Mach Plays Santa To Boost Business For Colchester Travel & Magic Of Lapland

There is nothing like having good pre Christmas sales to give an agent a positive start to a new year. This is particularly relevant if you happen to be big in the Santa market.

Colchester Travel is a successful agency with a high turnover of repeat local customers, it also happens to be one of the country’s leading players in the make believe world of Santa tours to Lapland  - thanks to its presence on the Web as www.santadays.com.

Fortunately for Colchester Travel the lure of avuncular gent in the red outfit proved strong this year, particularly because Santa had a little helper in the shape of some of the latest travel technology.

Magic of Lapland

One of the reasons for this success was due to sales agreement with the tour operator Magic of Lapland whose web-based MARS operating system from Mach Associates meant that Colchester Travel’s Santadays site could sell live availability direct from Magic’s web site until the very last minute, thus mopping up valuable late sales.

Magic of Lapland signed up with Mach Associates in July 2005, and in record short time, by 4th September was taking on-line bookings. Mach Associates got the company up and running with on-line Web bookings in a matter of weeks.

Magic of Lapland's Ivana Rizmal: “MARS gave us a browser based reservations system and a solution that allowed on-line bookings on our website to take place within required short time scale, within a reasonable price structure”.

Mach Associates’ Richard Bristow (left) with Colchester Travel’s John Bennett.

Colchester Travel required for its sales to grow an on-line booking solution and expressed their interest to work closely with Magic of Lapland, who came to a decision to assign Colchester Travel as one of its agents and test the use and practicality of the MARS reservation system for its agents and its effect on sales.

Bookings on screen

For Colchester Travel this meant that Magic of Lapland bookings were made directly on screen without clients ever being aware that they had effectively left Colchester’s site and were making their booking live on the Magic of Lapland MARS system. The look and feel of the pages were identical.

Colchester’s clients booking with all other Santa operators featured on its Santadays web site has to fill in a reservations form, and the details were then confirmed by phone.

The ability of Colchester’s site to offer customers live bookings with Magic of Lapland became increasingly important as the days before Christmas ticked away.

This was particularly as last year proved to be a late booking one.

Guaranteed availability

Said Colchester Travel director John Bennett; “We all know that things are tough on the high street at present, and travel is of course affected by other factors such as well. This is what made it a late booking market. But because Magic of Lapland is completely live and real time we know we can guarantee availability until the last moment.

“There is no doubt that this technology will mean that Magic of Lapland got proportionally more business than our other operators the nearer we got to Christmas. I knew that any of our customers who made a Magic of Lapland booking got instant confirmation, live on-screen, and that improved our level of service to them”.

Because Magic of Lapland’s pages are actually embedded into Colchester Travel’s Santadays web site, rather than being simple ‘white label’ pages, it also means that the agency is paid by the customer and then passes money back to Magic of Lapland, rather than having to collect its commission retrospectively.

Said John Bennett: “The whole process improves your relationship with the tour operator because he knows you are giving him more exposure on your website”. The result of this marriage of convenience and technology is that, thanks to its MARS system, Magic of Lapland became

Santadays best booked operators, whilst the agency now has a product it knows can be booked 24 hours a day with fully live availability.

Said Mach Associates director Richard Bristow: “The relationship between Magic of Lapland and Colchester Travel’s Santadays programme is a perfect example of a tour operator taking advantage of the latest technology, and passing it on to an agent.

The result is of this success is that Colchester Travel is to re-model its shop to reflect more of a concentration on up-market business for the future. As John Bennett says: “You can no longer just rely on local business walking through the door. Customers are sophisticated, they can all use the Web and if you want to prosper in future you have to on it with a good product they can book”.