LAS VEGAS -- Virtuoso, meeting at its annual Travel Mart and
conference here, said it signed an agreement with Travel Wizard, an
Internet company that offers destination information through 120
domain names, including www.tropicalislandvacations.com.
Travel Wizard will direct travel requests for luxury vacations
to Virtuoso agents who participate in the program. Bob McMillen,
president of Travel Wizard, based in Nicasio, Calif., said his firm
receives between $1 million and $5 million in requests for travel
per day from visitors of the site.
Until the agreement with Virtuoso, the company was handling
requests on a limited basis with an in-house staff and through a
local agency. With the agreement with Virtuoso, users who fill out
a detailed customer request form, including how much they wish to
spend per day, will be directed to a Virtuoso agent if they are
luxury travelers.
McMillen plans to service budget and moderate travelers to his
sites, which are ranked as the most heavily trafficked on the Web
by several search engines, through a new booking engine and
fulfillment center that will start in September using a technology
company that he said he could not disclose until the end of
August.
Meanwhile, the Virtuoso program has been operating under a pilot
program for the last three months with eight travel agencies, who
have been receiving e-mail requests for travel arrangements,
forwarded from Travel Wizard.
McMillen said his company attracts thousands of hits per day and
he estimated that by the end of the year Virtuoso agents could
receive 5,000 requests per day. He also said successful agents,
with training, can convert requests to actual bookings 22% of the
time.
"It takes a little training to learn how to handle e-mail
requests from the Internet," he said. "It's a different kind of
travel request than telephone calls" or walk ins to an agency
office.
But, he said, the pay off can be great. An in-house agent at
Travel Wizard, with little training, is booking more than $1
million in volume to Hawaii.