Case Study

Skiing Trip

Getting a large group sorted

Building the concept

When an extended family plans a £20,000 skiing holiday in the Alps, you would have hoped that the travel agent would be pretty slick. Instead, what the organiser got was a flurry of emails from the agent about the booking options. The organiser now had the unenviable task of forwarding them all to everyone in the group. The organiser had inherited the responsibility of coordinating everybody, when it should really have been the travel agent.

The result was endless emails being passed backwards and forwards and to cap it off, when the agent took a break for a few days, nobody else in the agent's office seem to be able to help or access the emails. Crazy!

If the family had used us, this is how we would have done it differently…

The organiser would have started by getting everybody involved in the process. She would have built the group so that all the decision-makers could vote on which chalets they preferred. They would have selected a set of dates and agreed the maximum budget.

Once the chalets and flights had been booked, then it would have been easy for the members of the group to add in the necessary personal details that were needed. Furthermore, all the added extras that were available such as ski hire, ski school and the extra events that were offered by the travel company, were available to book as well through the itinerary rather than through a series of increasingly confused emails.

Our system would have kept all the messages together and would have allowed all of the organisers to see what was being discussed and what had been agreed. It would also have allowed the agent to join the process to assist or advise when necessary. The worst outcome from all the emails was that the ski hire turned out to be a mess and neither the local rep nor the shop was quite sure who had hired what, when for and what had been paid for.

Probably the most valuable part of our system for this group would have been the ability for them to divvy up the payments between the various adults rather than having to send the money to one person who then had to write a cheque for £20,000. Also, if the company had had all the extras in the system and available for pre-booking, they would have made even more money out of the whole trip.