Interview By: Andy Ogg, Editor and Sales Director – Travel Professional NEWS
Interviewing: Rob Keen and Jeremy Clement, Founders – Project Expedition
First and foremost, Thank you for your time with us today. We are excited to not only learn more about your products but also to inform our Travel Professional NEWS readers of this exciting offering!
When did Project Expedition get started and how did it come to be?
As avid travelers, we have been through the struggle of visiting myriad websites to identify and book the best things to do in a destination, and we knew we could improve this process for others. As a result, we launched Project Expedition in early 2015 in an effort to aggregate the best tour operators around the world and make it simple to discover and book thousands of excursions in a single site.
Since then, we have grown primarily by listening to our clients and responding to their needs. This focus on customer experience has driven our expansion into more than one hundred countries worldwide, in addition to leading to the development of technology that empowers travel professionals to take advantage of co-branding, white label solutions, flexible payments, and more.
Can you provide us with some insight into what exactly Project Expedition offers?
Project Expedition offers access to day-tours, shore excursions, transfers, and multi-day trips in destinations around the world. Experiences range from sightseeing in Rome, to helicopter tours in Hawaii, food tasting tours in Paris, and even multi-day trips through Argentina. As of today, we currently have more than 8,000 unique experiences around the world, all of which are run by local tour operators that we have personal vetted and verified.
Apart from our diverse inventory of experiences, we pride ourselves in offering travel professionals with a personal concierge service to assist with researching and planning excursions. From curating excursions based on a client’s interests, to negotiating groups rates and creating custom quotes we are here to help.
We also offer travel professionals a number of solutions to help them promote excursions to their clients. These solutions include co-branded affiliate links that allow their clients to browse on their own, and wish lists that allow travel professionals to easily curate tours on behalf of their clients.
Many Travel Professionals find it difficult to compete directly with the supplier, what is Project Expedition’s relationship like with Agents, who are selling your offerings?
We view every travel professional that registers with us as the start of a long-term relationship. As a result, we prefer to have an intro call with every agent in order to see how we can best support them when it comes to planning excursions for their clients.
A promise that we always make to travel professionals is that we will always respect their client-agent relationship. This means that we will always honor commission payments no matter how a booking occurs, and that we won’t offer any incentives for their clients to book directly with us.
Feedback is also an important aspect of our relationship with agents because understanding the challenges that travel professionals face helps us to build a product that improves the way they book tours and activities. Whether it is a specific excursion or destination that they need, or new functionality on our website, we are responsive to these requests and seek to fulfill them as quickly as possible.
Do you offer any training opportunities for Agents looking to get started with Project Expedition?
Travel professionals who register with Project Expedition receive access to an account manager and our concierge team. Many travel professionals will ask questions via email, phone calls, and live chat on our website, but we also organize webinars and conference calls as well.
What are your Top 5 selling products so far in 2018?
Italy – https://www.projectexpedition.com/location/italy/
France – https://www.projectexpedition.com/location/france/
Iceland – https://www.projectexpedition.com/location/iceland/
Mexico – https://www.projectexpedition.com/location/mexico/
Hawaii – https://www.projectexpedition.com/location/united-states/hawaii/
As a supplier, do you have any advice for a Travel Professional looking to get started selling your products?
To get started, we really encourage travel professionals to simply get in touch with us via an email, phone call, or live on our website. We are very quick to follow up and can get you setup within a few minutes, in addition to providing you with a quick overview of our product.
We also understand that there are a lot of excursions to choose from on our website, and this is where our concierge team can jump in to help curate an experience that is right for a travel professional’s client.
With 2018 well underway, what do you see as being the “hot trend” for 2019?
An increasing number of travel professionals are taking advantage of our co-branded and white label solutions, and we believe that this trend will continue well into 2019.
Our co-branded affiliate links allow travel professionals to place their logo on our website when they send a link to their clients. Any tours that are booked via that link are then tagged to the travel professional for commission. Co-branded affiliate links are free.
Project Expedition also offers white labeled confirmation vouchers and itineraries at no extra charge. White labeled, hosted websites are also available for an additional cost for travel professionals who wish to sell our tours on their site.
Before we conclude, do you have anything you’d like to share with our Travel Professional NEWS readers?
We really appreciate the support from the travel professional community. We are fully committed to travel professionals and making it as easy as possible to plan and book excursions for their clients.
Over the coming months we are planning to release even more destinations and excursions onto our platform. Feel free to reach out if you’re looking for something specific, as there is a great chance that it is already in progress.
Thank you so much for the time today, as well as the very valuable information that you have shared. It was not only informational but fantastic to learn more about your products!