Advantage Travel Partnership used its annual conference to reveal a new comparison tool for agents to help them sell touring an adventure products.
The Advantage Tour Finder allows agent members to compare information, itineraries and pricing from more than 10,000 tours worldwide – with the ability to browse by tour type, duration, cost, destination and operator.
Developed and powered by TourHound and accessible via mobile, tablet or dektop, Tour Finder will be live by the end of the month and exclusive to Advantage members.
It will be free to use via the Advantage members’ intranet site and a white label version can be placed on an agent’s website or Facebook page for a monthly fee.
Analytics will track trends based on searches and responses.
Tour Finder follows in the footsteps of cruise comparison tool Cruise Finder, which was launched by Advantage in November at its cruise conference, where 90% of agents in attendance signed up.
Chris Dewey, of Solent World Travel, said his cruise sales had gone up by around 5% since he started using the tool.
He said: “It’s really user-friendly and particularly useful when clients want to join a ship in further-flung ports that we don’t have as much knowledge of.
“I think tour finder will have a similar effect. It will save us trawling through brochures looking for something suitable as it will all be in one place. Anything that can save us time and help us create better itineraries can only be good.”
John Sullivan, Advantage Travel Partnership’s head of commercial, said: “We are incredibly excited to give our members, for the first time, a search tool suitable for Facebook that also backlinks to members’ websites.
Advantage Tour Finder has been designed for travel agents who do not have a large technology development budget but do want an intelligent and easy to use platform that can be built and installed within a few hours.
“It’s a market-leading product that gives agents a suite of specialist products, and no other consortium or agent has anything like it right now.”