you will enjoy the new performance improvements.

As always – feedback appreciated.

Regards

Mike

September 13, 2008 – 8:03 am

Tomorrow morning at 6am (GMT) we will be performing a server upgrade. We dont expect the service to be out of action for more than 90 minutes.

Why are we upgrading?

We always want to ensure that we provide the fastest service available.  Internally, we require all pages (except certain reports) to load within 2 seconds or less. This upgrade will help us get to 1 second or less in the majority of cases :-) Obviously the speed depends on your broadband connection speeds but everything we can do at this end to help is always something we think we should do.

So from tomorrow we will be on bigger servers which can process more data faster than before and we will have a dedicated supply of bandwidth to the Internet so you can be assured of the best possible speeds from our software.

Regards

Mike

September 7, 2008 – 5:39 am

We have now successfully implemented the API functionality for TravelManager.  We are currently testing it on live and will publish the details within the week.

This will allow you to use the TravelManager widgets for online quoting and tour bookings and be able to get the data out of TravelManager into any other software solution you require or to do your own reporting on.

We will be adding more API requests over the coming weeks and months as you provide us feedback on your requirements.

Regards

Mike