Mr. Scott Stewart
Carlson Wagonlit Stewart Travel
Ontario, Canada

An award-winning, diverse, family business

Carlson Wagonlit Stewart Travel is an award winning, full service tour operator and travel agency with offices in four different cities. They are a family run business celebrating over 30 years of service. Their different divisions offer full retail and wholesale tours, group management, charters, conference management as well as full travel planning for leisure or corporate clients. Stewart also has outside sales agents and resells some of its products through other tour and travel operators. Stewart has been recognized over the years in various categories as one of the best Carlson Wagonlit offices in Canada.

Needed a better and cheaper way to compete

Because of the diverse nature of their business and the fact that their offices are separated by as much as 100 miles (160 km) they faced tremendous challenges maintaining and sharing accurate information on the various tour and travel products that they offer. Scott said, “We started with a simple binder, progressed to shared spreadsheets, and even launched a web site with some tour information...then we hit a wall. Our customers expect to get instant, complete, and accurate tour information when they contact us. They don’t really like waiting for callbacks. They also want accurate product information available on our website so that they can browse, reserve or book at their leisure.” In short, Scott recognized that they needed a simpler way to manage information and not another new system or another layer of complexity. “All of our people needed the same information at their fingertips in real-time no matter what phone rang in what office. I wanted everyone to use one system and I wanted it connected to my website so we could manage the content directly”, said Scott.  Stewart travel needed a way to raise customer service without simply trying to do more in less time.

Easy, powerful and LESS money than he was currently spending!

“The Tripz System was deceptively simple to manage and use. Because it works the same way we do, our team picked it up in a few hours”, said Scott. Today, people can create tours, give out accurate information and manage reservations or bookings from every desktop. The system allows Stewart to choose the tours that they show on their website or make available to a re-seller. They are also instantly notified if any reservations come in from the web so they don’t miss orders or client interest.

From the Tripz suite of reports, Stewart Travel can generate passenger manifests, rooming manifests, escort manifest anytime at the click of a button. Management and tour administrators can see a P&L on any tour, sales by product or office. The system will even notify them if they are undersold or oversold. Mailing lists can be generated and outputted directly onto standard mailing labels using clients of a specific type of product. “This system actually costs me less than I was spending before”, says Scott.

Stewart can now grow, save money and compete with the Big Guys

Stewart Travel can now compete with the big guys since they control their web content and can now market this fact to their customers.  This saves them time and reduces the number of incoming calls for basic information. Finally, because they can accept reservations directly through their existing web site they don’t have to charge customers a service charge, as the big players do, for self serve shopping at their convenience… another clear Tripz advantage.