The TripButler wifi device is a small pill shaped unit that fits in your hand or pocket and uses local mobile carrier partners to provide data at a fraction of the cost of a roaming mobile phone.  The device can support up to five devices at a time so it is perfect for a family travelling together or a small group of friends.  Imagine paying for roaming charges on 5 different iPhone or Android devices.  For a one week trip, the unit including 300 MB of data is only 36 Euros or about$50 US.  Considering that a 5MB week long International data pass from Rogers.com costs $75, the savings and value of a device like the TripButler is pretty clear.

Here is a nice little promo video explaining how it works…

Tripbutler Demo Video from Michael Hirschbrich on Vimeo.

You can order a device in advance of your trip and have it delivered to you or your hotel so it is ready to use once you arrive.  The cost of delivery is about $14.  The website does mention a 75 Euro deposit that is refunded if the unit is returned undamaged.

TripButler is providing a 10% discount exclusive to T4 readers who use promo code “BUZA2012“.  For more information about the TripButler and to rent a device, visit their website at http://www.tripbutler.com.

If you have rented the device or plan to, let us know what you think of the service by leaving a comment.

In working with travel start ups a consistent theme I come across is the lofty sales expectations the founders place on themselves and their start up at launch. I believe this to be a huge mistake that reduces your overall chances of success. Money gets spent frivolously on activities that focus on attaining a large number of sales at launch and you spend four times as much time doing things that are unnecessary chasing an unattainable sales goal.

The biggest challenge in a travel start up is actually starting, meaning doing business, making a transaction. In the early stages of your start up you should focus on a conservative and attainable number of tour and activity sales. The key is to have success coming out of the gate.

Out of the gate its initially not about how many you sell but…

-that you are selling.

-what you are learning from your initial sales.

-what kind of experience your client had purchasing and attending your tour and activity.

-that you are making a profit on every sale.

In the Travel Business Academy- Start up and Growth Program a professional online home study course and membership based website we teach entrepreneurs a start up business strategy and philosophy called the Power of 100™ that establishes your initial sales goal of 100 sales. The start up strategy prepares your tour and activity business to sell 100 bookings, trips or tours. By knowing where you want to go in the beginning and simplifying your sales goal to 100 sales you can build your business more efficiently and spend your valuable time and money marketing and advertising your new tour and activity business with an accomplishable sales goal in front of you.

If you sell 100 tour and activity trips you’ll most certainly be on your way to building a successful travel business. Your next steps will then be to structure a business strategy to sell 250, 500 or even 1,000 trips.

As part of your overall start up strategy look to scale down your initial sales projections. Focus on a sales level that is accomplishable. This will ultimately save you money from spending foolishly, make your start up more efficient and help you succeed in the initial stages.

Matt Zito is a veteran travel industry entrepreneur, consultant and founder of the world’s first ever, Travel Business Academy, a professional member-based, home-study program that teaches entrepreneurs globally, how to start and run a travel business. To learn more visit the Travel Business Academy or email matt@travelbusinessacademy.com

5 Tips to starting a successful tours and activity travel business. This is Tip #3.

In the first two articles I wrote about how to partner and package to help your start up get business in the early stages. This third article is about implementing a simple distribution system so at launch you have other marketers and or marketplaces selling your tour and activity products.

There are many new tour and activity distributors and tour and activity marketplaces like Viator, TourCMS marketplace, Isango, GetYourGuide, Kijubi, Smart Destinations and Kumutu. The tour and activity distribution system has been expanding, just Google “tour and activity distribution,” to find one-to-two distribution partners that fit your business model.

Depending on how you run your new tour and activity business it may be smart to allocate a % or a # of your tours and or activities solely for your new distribution partners. If you can find a partner that can resell your tour and activity in real time from your website database or online system this is the best route as this enables you to ultimately maintain all your inventory in one system.

Don’t get caught up in paying a commission and or a % of your sales to your new distribution partners when you start your business. Small business owners have this mentality that they think they are loosing money on the transaction when they could be selling it themselves directly. Another way to view paying a commission and or a fee to a 3^rd party distribution partner is to view it as an acquisition cost or a cost to acquire a new client.

When you start a new business it takes time to determine your acquisition cost per client. A simple equation of an acquisition cost per client is your total marketing and adverting dollars spent divided by the # of clients you acquire. When you start your business you’ll most likely have a marketing and advertising budget and you’ll be spending money to get new business. If your distribution partners acquire you new clients you can use the commission cost or fee paid to the 3^rd party as the basis for how much it costs you to acquire new clients.

You can boost your business and get off the ground quicker by enabling one-to-two tour and activity distributors to sell your travel product. This is a quick way to get new business fast and it will help you determine the cost to acquire new clients.

Matt Zito is a veteran travel industry entrepreneur, consultant and founder of the world’s first ever, Travel Business Academy, a professional member-based, home-study program that teaches entrepreneurs globally, how to start and run a travel business. To learn more visit the Travel Business Academy or email matt@travelbusinessacademy.com

Tip #2: Partner with other travel suppliers in your destination to create a unique one-of-kind package for your tour and activity business.

At the Travel Business Academy we teach entrepreneurs how to build online travel businesses including tour operators, destination activity providers and individual guiding businesses. Packaging is the product that trip and tour operators sell to travelers. If you’re an activity provider or a guide and only provide one type of activity you can easily partner with other activity providers and or hotels and lodging providers to create new packages in addition to your core activity or tour product.

Packaging for Profits

Packaging in the travel and tourism business is all about leverage. To understand the true power of packaging and how it can make your business more profitable, I use leverage as an analogy to help you really understand how packaging works and how it can make your business more profitable. Leverage is simply to borrow to improve your capacity to increase the rate of return.

I define packages as two or more travel products combined to create a third unique product. Most travel packages include a lodging component and an activity component.

In the tours and activity business you can earn greater profits or increase your rate of return for your business through packaging. In its purest sense you borrow other businesses travel products to increase your economic gain.

Let’s look at the numbers and see how packaging works when a lodging property partners with an activity provider. In the mid 1990’s in my early 20’s, my wife and I bought a house in Pennsylvania and created a bed and breakfast named the Yellow Breeches House, next to a famous fly-fishing river. We sold two travel products. Lodging (B&B) and Fly-Fishing guided packages (B&B + guided fly-fishing). Our rooms ranged from $99-$175 per night in season. Our Fly-Fishing Getaway packages were $395 per person and included 2 nights lodging, 1-½ days of guided fly-fishing, 2-dinners and 2-breakfasts. Either a couple or 2 guys purchased the Fly-Fishing packages.

At the height of the business we had up to three Fly-Fishing guides. We paid the guides $200 for 1 ½ days of guided work. We paid two restaurants $20 for each dinner and we served our own breakfasts at the B&B.

Let’s analyze the numbers and compare selling a room vs. selling a package with 2 people per room on a 2-night weekend stay. A room only with 2 people would gross $350 in our most expensive room, $175 a night. A weekend Fly-Fishing Package with 2 people grosses $790, $345 a night. The package expenses were 1 guide $200, 4 dinners $80, net profit is $510. We made $160 more on the weekend or $80 more per night when we sold a package into this room. That same room is now worth $255 per night. Multiply this by more than one room and you can see how the business became more profitable quickly.

As a tour and activity provider you most likely don’t own a lodging property but in your destination you can probably find at least a dozen potential lodging partners. Create a sample package with lodging as your major expense and see if by selling a package can you earn more profit on your tour or activity by selling it as a package. If yes, it’s worth trying to add at least 1 package to your tour or activity product line. It’s just a matter of finding a few lodging partners.

Geoffrey Warner a master furniture designer and creator of the famous Owl Stool in Stonington, Maine, offer’s vacationers to Maine a handmade Owl Stool workshop as an experiential destination activity. Maine is renowned for handmade products. Vacationers take a 1-day workshop at his studio and go home from their vacation with an Owl Stool, made with their own hands. This year Geoffrey plans on selling a package to vacationers that includes 1 night lodging at a local B&B and the 1-day Owl Stool workshop.

The power of packaging is that you borrow other travel supplier’s products and unlike financial leverage you have no or limited expenses to borrow as you are just forming partnerships with other travel and tourism businesses in your destination.

An increased profit is the core strength of packaging. Other benefits include the following; the client buying a package is less likely to cancel a trip, your business fosters new business relationships within your community and you create win-win deals for others. Creating packages enables you to quickly move with trends and fads in the travel and tourism industry. If something is “hot” this season you can create a package for it.

As part of your overall start up strategy to build new business, look to create a package that increases the profit of your core tour or activity product by partnering with one or more travel suppliers in your destination.

Matt Zito is a veteran travel industry entrepreneur, consultant and founder of the world’s first ever, Travel Business Academy, a professional member-based, home-study program that teaches entrepreneurs globally, how to start and run a travel business. To learn more visit the Travel Business Academy or email matt@travelbusinessacademy.com

Tip #1: Introduce yourself and your company’s services to the established travel business owners and tour/activity operators in the destination you plan on starting your business.

A simple way to build a new client base is to reach out and build relations with the established travel businesses that operate in the destination or local area where you are launching. Small business owners in the tours and activity business have a tendency to be territorial and many don’t see the value in building complimentary business relationships with their peers. It’s a huge mistake new business owner’s make. You can implement this strategy to the extreme by reaching out to your fellow tour and activity competitors as well.

Introducing your new tour & activity business is as easy as visiting the established travel owner’s place of business. Tell the business owner what your new business will do and give them a few brochures or your business card. If an established travel business compliments your new start up in any way you can ask the owner if they would be interested in establishing a referral relationship. This can be as simple as referring one another’s business by exchanging phone #, email address and or website.

In my early 20’s my wife and I got started in the travel industry by building a fly-fishing guide service near the famed limestone trout streams in Pennsylvania. We introduced ourselves to two of the fly-shops in our area and told the shops we would bring in our clients to buy flies and equipment before heading to the trout streams. One shop eventually paid us a commission or % of all the business we brought to the shop. In return, whenever the fly shop referred fly-fishing guides they were for sure to mention our new guiding business.

We started a Fly-fishing lodge, Bed & Breakfast shortly after our guiding business got established and again we reached out to not only complimentary lodging businesses and hotels in the area but we built a referral network with other B&Bs. One B&B operated on a higher professional level than the other B&B’s and eventually we just started referring our overflow business to one other. The referral business was taken one step further and we actually sent each other 10% of the bookings. So if we sold a $200 room that was referred by the other B&B we cut a check for $20 and sent it in the mail. When you start sending out checks as referral fees your referral relationships will change and you’ll soon see an uptick in the amount of business you receive. This tip works like magic! Don’t under estimate the power of paying for referral business.

As part of your overall start up strategy to build new business, start reaching out to the local travel business owners in your destination or area and start building peer-to-peer referral relationships.

Matt Zito is a veteran travel industry entrepreneur, consultant and founder of the world’s first ever, Travel Business Academy, a professional member-based, home-study program that teaches entrepreneurs globally, how to start and run a travel business. To learn more visit the Travel Business Academy or email matt@travelbusinessacademy.com

But what will these messages do for you as a small business.  Well, to be totally brutally honest, I don’t think you need to worry about it or even care.  What these messages will do is make it easier for other systems to connect to your Rezgo accounts in order to share your data.  So, for example, if you want to create a relationship with some third-party website and they want your tour data, you just point them to the Rezgo API and give them your credentials.  Simple as that.

In the long term our goal is make it simpler for larger travel technologies like Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity to connect to Rezgo and resell your tours and activities the same way they do hotel rooms or airline seats.  Even though they can do that now, to some degree, they can’t do it with real-time availability. The problem right now is that they need access to a lot of data to make it worth their while.  By growing Rezgo and building an API that is OpenTravel compliant, we are positioning you and your tours/activities to be picked up and marketed by these players.  Will that happen now? Not in the short term, but all of these relationships take time and effort to develop.

The publishing of the OTA_TourActivity messages means a lot to me personally and to Rezgo as a company.  It is a reflection of our continued commitment to improve the opportunities for small business in the travel industry and to continue to develop the in-destination tour and activity segment as a whole.  In an increasingly crowded space where new booking engines are popping up all the time, I’m reassured by the knowledge that no one in the segment is more involved and understands the space better than we do.

You can find out more about the 2011B Publication here: http://www.opentravel.org/News/ArticleView.aspx?ArticleID=134

The woman in the family leads the spontaneous micro-tripper. Micro-trippers take between three and five trips per year, on one- or two-night stays. Micro-trippers are staying at lodging properties and destinations that 75% of the trippers are unfamiliar with, and/or have never visited before, and did not plan on traveling to. The trips purchased were never consciously planned or pre-planned and an overwhelming number of the purchases by micro-trippers occurred within twenty-four hours of hearing about the trip from their friends and family, or through the email marketing that comes into their email box.

The spontaneous micro-tripper is not an OTA buyer (the pre-planned travel market). The micro-tripper market is unlike any mature travel market. I believe this new market is being driven not by the 50%-off deal, like most people think, but by the power of the spontaneous purchase and the opportunity it creates for the lodging industry as a new online distribution channel.

The key difference between an OTA buyer and the Micro-Tripper buyer is the pre-planned purchase vs. the spontaneous purchase. The OTA website booking model or sales process supports a traveler’s pre-conditioned itinerary through a trip-quote booking engine, where the traveler, in effect, tells the website where and when he or she wants to go by selecting a destination and arrival and departure dates. This is the main function of the OTA booking model. At every OTA website the traveler voluntarily chooses to visit the website, so in my view travelers are highly pre-conditioned to know where and when they want to travel.

Whereas the flash-travel sale, group-buying and private-sale booking model or sales process supports minimal if any pre-planning, and starts out by sending an email to the prospect telling them about a travel deal, travel experience or travel destination that they may have never thought of or heard of before.

I have relationships with over 100 directors of sales and revenue managers at many of the major hotels and resorts in North America.  A few have told me that their OTA business is slightly decreasing, while their new “flash-sale, private-sale, group-buying” distribution category is increasing. In my opinion, the recent Groupon and Expedia joint venture is not about Expedia seeing this as a threat so much as an opportunity to enter into this new market, one that their current business model does not support.

Heather Salter, Innkeeper of Bishop Farm Bed & Breakfast and Cottages (www.bishopfarm.com), says, “I was ecstatic about the response I got from the Spring travel sale with BuyWithMe (www.buywithme.com) out of Boston.  We sold 300 vouchers in less than 48 hours. A lot of people told us it was risky to sell our rooms at 50% off, but we thought this was a great way to get our name out to travelers in Boston. This is Gorilla marketing! We knew we weren’t going to make a ton of money. We received over 5,000 visits to our website, and a check for $18,000 before anyone even came to the B&B, and we garnered many new TripAdvisor reviews from our guests. Overall, we feel this was an amazing opportunity for 600 guests from Boston to stay at our B&B and then go back to the city to tell their friends what a wonderful time they had had. You just can’t put a price tag on the amount of marketing we got out of this promotion.”

Patrick Matheson, the Director of Revenue Optimization for the 300+ room, Stowe Mountain Lodge (www.stowemountainlodge.com) in Stowe, Vermont, says, “the social e-commerce travel companies have become a part of our daily life now. We are pre-scheduling sales and we are reviewing in weekly and monthly reports.” Patrick says, “this is a new distribution channel—we have completely separated the social e-commerce companies from the OTAs and some months’ social e-commerce sales have out-performed OTA sales on both room nights and ADR. Our internal data shows that 91% of the bookings are new, first-time clients to Stowe Mountain Lodge.

My final point for this article focuses upon the lodging industry’s distribution needs relevant to the market it’s distributing into. If you’re in agreement with me that your OTA distribution channel is to reach travelers that know they want to visit your hotel or the destination your property is in, and you agree that the spontaneous micro-tripper market is a new market segment, you’ll have to view the flash-sale, private-sale and group-buying companies as a new online distribution channel. You need to think about how you value an OTA booking vs. a Micro-Tripper booking.

A successful flash-sale, private-sale or group buying sales offer is 50% off to the Micro-Tripper with the lodging property paying a 20%–40% commission. The 50%-off offer is the bait that attracts Micro-Trippers from inside their computer. A 50%-off offer with a 30% commission is an effective 65% off your best available rate. I won’t get into economics too much in this article as I realize that each lodging property is different and has its own unique needs in yielding rates. My intent here is to help you see the value you need to offer to acquire a spontaneous Micro-Tripper.

If you’re distributing to the OTA distribution channel you’re offering between 20%-35% off your best available rate, 35%+ to the opaque OTA channels. The purchaser in both channels is a pre-conditioned buyer, or has pre-planned their travel, and is highly likely looking to directly book your hotel and/or visit your destination or area. For whatever reason, this buyer is going through the OTA instead of going through your property website direct. My point here is that an OTA travel purchaser is most likely coming to your hotel or destination no matter what.

So how do you value a micro-tripper who is unfamiliar with your lodging property and possibly your destination, was never pre-conditioned or never planned on visiting your lodging property, and who, once introduced to your property through a branded and highly discounted lodging offer or package, decides to book a micro-trip of one or two nights?

I believe the answer to this question ultimately varies with each individual hotel and lodging property. As a side note, I owned a bed and breakfast, fly-fishing lodge in my earlier twenties, so I’ve had experience managing and putting “heads in beds”. Yes, on a small scale, but I’ve been there.

The new distribution channel makes sense, purely as a new client acquisition strategy, if I convert but 15%–25% of the Micro-Trippers who visit my property on 50%-off deals as repeat customers over my client lifecycle.

There are then—in my opinion—some secondary benefits; heads in beds, increased occupancy, in-house ancillary income generated, and the marketing exposure your brand will get from being displayed in 1,000,000+ email boxes.

The Spontaneous Micro-Tripper is a new leisure travel market segment that your hotel or lodging property will want to distribute into. I believe that this new market opens up huge opportunities for destination-based hotels, lodging properties less than a three-hour drive from major U.S cities and seasonal properties.

If your hotel, resort or lodging property is interested in participating in this new and fast growing marketplace or you would like to learn more, please contact me. mdz@mattzito.com

Matt Zito is an online travel business consultant in the social e-commerce travel industry, helping both online travel companies and lodging properties build and grow their businesses. To learn more about the social e-commerce travel industry, subscribe to the Travel Business Profits e-letter and on September 19-20, attend the Travel Distribution Summit North America, where Matt will speak as the expert moderator, “Social Buying and Flash Sales: The Pros and Cons.”

Having worked with hundreds of small businesses in the tour and activity segment, I’ve learned many things. One of the most important things I have learned is that almost all the business owners I have worked with are hard working passionate operators who are looking for ways to make a decent living doing what they love. Their business is what sustains them, but DOING the business is not what fulfills them, doing what they love fulfills them. As a result, these businesses tend to be easy targets for salespeople who pitch a great marketing opportunity that can bring a ton of new business with no upfront costs. The problem with this model, is that the end costs can be catastrophic for a small business.

Don’t take my word for it though. There are a lot of people out there who are saying the same thing. Unfortunately, most of what we say gets drowned out by the buzz and hype around daily deals. After all, how could it possibly be a bad thing when Groupon has managed to make $600 Million in revenues. That’s great for Groupon, but at the end of the day, they have made that revenue on the backs of the small businesses who are willing to give away their products and services for 25 cents on the dollar.

Techcrunch guest poster Rocky Agrawal has written an excellent series of articles about the daily deals phenomenon and why it is bad for business. Rocky’s series is eye opening and well worth the read. If it doesn’t dissuade you from doing a daily deal, I hope it at least gives you some tools to ensure that the deal you run is successful for your business.

You can find Rock Agrawal’s series on Daily Deals here:

• Why Daily Deals Are Becoming A Raw Deal
• Groupon Was “The Single Worst Decision I Have Ever Made As A Business Owner”
• Google Offers Is A Cheap Knockoff
• Why I Want Google Offers And The Entire Daily Deals Business To Die
• Why Groupon Is Poised For Collapse

So why did I write this post?  I am disturbed by what I see in the market. I don’t like the idea of a large business taking advantage of small businesses and I certainly don’t like the tactics that are used to do it.

As a long time advocate of small business, I’ll do what I can to protect the interests of my small business customers and educate and empower them to make good business decisions, even if that advice is contrary to popular belief.

The concept behind THack is that developers will get access to some cool open and private APIs in order to build something that they can showcase in front of the audience at the Advisory Forum.  The winner will get bragging rights and coverage by the most influential travel technology media site, Tnooz.

If you are a developer and you’re looking for a great way to showoff your skills and creativity to a highly influential audience, THack is a great place to be.  All Open APIs are fair game of course, like Google’s open APIs.  Some of the companies who have provided access to their APIs include:

If you are a travel tech company and want to get some exposure for your API, why not contact Kevin May at Tnooz and let him know.  We’d love to see more APIs in the mix so we can get the creative juices flowing.  For more information about THack, check out this article on Tnooz:

http://www.tnooz.com/2011/03/28/news/viva-las-vegas-thack-heads-to-the-desert/

Only 6 developer spots remaining, so apply now and contact Kevin May at Tnooz commit to your slot!

For as long as there have been tourists there have been tours, tour guides, and destination based activities.  Unlike the more commonly known travel segments like flights, hotels, car rentals, and cruise, the in-destination tour and activity segment is dominated by very small businesses.  According to research conducted by PhoCusWright and sponsored in part by Rezgo, the U.S. tour and activity market is worth a sizable $27 Billion.

“I am excited by the potential the tour and activity segment represents.” says Stephen Joyce, CEO of Rezgo “This research proves we’re in the right space and the right time. The small businesses that make up the tour and activity space need solutions that will help them take advantage of the Web.  Rezgo is well positioned to do just that.”

According to the study, the tour and activity segment represents the third largest segment in the travel industry, almost twice as large as car rentals and larger than the cruise and packaged vacation segments combined.  The year over year growth in Rezgo transaction volume also indicates that the tour and activity segment is undergoing a shift to on-line.

“In 2010 we experienced overall growth of 82% over 2009.  This represents both an increase in the number of companies using Rezgo as well as an increase in bookings per company.” adds Joyce “All our metrics indicate another strong growth year in 2011.”

With a value of $27 Billion, there’s no doubt that the tour and activity segment will be getting significantly more attention than it has in the past.  Thanks to companies like Rezgo, small businesses will be able to take full advantage of this new found exposure and build their on-line businesses.

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Media Contact:
Stephen Joyce, CEO
Rezgo.com
92 Lonsdale Avenue,
North Vancouver, BC, Canada
(604) 983-0083
stephen.joyce@rezgo.com