ORLANDO — During its annual conference here earlier this
week, Ensemble Travel Group announced that its members will soon have a new
itinerary builder with the launch of MyTripRoute.
“It is a web-based
tool that will help you create and share proposals, itineraries and travel
alerts with your clients,” Rice said. “After careful vetting of several
platforms in the marketplace, we’re thrilled to be working with our
behind-the-scenes partner, Umapped, to make this available to you.”
MyTripRoute will help
agents manage and send proposals, itineraries and travel alerts to their
clients in digital and print formats. It also includes an app that can be
downloaded on smartphones.
Rice and Pearlman
detailed several ways in which the tool will benefit agents’ businesses, one of
which is efficiency. MyTripRoute will help agents create professional-looking
itineraries “in a fraction of the time” it would to create them independently,
according to Pearlman.
“The tool includes live connections to the Sabre GDS and
ClientBase, and you can also import from other GDS providers,” he said. “It
helps that the Ensemble cruise and hotel amenities are already loaded into the
system, along with many of our partners Shore Trips, Classic Vacations, Globus,
Travel 2, Alpine Adventures and Big Five Tours and Expeditions. MyTripRoute
combines all the components from multiple sources into one comprehensive
document.”
Agents’ brands will
be displayed prominently on itineraries, whether they are viewed on the
Internet, in the app or as emailed PDF documents, Rice said. Additionally, once
clients download the app to their smartphones, it can send them notifications
whether they are online or not.
“It’s also interactive, so they can share their travel
experiences via email, Facebook or Twitter,” Rice said.
MyTripRoute will also
allow agents to sell more to their clients who use the tool.
“You can send
commissionable products like shore excursions in real time, meaning real
revenue for you,” Pearlman said.
He also pointed out
that the tool is content-rich. Umapped, Travel42 and Ensemble have a
partnership that enables agents to embed destination guide content into itineraries.
The app portion of MyTripRoute is expected to be available
in Apple and Google app stores in the coming months. The white-label Umapped
version is currently available for download.