2008-11-04

PhoCusWright Travel Innovator: Adventure Link

AdventureLink is a reservation and distrbution system for adventure travel and experiential product. They appear to be using TriSept Solutions as the basis of the application and piggybacking on the VaxVacation network to distribute their products out to 80,000 connected travel agents in North America. TriSept Solutions is a travel technology company that provides:

“airlines, hoteliers, tour operators, and travel agents with vacation travel technology to dynamically package, market, and sell vacations via a variety of distribution channels.”

AdventureLink benefits tour operators by giving them the ability to distribute their adventure product through multiple channels simultaneously and AdventureLink doesn’t charge the 10% distribution fee until a booking is made. There is no indication what the commission to agents is currently.

For travel agents, AdventureLink is a source of additional product that is focused on a growing niche market, the adventure travel market. Travel agents can sign-up, search for, and book adventure travel products through the VaxVacation network. AdventureLink also offers a service called the AdventureLink Expert Travel Agent. These travel agents receive a VOIP phone that is connected to the AdventureLink call center number and receive commissions for booking adventure trips.

Their website is well designed with some nice features like the pop-over details view for each product. This saves the traveler having to click through to a product to find out more details and then having to click back to the search results. AdventureLink also appears to have quite a significant number of products loaded into their system already.

Questions:

1. If they are promoting themselves as a global distribution system for adventure travel, then why are they also a licensed seller of travel?

2. Is the model B2B, B2C, or B2B2C? The site seems to indicate that the system is a B2B system, but it also appears to be a B2C model for selling the product.

3. For information or bookings please call 1-877-462-3854 or email reservations@adventurelink.com. Does this mean customers can book directly through AdventureLink.com? If that is the case, how does Adventure Link reconcile competing with their distributors?

4. Are the Expert Travel Agents independent or are they agents of AdventureLink?

Competitors:

The following companies share similarities to AdventureLink in that they focus on adventure travel, they provide booking systems for suppliers and are also B2B, B2C, B2B2C or some combination of the three.

Website Error Notice:

At posting time, links from the following page were resulting in an error:

http://operator.adventurelink.com/RegisterSupplier.aspx

This post was originally posted by Stephen Joyce @ Travel & Tourism Technology Trends.
> Read the original post here