A tour marketplace for a holiday company, built around its support team

Challenge

Bookings came in by phone and were tracked in spreadsheets. The company wanted customers to find tours online, but its strength was its support team, so it wanted every booking to stay a personal conversation rather than an online checkout.

Solution

We built a tour marketplace on WordPress with a custom plugin, with separate portals for the company’s admin team, its travel partners, its support staff and its customers.

• Travel partners register online, upload verification documents and are approved by the admin team. Once approved, they add and update their own tours: itinerary, inclusions, dates, prices and photos.
• Customers search tours by keyword and filter by city, duration, price, activity and category, save favourites, and send an enquiry from any tour page. A customer dashboard shows each enquiry’s status.
• The support team works every enquiry from one view, records follow-up notes, moves it from pending to closed, and builds custom itineraries as PDFs from the listed packages.
• The admin team sets the commission for all partners or for each one, with tour prices updated automatically, promotes chosen packages for a set period, and sees partner, tour and enquiry counts at a glance.
• Email notifications for partner approvals, new enquiries and status changes, plus user guides for the admin team and travel partners.

Payment stays offline by design, which keeps the platform simple and lets the support team close each booking in person.

Where It Stands

The marketplace is live. Travel partners list their tours on it, customers enquire through it, and the support team runs every booking from it.