There is a long history of technology creation enabling the growth of the retail travel agency business. One need only consider processing air reservations (and what used to be air commissions) without CRS/GDS technology – a virtual impossibility. Technology is continuing to evolve enabling retail travel agencies to meet the increasing demands of their clients. Recent new technology examples consist of the Internet, travel websites, online booking systems, and CRM tools such as ClientBase, and more.

Today’s Opportunity

Today’s opportunity in the leisure segment is the challenge of how to best market or reach out to existing and potential clientele. There is a business need for every travel agency to do professional direct marketing. However, there are many challenges to delivering quality marketing services to your clients, as most agencies…

• Do not have graphic artist on staff
• Do not have the technical expertise for promotional e-mail distribution (anybody want to deal with e-mail spamming regulations these days?!)
• Do not have the marketing experience to analyze their databases to make sure to send the right promotion, to the right client, for the right product, at the right time.
• Do not have the expertise to track open rates, click-throughs, analyze pre-existing data to create campaigns, assess what is working, and make changes to improve results.
• Do not have the negotiating power with the suppliers to obtain cooperative marketing sponsorship funds.

Yet despite these challenges, the fact is there is an overwhelming need for agencies to deliver good marketing programs to their clients. After all, each agency is competing with the on-line big guys and while the online sellers cannot compete with your personal relationships, you had better compete with their marketing abilities or the result will be customer erosion.

Technology Solution

In the past all agency databases, while individually the most valuable marketing databases in existence, were located only in your office. Hence, while suppliers were interested in supporting your marketing efforts (providing promotional content, formatting, campaign creation as well as underwriting costs of professional campaigns representing), the challenge was how to “centralize” the data to run these campaigns to achieve a large enough participation level to meet specific business targets, i.e., cabins sold/hotel rooms booked.

The technology solution, now available after three years of development, is a combination of marketing database synchronization (automatically moving and updating a copy of your marketing database to TRAMS central servers) and “synch web services” which is a function that automates these updates so that there is no ongoing work for the agency – or us.

We call this new technology Databases Central and it is part of our new TMA (TRAMS Marketing Advantage) product.

Net result

The net result of sharing a copy of your database with TMA and Databases Central is that you are now able to deliver to your clients:

• Professional promotions
• Quality offers for world class suppliers
• Unique promotional content
• Professionally managed programs
• Total reporting
• All legwork outsourced

While you can now deliver effective communication to your clients you still retain:

• Complete control over who receives offers
• What offers are sent
• What suppliers you support

In addition, all the marketing is outsourced letting you focus on what you do best - sell travel and service customers.

Finally the charge for the service can be:

• Zero fees! (Yes for agencies actively participating, the suppliers pay 100% of fees)

Suppliers are supporting this program because they are able to create professional marketing programs for agencies that can be sent with your permission to your clients. Several world class suppliers already sponsor very active marketing programs based upon this new technology including Carnival Cruise Lines, MARK Corporation (with their various brands including Funjet, Cunard, Seaborne, Radisson Seven Seas Cruise Line, NCL), and others are coming on board.

Furthermore, many of the leading consortia are adapting “Databases Central” technology to deliver their next generation marketing programs. Participating consortia now include Virtuoso, Signature, Ensemble, Vacation.com and WESTA.

Agency response to date has been great as some 1,200 agencies are signed up to join the program.

TRAMS is proud how this new technology is enabling agencies to add a professional marketing component to their business.

To find out more information please contact your TRAMS representative or call our corporate office at 310/641-8726.

Thanks for reading.

Lee