How Co van Kessel eliminated tons of Spreadsheets, eliminated manual work and remained their flexibility.
Co van Kessel tours is a multi-award winning bicycle tour company with locations in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, Thailand. The company offers bicycle, boat- and walking tours since the early 1990's. Guests are offered a real off the beaten path experience and get a glimpse of the Bangkok and Chiang Mai behind-the-scenes.
Over the years they have build up quite a brand, and receive guests from all over the world. Bookings not only come directly from individuals booking on their website, but also a variety of tour groups and a large amount of travel agents that are based all over the world.
From an operational perspective, their are bicycles involved, boats, restaurants, guides and assistent guides. Multiple groups often have to been sent out at the same time, from their small offices on a daily basis.
Co van Kessel was managing their entire booking and operational system from an impressive number of connected Spreadsheets. The biggest problem with their spreadsheet-system from an IT point of view were.
- 1 way communication
- lacking a single source of truth
- manual work, human errors
Tons of Spreadsheets were maintained, and information was send only one way without feedback. New employees would have problems understanding and getting used to this system.
What Co van Kessel was looking for was a new single source of truth, 2 way communication and manual work. Most of manual work would needed to be automated, but remaining flexible for both customers, guide scheduling and tour check-in were of utmost importance.
When it comes down to availability, the one-way communication was a big headache for Co van Kessel. Customers and agents could submit their bookings, but they didn't receive an automatic response whether the tour would be available or not. As a business, ideally you don't want to run a money-loosing tour. However, sometimes you have reasons to run that tour regardless. Whether it will be for marketing purposes, or taking the risk to schedule the tour hoping on additional bookings to come in.
On the other hand, you have a limited number of spots based on ressources such as bicycles, boats, guides, restaurants etc. Circumstances of the day often also have an impact on the number of spots that are available.
Solution:
Co van Kessel had a great desire of a two-way-communication where direct customers and agents could check live availability of their tours. RotaDesk allows to set a standard number of people that can be accepted and automatically confirmed instantly. On top of that, there is a (small) grey area, called ''pending''. For each tour, and even a specific departure on a specific day, the company is able to set their direct-confirmation availability, aswell as their pending-confirmation availability.
Bookings coming into the ''pending-confirmation'' area are being checked manually whether to accept, decline or move that booking. This features gives Co van Kessel the automation of instant confirmation, aswell as the highly flexibility of the pending-confirmation that can be set from all year round, to day/departure specific.
Over the years, the company has build a network of local and international agents that are booking tours for their customers. This is all happening through manual emails, phone calls or chat messages. A big tasks for the office workers to check all the different rates, contracts, availability and entering bookings details. Manual processes were inefficient and ofcourse prone to error.
Solution:
With RotaDesk, each agent receives their login to their own specific agent portal. They can find their contract here, current and open bookings and their contract rates.
Each agent can login and submit their bookings via the online agent portal. They can also immediately check the live availability for their customers. This solution has eliminated loads of emails and phone calls back-and-forth and all agents can 24/7 check live availaiblity and submit their bookings themselves.
As a bicycle tour operator, they are a variety of ressources that need to be available and scheduled before running a tour. You try to standardise all groups, guides and customers but being in the business for over 30 years, Co van Kessel have learned that no one day is the same. Scheduling guides and groups would need to be standardised, but with the availability of last-minute changes. A bigger group, a smaller group with an extra guide, groups with children that require an extra assistant guide, smaller boats, customers speaking different languages etc. etc.
On a daily basis, multiple guides and assistant need to be scheduled based on the circumstances of the day and flexible for no-shows or additional people showing up.
With the check-in it's of high significance that both customers and guides can be grouped based on a first-ready-first-serve method.
Solution:
Each guides of Co van Kessel has his/her own profile. This is where you can control their days-off, their capability to run a certain tour or not and the language they speak. As a result, when scheduling guides for an upcoming tour, RotaDesk will only recommend guides that are available, can guides that certain tour and speak the language. It is also showing the scheduler how many tours they have already guided and which tours they have guided yesterday/previously. Based on this information, RotaDesk is recommending Co van Kessel which guides to schedule for that specific tour. The scheduler of Co van Kessel can determine how many guides and assistants are needed, based on the number of customers and circumstances of that day with an easy drag-and-drop feature.
Also using drag-and-drop is the state of the art check-in features of RotaDesk. On the one hand there are the bookings for a specific tour. On the other hand, there are the guide teams that are guiding that spceific tour.
During the check-in, customers scan there booking QR-code (or mentioning their name) to check in. for their tour. When they are ready, they can be dragged-and-dropped into group A. Additional customers arriving at the office and that are ready to go are also dragged into group A. The person that is doing the check-in remains flexible on the number of groups and how many customers are in each group. This way Co van Kessel remains flexible for no-shows, sick people, cancelation or people arriving too late making groups well balanced and significantly reduces the waiting time in the office.
Is your tour business facing similar challenges or do have other challenges? Get in touch and see where RotaDesk can help your bookings or operations so that you can focus on offering the best experiences to your customers.
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