Chukka Caribbean Adventures' newest offering has little to do with ziplining but everything to do with streamlining.
After a six-month trial period, the Jamaica-based nature-adventure tour operator has rolled out TourMax, a booking system that handles reservations, ticketing and tour dispatch functions for Chukka's 38 tours in Jamaica, Belize, the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos.
"TourMax enables travel agents and hotel tour and concierge desks to have direct access to Chukka's live inventory. Chukka provides dedicated monitors and hardware to hotels to create this real-time access," said George Davidson, president and CEO of RepeatSeat, the technology vendor.
Agents can access the booking tool at Chukka's website.
"The TourMax product is a dream come true for tour and excursion operators," said Danny Melville, Chukka's founder and chairman. "Not only does it automate all of our reservations and ticketing, but it also schedules client pickups at hotels and cruise ships, assigns routes to drivers, assigns guides to tours, generates a list of names for each tour and updates drivers if guests and names change."
On the back end, TourMax calculates commissions and feeds into Chukka's accounting and payroll programs.
Melville said that many hotels in Jamaica already are using TourMax at their concierge desks, and that more than 800 travel agents in North America are using TourMax technology to book Chukka tours.