Making life easier for agents

Thomas Cook India’s new Holiday Mate portal offers its B2B agent partners automated processes to ensure speed, accuracy, and efficiency for their customers. It can create a complete itinerary within a span of a few minutes.

Hazel Jain

The new Thomas Cook India Holiday Mate tool is an enabler for all its channel partners to help them do all its GIT bookings in a seamless way for their customers. Sharing details of the new product, Romil Pant, SVP & Head – Leisure Business, Thomas Cook India, says, “We thought there was no better time and opportunity to launch this tool than now when we are standing on the cusp of a fantastic 2023 ahead. The demand has started coming in and business is now back to normal. We wanted to innovate and offer seamless experience to our B2B agent partners. Instead of contacting us, they can now make their bookings directly on this portal.”

The portal offers end-to-end solutions in easy steps without the need of human intervention, right from choosing a product, customising it as per customer requirement to transaction in four easy steps. This tool is now live. Agents can send multiple quotations at once for all their customer requirements, they can collect their payments, they can ensure that the booking has entered the Thomas Cook India system, in a seamless manner. “The idea was to make life easier for agents. Most of the tools currently available in the market right now are offered by B2B players. If there are any tools by B2C players, it focuses on a lot of things rather than specifically on the holidays business. Thomas Cook India is a holiday focussed company and our largest business is group tours. We also do a lot of FIT but groups are our largest business. We operate group tours across the globe – whether it is Arctic or Antarctic, USA, Canada, Japan, Russia, Australia or India,” Pant says.

Itinerary in a few minutes

Pant adds that the idea behind this was that instead of asking agents to connect telephonically or physically with the company, it gives the power in their hand to look, book and execute on their own. “This in no way changes the monetary benefits they get from these bookings. So, in that sense, this product completely stands out. The customer gets a quote quicker and the agent is able to send the quote for multiple destinations in a span of a few minutes,” he says.

The size of groups starts from about 15-50 pax depending on the destination. These are coach tours, so the itinerary, dates and rates are pre decided. All details of the product are available online and the pricing is dynamic. “The agent can look at the product within the tool, quote and then explain it to the customer, share the payment link with them, as well as book the tour. This is a classical group tour, it’s not an incentive and these are not customisable but these are our classic products. But they can create a complete itinerary within a span of a few minutes. All this without the intervention of Thomas Cook India at the back end,” Pant adds.

Understanding new needs

There is a clear demand for travel and this, feels Pant, is a clear manifestation of the fact that travellers are ready to get out. It’s only a matter of time and for borders to re-open. There is certainly a light at the end of the tunnel, which is now visible by the way India and some international destinations have opened up. This also shows that safe travel is possible and is being managed very well at both ends. We are all driving momentum together now – the tourism boards, the travel agents, the DMCs. The early trends are positive. We are putting all our might behind promoting not just our individual brands but collectively promoting travel as an industry, so that we all gain from it and not just an individual operator.

A new era for agents

Agents need to create a user log-in to start. Thomas Cook India is planning webinars to reach out to the travel trade and inform them about this product. This surely is the new era of travel that Thomas Cook India is ushering in. Its accelerated digital transformation is aimed at delivering an exceptional experience to its key stakeholders. This newly launched B2B platform – Holiday Mate – has been strategically designed to empower its travel agent partners. The idea is to simplify booking processes and strengthen its outreach in India’s viable tier II, III and IV key source markets, thus expanding its market share. Holiday Mate currently offers group bookings and will soon also cater to individual travel in its next phase.