Tourplan Consultancy
Our Tourplan knowledge spans more than ten years:
- Standard product set up
- Add ons and enhancements
- Upgrades and database cleanups
- Financial exports
We can build bespoke live reporting tools, extracts to CSV files or automated reports, sent by email, on bookings, allocations, financials etc. Examples:
- Live wallboards of top sales staff
- Management dashboards of clients, sales, financials
- Top performing products
Tourplan’s messaging tends to be a manual push by your operators. We can sidestep this and send out messages automatically. e.g. booking confirmations and supplier requests. We can even get supplier requests confirmed by one click from the email directly back into Tourplan. The request process from client-to-supplier-to-client can be fully automated.
If you receive big suppler invoices, we can feed these into Tourplan and create the Tourplan invoices, saving hours. This would normally be from a supplier’s excel invoice.
Depending on how you are set up, Tourplan’s reports and tools might not give you what you need. We’ve built automated reports on non payments, over payments or withheld amounts. We can give you live visibility of bookings that have not been invoiced or have been under-invoiced.
If you’re coming off Tourplan finance we can export your data to other systems. We can do this almost in real time if you need it – just a 15 minute lag is possible.
We’ve also dealt with a feature unique to Tourplan – “withelds”. If you rely on this feature, you wont find it any standalone accounting systems, so you’ll have to find a workaround. We successfully did this when integrating into Exchequer.
For more info on this area see our page on financial systems
Do you have customers with services coming up that should be pre-paid? Or a supplier you should always pre-pay? If you have trouble checking for this, we can build an automated daily email highlighting everything.
Over the years your database will grow – but not always in the way you would like it to.
You may end up with a lot of database clutter that has just naturally accumulated – by different staff doing things differently, or, by simply changes in the way you have evolved over time.
Are your debtor/creditor codes all wrong? Or locations and localities? We can clean these kind of things throughout your database and your past bookings and financials. Bring down your database size and hence improve performance.
You probably give your tour manager an itinerary document from Tourplan which you generate on demand. This means every time it changes it has to be regenerated and re-sent. Instead of this, it’s possible to use a staff extranet where the itinerary can be downloaded directly from Tourplan – so it’s always the latest version.
We can also email your tour managers every day with a survey on what their services were for the day, taken directly from a Tourplan booking. This allows you to get instant feedback when there are problems, all kept in a log against the supplier. We can then run reports or get live alerts from two different angles:
- Venue-centric – when the same venue is causing multiple problems – you might want to switch it out if you’re using it again.
- Group-centric – when one group has had multiple problems – you can pro-actively ensure that the rest of the services will run smoothly.
Tourplan lacks any kind of audit trail on who changed what when (although this feature should appear in Tourplan NX). We can provide a system which shows a change history to a booking (or a product and its rates), who made the changes, and when. We can snapshot what’s important to you and give you the tools to see the changes. This may save your finance department a lot of time in working out what happened to a booking when dealing with supplier invoice queries.
Tourplan doesn’t really have a default area to put booking notes. If your staff make a change to a booking – they should annotate that they did it, and possibly why and for whom.
The best place we have found to put notes is in the booking Message/Queue area. But the problem with this is that you can’t enforce it. For example, when a service is cancelled, you need to know when and by whom and, hopefully, why and on behalf of whom. This can all go into a note – but you will need an external system to enforce it. So in this case, we would set up a process to check a booking when a service is cancelled and look for an explanatory note. If no note has been created, then an exception report can be sent to draw attention to it – so the note can be added retrospectively before the who/why/when gets forgotten.
If you are a B2B group supplier then you are probably entering bookings into GroupBook manually. Tourplan’s API (icom/hostconnect) doesn’t allow for making GroupBook bookings – and neither does their supplied agent booking website “WebConnect”. Using FastBook for booking groups gets very unwieldy very quickly – as rather than one config for the whole booking, you effectively get one per pax.
But there is a way round this – make the booking in FastBook and then convert it to GroupBook after it’s confirmed. It’s even possible to convert it back to FastBook if the end user wants to add more services to their booking via the internet. So you can use WebConnect or build your own client booking website and then manage the bookings in GroupBook.
This works reliably – the only caveat being you cannot book escorts/drivers/guides through this method as icom/hostconnect does not have these pax types.