Despite the negative effects the Brexit devaluation and the calling of a snap General Election, 2017 is so far proving to be a good year for the UK sector of the coach tourism industry. There is a mood of optimism from most operators and this is reflected by significant increases in spend on quality of provision, improved customer services and more intelligent marketing. This is more necessary now than ever before, selling to increasingly savvy customers in a highly competitive market place.

The team at Roeville have had a busy start to the year delivering high quality and feature packed re-structures to the web sites of many of the UK’s leading brands, including Just Go Holidays, National Holidays and Grand UK. Each WebRes site is individually designed and built to suit the precise needs of the operator brand, and the Roeville Team are happy to incorporate third party designs. All WebRes sites are securely hosted in a high performance data centre, minimising the risk from the recent spate of ransomware attacks suffered by the NHS and many UK businesses.

It is no longer sufficient to have a basic web presence. Some of Roeville’s tour operator clients regularly take over 40% of their holiday bookings on line (even higher for day trips) and their customers expect an enjoyable and fruitful experience when seeking to spend their money! 

These days most operators have some kind of web presence – after all, you have to be in it to win it! It is essential that visitors are enticed onto your site, enjoy their browsing experience and find well-presented and tantalising offerings. If they don’t feel satisfaction with your site prospective customers will soon drift off to competitors’ sites and the opportunity is missed.

A good holiday product often has additional tasty morsels which the customer can add on at the time of booking, so the entire booking journey has to be smooth, transparent and extremely easy to use. All new Roeville WebRes sites are tested on a wide range of browsing devices including desktop computers, tablets and a host of smartphone types and o/s flavours to ensure the best possible responsive experience.

Roeville have made further strides with the highly acclaimed t3 Tour Reservation System adding more productivity and marketing features and are extending the inter-operability with other service providers within the tourism industry. t28 operators should watch out this summer for a special cross-grade incentive so they can make use of the full range of t3 benefits.

Coach Operators will soon be able to experience the brand new PhCloud system which will allow them to operate their businesses from anywhere in the world using their favourite smart device. The system launches with a map-based coach hire quotation system and booking/invoicing for private coach hire, and is available for a very modest monthly rental. More information will be available in the summer months with a full product launch at Coach & Bus Live in the autumn.