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Main characteristics • Tomnium begins where your website ends and enables the website visitor to book a complete trip reservation. • With Tomnium, the tourist can book every product and service that your city or region offers. • The tourist can choose from a selection of requirements that - in his or her opinion - the business or product should meet, such as location, price range, etc. • In order to preserve the neutrality of the tourist office, Tomnium shows the businesses and products that meet the chosen requirements in random order. • The products and services are shown with clear texts and pictures, in order to give the tourist a good idea of what he or she can reserve. • These can be hotel reservations, a table in a restaurant, tickets to an exhibition, or excursions, but also brochures, picture books, or T-shirts with the tourist office logo. • They can be single products as well as arrangements. • Arrangements can be freely put together by the tourist office. They can include all existing products and services that your city of region offers. • A partner can personally compose packages based on his own products. • An arrangement can be assembled from as many elements as you desire. Per element you can offer one specific product or the tourist might be given a choice from a number of alternatives. • An arrangement can be one or more days. • The tourist can indicate his preferences when making a package reservation. Should a requested product not be available, Tomnium will automatically select the next one on the tourist’s preference list. • If the tourist makes an A la Carte reservation and a product is not available, Tomnium will automatically suggest an alternative. • A partner can also be a web shop. In that case, the tourist can buy items that will be shipped to him. The purchase screens look very much like the reservation screens, but there are simpler. • For products that need to be shipped, Tomnium has a wizard in which the system administrator can manage the shipping costs per region and method. • To perform real time stock management, Tomnium has a very powerful stock management function. All orders for products (whether they arrive via internet and Tomnium or through other channels) are deducted from the stock count. As soon as this count falls below a configurable value, the manager of the shop receives an email, asking him to replenish the stock of this item. • Often a partner offers supplementary products in addition to the main product. This supplementary product can either be optional (an additional night at a preferential rate) or mandatory (cleaning charges added to the rental of an apartment). The partner can freely assemble his products by adding supplementary products (optional or mandatory). • Tomnium also shows the region's event calendar. Text and graphics can be entered for each event, in order to give the tourist a good impression of the event (guided tour, market, concert, etc.). Of course, reservations required to participate in the event can be made using Tomnium. • Tomnium can manage complex structures with, for example, national, regional and local tourist offices. The tourist can enter at any level through the website of that organization. In case the tourist does not find everything he wants to reserve, Tomnium will automatically show him the product offerings at the next level up. In this way, the tourist always finds what he wants. • The partners (hotel and restaurant owners, museum staff, guided tour operators) have a choice of three ways to confirm a reservation: o Real Time. As long as a partner has products available, the tourist immediately receives a confirmation that the desired product is available on the requested date and in the requested quantity. o Contingencies. As long as the number of products that a partner has allotted for reservation through Tomnium has not run out, the tourist receives a confirmation that the desired product is available on the requested date and in the requested quantity. o Request and confirmation. The request made by the tourist is forwarded to the partner. The partner has up to three days to confirm or decline the request. If the requested product is not available (e.g. it is fully booked), the partner can suggest a comparable product to the tourist. • All communication between the tourist and the partners delivering the product is conducted by email through Tomnium. • If a partner cannot communicate by email, Tomnium can send faxes. These are to be filled out by the partner and should be sent back to the tourist office. The information is entered in Tomnium at the tourist office. If a partner cannot communicate by email or by fax, he can ask the tourist office to handle the requests for him. Tomnium has special screens for these cases. • The tourist and the partner each have their own tracking system, which can only be accessed with a user name and password. Here they can check the status of their reservations at any moment and in real time. • Once the availability of all products is confirmed, the tourist automatically receives an email from Tomnium requesting him to go to his tracking system. Here he will find a summary of his reservation as well as a contract which he is asked to print, sign and return (by mail or by fax) to the tourist office. The receipt of the signed agreement is entered in Tomnium. • However, the tourist office is not obliged to ask the tourist to sign a contract. The system administrator can also choose not to offer a contract to the tourist or only in those cases when the reservation amount exceeds a configurable value. • If the reservation is OK, and in case a contract was offered, it has been signed by the tourist and received by the tourist office, Tomnium sends an email to the tourist requesting him to go to his tracking system to arrange for payment of the reservation. • Each partner can personally configure the percentage of the total amount that the tourist must pay before his arrival. This percentage can vary from 0 - 100. o If the percentage is zero, the tourist does not have to make any down payment. He pays the partner the entire amount upon arrival. In order to increase the level of security, Tomnium has the tourist’s credit card number verified. Although no money is collected yet, the partner now knows that the credit card is valid. o If the percentage of the advance payment is not zero, he can pay in installments (up to three) and the first installment should be paid at once. The last installment must be received no less than a week before the beginning of his stay. The number of installments, their configuration and their due dates can be configured by the system administrator. § The amounts received are deposited in a bank account of the tourist office. § A specialized entity collects the payments. Tourisoft has developed interfaces with a number of such companies. If, however, the tourist office prefers to work with another company for the collection of the payments, Tourisoft will build the necessary interface between the selected company and Tomnium. § The tourist can cancel his reservation up to the day his stay was scheduled to begin. The applicable cancellation policy is drawn up by the tourist office. In case of a cancellation, Tomnium automatically takes care of all communication with the tourist. If applicable, Tomnium also arranges for the (partial) restitution of the received amount. The remainder of this amount is paid to the parties entitled (partners, tourist office). § On the first day of the holiday (the tourist can no longer cancel his reservation), the collected amount is released to be disbursed. Tomnium offers the financial affairs person at the tourist office a complete and detailed overview of all payables, including amounts resulting from cancellations. This person can approve each amount separately. Upon approval, the amount is disbursed. If a problem arises, disbursement can be held up until the problem is solved. • The layout of the Tomnium screens can be configured and adapted to the look and feel of the tourist office website. In this way, the Tomnium screens can be integrated in the tourist office website. • Tomnium also contains a powerful, two-level statistics function. Every partner can use this function to analyze all reservations for his business using an extensive number of criteria and view the results in a graph. At the second level the tourist office has the possibility to analyze all reservations processed by Tomnium though their website. Using the analysis and the graphs, the partner and the tourist office can both improve their product offerings and marketing. • Tomnium also has a survey function that offers a tourist office the possibility to compose a list of questions (either optional or mandatory) that the tourist will be asked to answer immediately after he has sent his reservation. This makes it possible to learn even more about the tourist. The results are presented in the form of statistics. • Tomnium has a management function for products with a limited capacity, like, for instance, excursions, tennis or ski lessons. The schedule for each guide or teacher will be created automatically. Reservations that arrived through other channels than internet and Tomnium can also be entered which makes Tomnium a very powerful manpower-planning tool. • To answer frequently asked questions from tourists visiting the reservation site, the system administrator can enter these questions with their answers in a wizard. He can group these questions by topic and he can create as many topics as he wishes. To each topic, he can assign as many questions as he wishes. • Tomnium is multilingual. The tourist office decides how many and which languages are used. • Tomnium handles all administrative and financial tasks related to a reservation, so that very little manual intervention is needed and the workload for the tourist office employees is minimal. • Tomnium also takes care of all necessary statements for your internal bookkeeping, as well as those for your external accountants. All taxes (VAT, hotel taxes) are specified separately. • Special 'wizards' have been developed to help with manually entering partner data (text and graphics). The user is guided from one screen to the next, preventing all problems and errors. • In case the tourist office already has a partner database, Tourisoft will build an interface between this database and Tomnium. Tomnium will also use the existing data, and the existing procedures for entering and modification will be retained. • No financial investment in IT equipment is needed for Tomnium. A standard PC with a standard operating system (Microsoft Windows '98 or higher), a standard browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher) and an internet connection (ISDN or better) suffice for a partner or tourist office to use the product. For the tourist the requirements are even less. • Tomnium cannot be purchased and no annual maintenance fee is required. The use of Tomnium therefore, does not strain the budget of a tourist office. The tourist office gets a license, which entitles them to use Tomnium. The license enables automatic access to all updates and additional functionality as it becomes available. Tomnium only asks a percentage of the amount of the reservations made. No reservations, no expenses. The more reservations, the lower the percentage.
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| Tourisoft Sàrl Les Chesaux-Dessus D4 CH-1264 Saint-Cergue Switzerland Tel: +41 22 360 03 70 Fax : +41 22 360 03 73 E-mail : info@tourisoft.com | ||||