In the following videos, we will explain to you how to create a Hop On Hop Off tour.
Part 1
Transcript part 1
Hello. In this video, we're going to explain how to configure the Dates and Prices tab of a tool. That's the last part of the creation process, and we can also create departures there.
So if you click on Products, Tours, you will get your tour. We need to click on that Edit button and then Dates and Prices. Here we have different sections. First, we can see a filter to filter departures between the time frame and also different statuses of the departures: Bookable, Not Bookable, Bookable but Zero Bookings, etc. And if we click on Refresh, we can only see those departures according to those filters. As we still don't have any departures created here, we don't see anything.
To create the departures list, we have to scroll down. In here, in the Create a New Departure in New Single Departure Date, we can create a single departure, only one. That's not very useful if we want to create all the departures for the whole season. So, for that, we need to use the One Day Tour Activity Generator tool, where we can create the departures for the whole season.
The season start date is today, and the season end date is at the end of the year. On the day of the week, we can select all the days or we can unmark those days when we don't offer the tour. In our case, we'll keep all of them marked. Below, we have to enter the price information. This is the customer price. So let's say for an adult it is 50 Euros and for child it is 20 Euros. On the right side, we have additional information. The Product Note is something visible in the channel manager, and it's displayed in the booking engine for every channel. So here we can add additional information about this departure. Let's say we're going to create two different departures: one for the English group and another for the Spanish group. So here in product we will enter "English product note English" and in the Supplier Note we can enter something like "ENG" or the same English word. Below we have the code. This is the code of the departure. We can enter a code if it's useful for you, or we can leave it blank. In our case, we'll leave it blank and click on Create Departures.
Now we have all our departures from today to the end of the year with the prices we have already entered, and the capacity is zero right now, but in a few minutes it will be refreshed to a real capacity. If we click on this button, Toggle Notes, we can see the product notes, offer notes, and supplier notes for every channel. All of them have the English note.
Now we want to create the departures for the Spanish group. For that, we have to use the One Day Tour Activity Generator tool. Click here and repeat the process. We can copy the price structure or recreate it. That's very useful if you don't want to enter the same prices again. Click here and we have our prices and the notes. We will change the notes as we mentioned, we are creating now departures for that Spanish group. So we replace English with Spanish, and also in the Supplier Notes. Again, we have to define the season start date and season end date. And if we don't offer the Spanish group on a specific day, then we can unmark it. Now again, we will keep all the days. We'll keep the same price, but we'll replace the notes with Spanish. And then Create Departures.
Now, if we click on the Toggle Notes, we can see how we have our English and our Spanish departures every day.
Apart from that, here we have different columns: the dates and the status of every departure. Date is the start date, and Status is Closed or Open. Closed means the departure has been closed because of the cutoff. And open means the departure is still open, and we can book for that departure. The Code, if we have previously entered the code, we can see the code here; in our case, we didn't enter any code. Then we have the Customer Price. Then we have an Offer Price (instead, we entered one; we will explain how to do it in another video). Then we have the Quantity column with quotation. "P" stands for provisional, and "C" stands for confirmed. Those are the different statuses of the booking. So here we could see how many spaces we have already booked for this departure in terms of quotations, provisional, and confirmed bookings. Then we have the Block Capacity column. Here we can see how many spaces we still have and how many spaces we have blocked in case a subsystem is blocking capacity. Then we have the Close column here where we can click and manually close the departure. And we have the Action column where we can delete a specific departure by clicking on the trash icon. And here we have all our departures.
Part 2
Transcript part 2
Under Text Description and Images, we find the possibility to tell and show much more about this tour. Commercial Priority influences the order in which sales agents get your product to display if they do a search query. This is not a very important function, so I will leave this at the default.
Where the tour takes place should already be filled in as we did that in the total general settings, but if you run a multinational operation, you might want to change this entry. Postal address is not a mandatory field, but here you could enter the address of your office.
About geocodes, here we must enter at least the start and end points of our tour. If you click in this link, click on the map, and you get the exact geographic values which you can copy into the corresponding fields in Tour CMS. For a hop-on hop-off, I recommend adding all the stops and marking them as "Can Start" and here.
Now you need to choose your Tour Type, Tour Leader, Grade, and Accommodation Comfort Rating. As we don't offer accommodation, we set this to "No Accommodation - Not Applicable." Then we must choose the suitability of our tour. And finally, we have the option to use other spoken languages on our tour, but because we can really handle languages in another way, I would like you to leave this empty for now.
Click Save Key Information to continue.
Next, we head to Tour Text Descriptions and Videos. Here we have some mandatory and some non-mandatory fields to fill in. As I already said, this information will be pulled to some extent by your sales agents, who will use it to sell your products. Try to give as much information as you possibly can.
We can continue to Images. You can search them on your hard drive and upload them here.
The next tab is the Product Page URL. For the moment, I want this to remain untouched as it will be greatly influenced by the sales agents that we will explain in another video.
Because we set the status of these stores to be distributed, we get a fifth tab called Incomplete Data. This step acts as some sort of quality control, and all the remaining requirements in here must be met before a tour can be distributed to the sales agents.
So, let's head to the final tab, Date and Prices.
Part 3
Transcript part 3
Let's set up the first season of departure for this tour. One Day Tour Activity Generator is by far the best way to do this.
We start by setting the first and the last day of our season. Beneath that, we can tick off certain days of the week if we don't run the tour on those days. Now we must enter the price for the rates we defined a few minutes ago in the setup menu. And let's say adults pay 20 and children 10.
Now we must enter the price, the product note, and the first language that we offer on our tool. Let's say English. By the way, we handle languages in this particular way because we discovered that this is the easiest way for our connected OTAs to incorporate languages into the sales process. Let's hit Create Departures to do so.
As you can see, we created a lot of departures for every day of our season. We see the date, the status (open or closed), the product note (in this case, English), the pricing, and the quantity of the booking. And by the way, QPC stands for Quotation, Provisional, and Confirmed. I feel close to the departure, and at the end, we have the possibility to delete a single departure, but this is only possible if there are any bookings for this departure.
Speaking of deleting, down in the tools, we find a function called Mass Departure Deletion Tool, which you can use to delete all dates without bookings.
Let's continue by adding more daily departures for other languages. Again, we click on One Day Tour Activity Generator. Now we can copy the pricing structure from an already existing tour. Again, we select the start and end date of the system. And now we change the products node to another language, in this case, Spanish. And click on Create Departure.
In the updated list of departures, we now see two departures per day with different product nodes: English and Spanish. You can go on and repeat this process for other languages on your tour. Once you have added other languages, click on Save Departure Changes.
Now we're almost finished with this tour. The next step would be to set up the shared availability feature, but that is something we'll explain in another video.