TOURCO is a wholesale receptive tour operator

1

Who is Tourco?

• TOURCO is a wholesale receptive tour operator
• Wholesale because we sell to other travel/tour
  operators in the travel trade, who then market
  their products to travel agents and consumers
• Receptive because we welcome passengers INTO our
  special destinations, we do not send passengers
  to far away places.

2
Tourco History

• TOURCO was founded in 1980, and specialized in
  group tours to Cape Cod, Mass.
• Tourco is a family business owned and operated by
  Jerry Marian DiPietro
• Today, Tourco has 5 offices and specializes in
  group and individual tour products for the
  wholesale and retail markets.
• Nobleboro, ME
• Boston, MA
• New York, NY
• Philadelphia, PA
• Toronto, ON

3
Tourco Territory
Over the years, Tourcos specialist territory has
expanded from providing products in the 6 New
England States to include products in the
Mid-Atlantic (Capital) Region, the South and
Eastern Canada. We consider this our specialist
area as we strive to be the best operator in this
region. We do not offer services or products in
any other parts of the USA or Canada. Tourco
works closely with the State Tourism boards and
Convention Visitors bureaus in the States and
Cities of our region.
4
Tourcos Suppliers

• Tourco must contract or establish signed
  wholesale agreements with hundreds of hotels,
  restaurants and attractions in our region in
  order to create our different tour products for
  our different divisions.
• As a wholesaler we contract rates that are much
  less than the average rack rate or retail rate
  for a hotel, restaurant or attraction. As we can
  promise these suppliers hundreds and sometimes
  thousands of passenger visits each year.

5
Contracting Department

• Tourco has a contracting department that is
  responsible for communicating with all of the
  vendors that we hope to work with in a given year
  and to establish contracted rates with that
  vendor, be it a hotel, attraction, restaurant or
  similar.
• We establish written contracts with each vendor
  that we work with, once all rates and conditions
  are agreed upon, the contracting department
  prices out the rates and loads all of that
  information into our booking system, TM so that
  all of the staff may view and use those vendors
  in their bookings.
• The contracting department is also responsible
  for keeping track of how our rooms (or inventory)
  are selling and moving those blocks around so
  that we can get the most amount of bookings into
  each room block and not release rooms back to
  the hotels if we can book them.

6
Tourcos Divisions

• Tourco has several different sales divisions
  within the organization
• FIT Division FIT means Foreign Independent
  Traveler, or Frequent Independent Traveler.
• Group Division groups of passengers traveling
  via Motorcoach usually with a Tour Director or
  Guide.
• Retail Division direct to consumer sales through
  our retail web site Destinnations.com

7
FIT Division

• The FIT Division handles the sales, booking and
  processing of reservations for individual
  travelers.
• The Division is comprised of Sales Managers,
  Reservations Agents and Customer
  Service/Documentation Agents.
• The Sales Managers go to trade shows and travel
  to the offices of our International Clients to
  sell Tourco Products for our clients to put in
  their brochures.
• The Sales Department is usually very busy during
  the summer and fall getting all of the rates and
  details to our clients for the next year. For
  example in August 2004, they are selling the
  products that will be in our clients brochures
  for the 2005 season.

8
FIT Division - Res

• The Reservations agents process all of the
  reservations that come through from our hundreds
  of overseas clients. They can be booking, editing
  and canceling hundreds of reservations a day.
• They are also responsible for processing and send
  rooming lists out to hundreds of hotels daily.
  All of those hotel room blocks that our
  Contracting Department has firmed up for us, need
  to be sent back to the hotels on the agreed upon
  date with passenger names or released back to the
  hotels if we have no bookings.
• The Reservations team uses information provided
  to them by the sales department to know what each
  of our clients is selling and how to book it,
  this information is provided on Active Clients
  sheets.

9
FIT Division - CS

• The Customer Service Department is responsible
  for putting together all of the documentation
  that the passengers will receive when they
  arrive.
• They prepare the vouchers that the passengers
  will present to the hotels for payment and the
  daily driving directions and sightseeing
  information for Fly/Drive tours. They also work
  very closely with our remote offices to ensure
  that those offices have all of the passenger
  names and details for passenger arrivals each
  day.
• Finally, they are responsible for handling any
  problems that passengers may encounter while they
  are on their holiday and/or complaints or
  comments when they return home.

10
FIT Division - Clients

• Most of our FIT clients are International Tour
  Operatorsnames you might know are British
  Airways Holidays, Virgin (airlines) Holidays,
  Thomas Cook, Thomson Holidays and more.
• These clients select Tourco products
  tours/hotels/services and publish them in their
  vacation brochures 8-10 months prior to the
  operating year. The brochures are then placed on
  travel agency shelves all over the world.
• The passengers themselves dont usually know
  anything about TOURCO at allthey are traveling
  on a British Airways package or a Thomas Cook
  package (this is called own branding) Tourcos
  name typically doesnt appear anywhere.

11
Fly Drive Tours

• One of our most popular FIT products is the
  Fly/Drive tour.
• Our Tour Operator clients make the reservations
  for their passengers. We book all of the hotels
  and provide the passengers with travel documents
  that include their daily driving directions, maps
  and discount brochures or coupons for area
  attractions.
• Passengers arrive by air, and then pick up a
  rental car to travel around on their tour.
• We offer Fly/Drive tours throughout our region,
  they range in length from 7 night tours to 21
  night tours and anything in between.

12
Scheduled Coach Tours
Our FIT customers can also book passengers on
any of our scheduled departure Motorcoach
tours. These tours are scheduled to departure
several times throughout the season, they are
escorted by a Tourco Tour Director and are
operated in a variety of different languages.
Therefore on any one of our Motorcoach tours,
you could have passengers from several different
tour operators and/or countries, traveling
together. Many of these tours include meals and
admissions to the attractions along the route as
well as guiding by our trained Tour Directors.
13
City Packages

• Each season we create City Packages to make it
  easy for our clients to sell city stays to their
  passengers. Most of our city packages include
• airport meet greet
• roundtrip airport/hotel/airport transfers
• and usually 2/3 nights in a hotel
• Sometimes these packages include theatre tickets
  or a sightseeing tour of that city
• Our remote offices in Boston, New York host
  welcome meetings for passengers. They provide
  travel information about the city and sell
  theatre tickets, city tours, and many other
  special services (i.e. museum passes, dinner
  cruises, helicopter tours, etc.)
•  

14
FIT Hotels, Inns, Resorts
Also we provide our clients with a selection of
hundreds of Hotels, Inns, Bed Breakfasts and
Resorts throughout our entire region. FIT
passengers can book hotel stays for as many
nights as they choose. They may also create their
own itineraries by selecting from our list of
properties and putting together their own
customized tour. We block rooms (allocations)
with most of the properties that we work with,
these rooms are loaded into our booking system
TM, the FIT reservations staff use those rooms to
confirm bookings to our customers.
15
Gateway Services

• Our clients can add gateway services to their
  hotel, city stays or fly/drive, coach tour
  bookings, such as
• airport meet greets
• hotel/airport transfers via private sedan,
  limousine or in some cities, shuttle bus
• The staff we have in various of our major gateway
  cities handle all of these arrangements
• These staff also sell optionals sightseeing
  trips, theatre tickets, dinner cruises, etc. in
  the various gateway cites

16
TORS
Our TORS website also provides our clients with a
place to download our tariffs, view important
updates, specials, status and more.

• The TOURCO Online Reservations System is an
  online real-time reservations system.
• Designed for our Wholesale Tour Operator Clients
  the system allows our clients to book any of our
  hotels, packages or services from our current FIT
  Tariff. They see live availability and get
  instant confirmations on their bookings. Plus,
  our customers that have customized or special
  itineraries, can also book their own itineraries
  on the TORS system, once they log in, any
  itineraries that are affiliated with that
  customer will appear on the tour list for them to
  select and book.
• Bookings made on TORS are automatically entered
  into our TM system. Our customers may also cancel
  their TORS bookings online, or send us a request
  to amend a TORS booking right from the system.

17
Group Division
We have a group brochure that shows examples of
many different group itineraries. Sales Managers
also spend a lot of time creating customized
itineraries for any requests that come through.
Once a quote is accepted by the clients. Rooms
are confirmed and the whole file is passed onto a
Operations Coordinator.
Our Group is comprised of Sales Managers and
Operations Coordinators. The Sales Managers
attend shows and go on sales trips to meet with
operators and agents to sell Tourcos destination
and products. These are usually preformed
groups, a bank club, or bowling club,
organization or just a group thats sold by an
agent at an operators office. They will often
arrive in on their own coach. We also welcome
international groups that arrive and travel
together, these are different from the scheduled
departure tours as they are all coming from one
agency and traveling together.
18
Group Coordination
The Operations Coordinators will then review the
whole itinerary or contract and make reservations
for all meals and attractions on the tour, as
well as scheduling motor coaches and preparing
driving directions and day to day itineraries for
the passengers and our Tour Director. They must
get all rooming lists to all hotels and a packet
of complete instructions to the Tour Director or
Guide. Then they must monitor the tours while
they are on the road to make sure all is
operating smoothly. The Manager of Tour
Directors schedules our staff of Tour Directors
on the various tours that are on the
roadsometimes we can have as many as 100 Tour
Directors on the road at the same time. Our Tour
Directors report to us regularly while they are
on the road to advise of any issues during the
tour.
Once a tour has completed, all of the paperwork
from the Tour Director must then be sorted to the
correct departments so that vendors can get paid
and all of the evaluations from our passengers
can get entered into the system.
19
Retail Division

• Tourco also operates a retail division where we
  sell products direct to consumers instead of
  selling to other tour operators or travel
  partners.
• We promote these products totally on the
  internet. DESTINNATIONS is a TOURCO owned name
  were we sell BBs, Character properties and
  resorts on the website www.destinnations.com
• Because these are direct to consumer sales we
  have a reservationist that is responsible for
  answering the telephone lines where consumers
  phone in to make bookings, they may also make
  their bookings online through the website.

20
Accounting Department

• Tourcos Accounting Department is responsible for
  keeping track of all company finances.
• Our Accounts receivable clerk collect all funds
  from our customers, the tour operators and group
  clients and apply those payments to the bookings
  in the TM system. They send out monthly
  statements to all of our customers every month
  and track all wire transfers, checks and credit
  card payments on a daily basis.
• Our Accounts payable clerk is responsible for
  getting all payments out to our vendors on time
  (according to our contract with the vendor) Some
  of our vendors require prepayment or immediate
  payment and others bill us on a monthly basis.

The Director of Accounting not only oversees the
accounting clerks but is also responsible for all
other finances of the company, monthly financial
reports to our owner and accountants, payments
of overheads, such as rent, electricity, payroll,
employee benefits and more.
21
Marketing Department

• Our Marketing Department is responsible for
  producing and distributing all of Tourcos
  written or visual collateral, this means flyers,
  fly/drive documents, brochures/tariffs, press
  releases, company profiles organizing territory
  and hotel slides to provide to our customers.
• Our FIT Tariff and Group Brochure are the two
  largest pieces that we put together each year,
  and they take months to finish every year. In
  additional this department also creates and
  designs many specialty/seasonal brochures.

22
Information Systems

• The Information Systems Department is responsible
  for review, purchase and maintenance of all
  information system hardware and software utilized
  by the company staff. They work with a local
  support company to monitor repair and
  installation of software and hardware company
  wide. They also maintain all company servers
  including file server, WAN server, mail server
  and web servers.
• The Information System Director reviews and
  troubleshoots any software issues including
  testing and reporting issues with our in house
  booking system TM. The IS Director also creates
  and maintains all company websites including the
  TORS online booking system and any Tourco
  profiles on third party websites. They also
  research and review technological advancements
  Tourco can make either online or offline.