Description : 1. Overview
BU TMIS is a booking, reservation ,online purchase , information and management system for tours and sightseeing trips. The software guides the user through the booking dealing with seat allocation, accommodation choice and pick-up point selection. BU TMIS also offers payment processing , emailing and faxing of invoices.
Flexible Tour Setup
The BU TMIS in-house reservation system makes it easy to build a collection of different tours from a set of entirely user definable underlying components. The components consist of an unlimited number of seating plans, fares, accommodation types, insurance options and pick-up points. These are assembled as appropriate for each tour. The inclusion or exclusion of any one of the components is optional on each and every tour. This means BU TMIS is able to handle not just coach based tours, but self-drive holidays and holidays by air or even rail. The tours created can be for tours, sightseeing trips or, in the case of the full BU TMIS system, express services.
Flexible Pricing
Once a tour has been created it is easy to add prices to any number of different fare options and/or accommodation types and supplements. If required prices can vary on different departure dates. The full BU TMIS system can also, if required, apply premium seat supplements and standard or home pick-up supplements.
Foolproof Booking Entry
BU TMIS guides the user through a booking one step at a time dealing with seat allocation, accommodation choice and pick-up point selection. The system can handle payment authorisation and can either print or email tickets and invoices.
Waiting List
BU TMIS has a powerful waiting list facility which will automatically raise an alert the moment resources become free.
Financial Reports
Financial reports include agent statements, profit and loss statements.
Operational Reports
Operational reports include final confirmations, seating plans, passenger lists, rooming lists, standard pick-up and set-down requirements, home pick-up requirements, special needs requirements, luggage labels and ferry passenger registration list.
Client Mailing
The BU TMIS client database includes extensive mailing and faxing facilities with de-duplication facilities.
State of the Art SMS Informing Feature
BU TMIS has integrated an state of the art SMS Informing Feature to inform Drivers and Tour Guide the details to do and follow ups.
Data Driven Website
In addition to the facilities that make up the system, the full BU TMIS system includes as standard a further set of facilities that automatically creates a data driven website. This allows operators to create and maintain a professional website without the expense of employing a specialist web design company.
Against every tour in BU TMIS , in addition to the information relating to dates and prices needed by the system, there is an area where operators can enter the information they would like to present to clients on the BU TMIS website. This information essentially mirrors the details that would go into a printed brochure and includes a brief overview, a detailed overview, a day by day itinerary, a further information area and a selection of pictures. Since this information is destined to be presented on a website it also includes an area for useful links to other related websites such as the destination hotel or tourist office.
The BU TMIS website accesses all the information that has been entered into BU TMIS and assembles it to create a separate page for each tour, in effect creating an online brochure, except that for efficiency a page isn't actually created until someone asks to see it.
The website comes with a customisable front page that displays welcome information and provides a means of navigating through the available tours. Clients can browse through the tours and check prices and availability before either telephoning or requesting a call back. They can also place an online order for a brochure.
A totally unique feature of BU TMIS is that all the content required to build the BU TMIS website is entered into the system in nothing more complicated than plain English text. Behind the scenes BU TMIS converts this into the HTML required by the end-user's web browser.
Online Bookings and Travel History
The full BU TMIS system can be further extended with the addition of the BU TMIS online booking facility. This allows clients to create an account, enter passenger names, choose tour packages ,check their previous travel history and pay as appropriate.
The online booking facility includes a secure login facility that allows existing clients to view their current bookings, make online payments and update their contact details.
The facility also provides a secure login for agents allowing them to enter bookings directly into BU TMIS .This completely eliminates the need for agents to phone in, thereby offering considerable savings in reservation staff costs. Agents are also able to view their existing bookings online and maintain their own authorised operators.
Website Hosting
Hosting the BU TMIS website on the Internet is secured by BU TMIS Web Servers. The efficiency of the BU TMIS SQL Server database design allows excellent response times to be achieved with an ordinary low cost broadband connection to the Internet.
BU TMIS includes utilities that allow pictures to be uploaded and managed over the Internet just as easily as if they were stored locally. This means pictures used in the BU TMIS website are downloaded directly rather than from the site hosting BU TMIS itself. Freed of this traffic the broadband connection is capable of delivering a first rate booking experience even while serving multiple clients.
Why Do Travel Companies Need BU TMIS Solutions?
In today’s environment, travel management companies need every advantage to compete with pressure from mega-agencies, online travel companies and regional players. Continuing to use dated technology and tolerate inefficient process will likely spell doom for those companies, especially as competition intensifies and economic conditions continue to falter.
Most traditional agency back office systems, originally created to automate ticket settlement were designed in decades past. A disparate set of disconnected systems, these tools fail to provide the more sophisticated business information and analysis enjoyed in other industries:
- information is scattered across spreadsheets and stand-alone systems;
- report generation is a cumbersome, often manual task;
- systems are brittle and lacked adaptability.
Many travel companies today are
- wasting time on error correction and manual tasks;
- wasting money on unrecognized vendor commissions;
- limiting their ability to grow and respond to industry developments.
The BU TMIS Solution
BU TMIS is fully integrated end-to-end business information system for travel agencies and travel management companies (TMCs). It focus on travel with powerful back-office financial management tools. BU TMIS provides the detailed level of reporting needed by growing travel management customers who have complex settlement, billing and reporting requirements and the operational tools to optimize business processes.
The BU TMIS Advantage
BU TMIS is very different in approach; revolutionary design concepts within BU TMIS permit the capture and delivery of virtually unlimited amounts of analytical information across the entire operation.
BU TMIS is designed to help your business compete, not just provide travel accounting. It has provided a positive return on investment (ROI) to current customers whether through streamlining existing business processes, eliminating redundancies, or by providing insight to internal and external customers via business intelligence and reporting.
The Benefits of BU TMIS
As an integrated travel solution we provide unparalleled insight into your operations, customer service and profitability. Our customers enjoy superior efficiency with built-in error correction, increase productivity, reduce costs, and the agility necessary to respond to changing business needs:
- Reduce the need for multiple software systems;
- Maintain consistency of all data throughout all back-office processes – one version of the truth;
- Increase productivity through common interface with standardized tools;
- Enhance your agency’s ability to manage change;
- Reduce clerical time through full integration, external transaction import routines and speedy keyboard entry of transactions across standardized entry screens;
- Dramatically reduce reporting time through automation of period-end tasks;
- Provide fast and effective answers to queries through quick and easy access to online information;
- Allocate more time on managing your business effectively by reducing the time required to produce standard management reports.
How Can BU TMIS Add Value to My Business?
Our integrated solution provides a vastly superior business tool, allowing TMCs to:
- Increase revenue: Use powerful reporting capabilities to develop targeted marketing programs using historical data. Identify unrecognized vendor commission and automate service fees;
- Reduce costs: Reduce the number of disparate systems, eliminating manual interface and redundant data correction;
- Optimize sales efforts: Create notifications and reporting that will allow you to respond and refocus sales efforts based on market conditions;
- Improve customer satisfaction: Provide customers with detailed and accurate reporting that meets their specific needs. Reduce your respond time to customer requests due to a single source of data;
- Reduce staffing and overhead costs: Reduce manual intervention, double entry and error corrections through improved automation and workflow, reduction of data entry between separate systems;
- Respond to evolving business needs: Identify trends with real-time access to business critical information, forecast revenue and costs easily, track productivity by supplier, branch, agent or customer and update the system easily and inexpensively as changes in circumstances require.
What Are Your Current Challenges? | How BU TMIS Can Help |
How do you generate reports on costs and revenues? Can you see and understand all aspects of your business with these reports? | We offer a business information platform that integrates travel applications with financial and client services applications, enabling: - Financial planning;
- Global capability;
- Balance tables;
- Multi-currency processing;
- Ad hoc querying;
- Financials;
- Reporting;
- Multi-Users Login.
BU TMIS has a comprehensive and flexible travel applications module along with reporting and a fully integrated financial application. |
What kind of weekly /monthly/annual reports do you generate? Would real time reports, available on demand, impact your strategic decision making? | - Access real time data gathered from key areas of your business to respond to changes in the marketplace quickly;
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How long do these reports take? | Many agencies today have to manually combine information from different sources; BU TMIS eliminates this manual, time consuming, error-prone process. Reports that took hours or days can now be done in minutes. |
Do you know which customers are the most profitable based on cost and revenue? | Detailed reporting features let you drill into specific customers to identify the cost and revenue of the customer relationship: - identify where additional time and resources should (or should not) be spent;
- communicate to the agency that not all customers are the same.
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Are you missing commissions due to limited or cumbersome tracking? | Recover commission payments from hotel and car companies more efficiently: - faster searches to find transactions with commissions due;
- generate outstanding commission reports.
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How are your agents making reservations today? | Easy to use tool with BU TMIS supported training |
BU TMIS Provides The Ability to Respond to Change
The travel industry is dynamic and TMCs regularly face pressure to adapt to new situations. Often these place enormous strain on brittle, disconnect back-office tools. BU TMIS takes full advantage of the feature of post-implementation agility – the ability to change or modify the system AFTER it has been installed, without the need for costly consultants or IT resources.
- Reorganizations or Restructuring – can occur frequently in growing organizations
- Mergers and Acquisitions – to grow and take advantage of economies of scale
- Regulatory Changes – such as the S IFRS
- Industry “Shake-ups” – shift in emphasis from commissions to service fees
Establishing Your Business Case for BU TMIS
Sometimes TMCs need help looking beyond the sticker-price on an ERP system. If they don’t fully understand all the real costs of their current system, these costs can get buried or even taken for granted...but they add up fast and can quietly jeopardize the business.
Establishing the true value of an ERP system is much easier once dollar values are attached to the many inefficient processes, errors, and deficient commission collection. Consider some of the estimates below and see how dramatically BU TMIS can impact your revenue.
Revenue Opportunities and Efficiency Savings | Achieved By | Example |
Increase Revenue by Eliminating Commission Tracking Services | Elimination of third-party commission tracking; TMCs report an ability to increase commission tracking by 100 percent. | Cost of a commission tracking system, tracking and reconciliation can be $4,000/month Two staff each researching, correcting and preparing third-party commission tracking handoff and bank deposits for seven hours/week (at an estimated $20/hour) costs $280/week. An integrated system could save
$62,500 per year savings
(plus the value of the additional revenues collected) |
Efficiency-Saving Through Error Reductions/Data Cleansing | Identifying missing information before it hits the database and automatically correcting the data by sending it back to the point-of-sale | Two staff each correcting errors for three hours/day (at $20/hour) costs $120/day. Identifying errors during the interface and pushing them back to operations for correction reduces the burden on the accounting staff by 60 percent. An integrated system could save
$31,200 per year |
Reduction of Errors in Debit Memo Handling | Querying the database to quickly research and resolve debit memos | One staff spending eight hours/week (at $20/hour) to open, print and code debit memos as they arrive at the agency costs $120/week. Identifying errors at the time of processing can decrease debit memos by as much as 30 percent. An integrated system could save
$8,320 per year |
Reconciliation and Integration | Automating the Tours feed | One staff spending four hours/day (at $20/hour) transmitting Tours messages in real time, watching the interface process and correcting any errors that might stop the process, costs $1,700 per month. Real-time interface to the Tours Feed allows accounting staff to simply flag and correct errors without stopping and restarting the interface. An integrated system could save
$20,040 per year |
Bank Reconciliation | Bank Reconciliation make easy to improve cash flow | One staff spending three hours/day (at $20/hour) reconciling the agency bank statements costs $60/day. Automating bank reconciliation processes can reduce errors by 50 percent. Jobs that once took days now take hours. An integrated system could save
$15,600 per year |
POTENTIAL SAVINGS :
$62,500 per year savings
$31,200 per year
$8,320 per year
$20,040 per year
$15,600 per year
TOTAL : 137,660 PER YEAR OR MORE !
* We will provide print to fax calling modules from the web.
