Meet Susan Sanderson – Technology Evangelist for Rezometry – Reservation Software for Multi-Day Tour Operators
Today we have selected Susan Sanderson to take her interview. She is the Technology Evangelist at Rezometry.
First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?
Thanks for asking.
Being in the Travel Industry sector has been tough for us, our customers, and the travel industry at large. But we have come together as an industry during these times, and we are doing pretty well. We have taken this time to listen to and work with our customers to all come out stronger. It has been challenging, but we have seen growth in our company despite the pandemic.
Tell us about the Multi-Day Tour Operator Space Rezometry is in?
The global multi-day tour operator market is a large, diverse industry comprising approximately 10,000 tour operations, mostly small businesses, offering an extraordinary diversity of products and services, from custom trip planning to scheduled escorted and group tours to classic and unique tourist destinations. They create, sell, and operate tours comprising multiple travel components over multiple days for leisure and affinity travel.
These tours typically include accommodation, tours, activities, transfers and may or may not include transportation such as air, coach, or rail. The multi-day tour operator industry is well behind other travel and tourism sectors in digitizing and adopting modern reservations software. Just over half of all operators use some dedicated technology platform for their tour core business.
The rest use a mix of email, spreadsheets, itinerary tools, and extranets of some OTAs to manage various aspects of their operations.
Tell us about Rezometry. What do you do? What do you offer?
Rezometry Platform Overview :
Rezometry is a sophisticated, internet-based application platform designed for complex travel requirements. The platform delivers true network accessibility, scalability, security, and the power and efficiency of today’s most advanced technologies. Our clients have used Rezometry to book hundreds of millions of dollars of travel annually and move millions of passengers each year.
The Core Platform :
Rezometry is an impressive, rich out-of-the-box reservation and management system for tour operators of all types: Custom/Bespoke, Inbound/Outbound, Package, Schedule, Escorted, Small Group, and DMC’s. The Rezometry platform consists of the following integrated systems: Central Reservation System (CRS), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Product Management, Pricing & Availability/Inventory Management, Operations, Accounting, and Reporting.
Rezometry is designed for in-house staff and managers, including call center, administrative, and executive users, who access Rezometry using the Google Chrome web browser. With a feature-rich product database, supplier and channel connectivity, vendor portals/extranets, quick reservations processing, financials, reporting, customizable website, and partner connectivity, Rezometry gives you the control and flexibility to source and manage products and improve customer service, all the while increasing sales and improving your bottom line.
We have been solving the complex problem of providing travel tour reservation and management software for multi-day tour operators for many years now. Because of their diversity and complex needs, we constantly innovate and integrate to provide them with the best out-of-the-box solution customized to meet their needs.
Our commitment to customers and our flexibility in responding to their needs has led to impressive conversion and retention metrics:
- 55% of our clients switch to Rezometry after using one of our competitors
- 45% of our clients previously relied on multiple systems and manual processes
- Zero of our clients have left Rezometry for competitors
How does your company innovate?
As I mentioned, many Tour Operators are small and mid-size companies, but it doesn’t mean their needs are any less complex than those of larger Tour Operators. These companies have to work with many vendors in various ways while ensuring they provide the best travel experience for their customers. And this is no easy feat. Our job is to provide a technology solution that eases the workload while ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
And beyond the core system, we are constantly integrating with third-party systems to ease our customers’ burden of managing their business, always to stay ahead of the curve. We constantly monitor industry trends, listen to our customers’ needs, and implement changes to deliver the greatest benefits to our clients.
How the Coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?
As you know, the pandemic took a toll on many industries, but one of the hardest hit was and still is the travel industry. While travel has started to rebound in some countries like the USA, we have had customers in other countries for 16 months with no business. And even if travel is rebounding in one country, many businesses rely on outbound travel to countries that are still closed.
And with changes happening all the time, such as borders opening and closing or the entry rules with testing, vaccinations, and quarantine, our customers who have been able to do some business during these times have faced enormous hurdles.
In short, they have had to do a lot more work, all the while knowing there is a great risk of customer cancellations. But it is not all doom and gloom. As an industry, we have come together, and as a company, we have pivoted in many ways to help our current and potential future customers. We quickly changed our software to assist our clients with tasks, functions, and reporting they never really needed before the pandemic.
Some customers have used this slower downtime to develop some new capabilities to help protect their business in the future.
And in other ways, we were able to help out our customers with some financial relief. In the end, it was all about ensuring we all survived and thrived as best we could as we know travel will rebound worldwide. And to continue to drive business in a time when companies in our space were all about conserving cash, we pivoted to a new pricing model so new customers could use some of this downtime to set up a great tour reservation and management system without any out of pocket costs until their customers started traveling again.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined this company?
I joined the company in Toronto, Canada, and moved to Florida to open the US office shortly after that. During my career, I was always in sales, customer service, and training service, and I often found myself in the travel industry in one way or another. I got my BA while working as a flight attendant and traveling the world. And now, with Rezometry, working on the tech side to help companies run more efficiently and profitably after understanding what they go through on the front lines has been a real joy.
Who are your competitors?
There are only a handful of companies providing a complete solution in this space. Many companies do some aspect of the business, such as itinerary generation or customer relationship management, but very few provide an affordable integrated solution for tour operators. But to be honest, our biggest barrier is companies who think a solution like Rezometry is too costly. It just simply is not!
Your Final Thoughts
The travel industry is resilient, and it will come back from this pandemic better than ever. There have been many lessons learned from Covid, and technology has led the way in solving many of the challenges and problems the industry has faced. It is estimated the pandemic moved technology forward some 5 to 10 years, and we see this in our company.
We have continued to innovate and work with our existing and new customers to help them provide the best travel experience for their customers by managing much of the mundane, labor-intensive, detail-oriented tasks, all the while giving owners insight into their business with forecasting detailed reporting. And we aren’t done yet. In an industry that is always changing, there is much still to be done.
- Spokesperson: Susan Sanderson
- Company: Rezometry
- Website link: https://www.rezometry.com/
