Rezdy vs Travel Agency Tools: Which is a better fit?

Mario B.: Hello. My name is Mario. I'm the director of a small boutique tour operator, and we are in the travel industry, we do private guided tours and bespoke tours, and I would rate Rezdy 5/5. In 2008 we created our own in-house booking software. We hired a couple of developers, we did an in-house with our own [inaudible 00:00:28] and that was one of the biggest mistakes in the business because after three months the program was already obsolete. I mean we design how we wanted it, but as soon as that was on and working we needed more features. So every time we had to call the developers, tell them what we wanted, they had to price it back to us and then it took only weeks just to discuss about it. And then by the time that was online, we already were looking at something else. So after two years of that, that program was too obsolete to be updated and it wasn't working any more. So I looked around, we used Trekksoft for a while and then we swapped to TourCMS, but they didn't really work well for us for a number of reasons. Trekksoft didn't have enough feature for us, it was based on their kind of a website based template that wasn't really possible to change much. TourCMS was very complex to integrate, great products, but very difficult to set it up and we had to do the lots of work for integration for every product. So in the end, we decided to swap through Rezdy and we've been very, very happy with that. It took a little bit for us to swap because our operation was quite complex at the time, but then we managed to streamline and it's a great product and now we have about 170 products on it, and we sell all of them. So really these are products that we needed so it's been a really a good thing. I choose Rezdy because looking around on the web, I restricted the search to the companies that were allowing us to also distribute the product and had also marketplace. So not just something that could ease the way we manage our products, our day-to-day operations, but also a powerful tool to market them and to sell them and distribute them. And I tried two or three more and I just found Rezdy be easier. We had a couple of issues, things we wanted to fix. They were on it straight away, within 24 hours everything was solved. And also as a small tour operator, boutique tour operator, we partner with other similar companies in other parts of Europe, and they also use the same product there, they use Rezdy as well, and we can find very easily to sell each other products and the integration was really, really great. Plus they offer a very competitive price. Now I know that the pricing has changed, contracts and are a little bit different, but back then it was extremely competitive and after being a negotiation we even had the better deal, which is the still the current contract we are on. So I would say it was just everything we needed and it was very easy to get on board and to keep working with them. The integration process, it was longer than we expected, but this was more on our side because we basically do bespoke tours. So he had some 200 products to load on the system. So we decided not to do it all in one go. Let's just do... To phase it in stage by stage. Also we sell different types of tours, private tours, small group tour, and multi-day tours. So the multi-day tours, they are made of several bookings. For each day, you have some 20, 30 bookings a day. So one tour you can have easily 200 or 120 bookings. So different providers that you book, different services, entrances, transportation, hotels, and all that kind of stuff. So private guides and transfers, boats, anything you can think of while you're traveling. So basically we decided to break it down to individual parts and to log the service one by one and then sell them on the other side as a whole package. So, that took a little while, but I also say it was more because we were taking our time because we were busy working, of course was before the pandemic, so we had to do little at a time. `So we are using a hundred percent of our bookings now are taken to Rezdy and I think it's one of the best use of our times since we started working in this industry. So I think it was really worth it, the initial effort of loading all the products, making sure that every part was perfect, the customization of the different aspects. One of the good thing I love about that product is that you can actually design your own vouchers, you can put in your own information, you can add a lot of different aspects to each single service that makes it really personally unique and it's the advantage to it. I think if you're considering using Rezdy, first of all you need to think that you need [inaudible 00:05:32] now you need a CMS, and you need a software that it's also versatile and can give you also good distribution, good management and good access to your data and to contact your clients anytime, anywhere. So I just recommend you get in touch with them and just give it a go like a trial. Log one product, just try it, try the integration with the website, try everything that matters to you. Try to streamline your operations. And this is one problem with us, we were selling multi-days packages with the mentality that every tour had to be unique. And so to then transform this unique service into something that you can actually make bookable online and also transfer it to your providers, or confirm all the bookings and all that, it was a nightmare, had to be done by hand. But we were just sat down and we just find a way to streamline all this process of selling in a very good way, offer the service in a very good way, but also make it quite easy to make the process as automated as possible. Plus we found the integration using other software, so you can actually extract the data from the [inaudible 00:06:55] from Rezdy. So your data can go into any sheet or any other products, into your agenda, into your Google calendar or whatever. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to say names of other softwares, but anyway, you can use hundreds of [inaudible 00:07:13] that will integrate with Rezdy, like to do the books, or anything you need to do it. At the beginning, if you look at the whole thing, it looks like a thousand things you have to do in order to make it work for you. But just take one step at a time and I think within few weeks we'll be fully on Rezdy and you can make the most of, concentrate on growing your business rather than on day-to-day admin, which is, where every small business dies because you have to do endless emails and Excel sheets and then in the end, there's no time to do any growth business.