Magpie Travel, a San Francisco-based company offering content management solutions for the Tours & Activities sector, announced the launch of Magpie Promotes. The new service provides Tour & Activity operators with sales and account management focused on OTAs and other online and offline resellers.
Discussing the service, Magpie’s Head of New Growth Initiatives, Baidi Li, said “Most tour operators have had to cut staff numbers quite severely, and don’t have a sales force -- in many cases even a single salesperson -- who can help them find, contract and then manage their products with relevant distribution partners.”
“At the same time, major OTAs have cut their staff numbers, and there are quite a few experienced Product & Market Managers looking for work. We’ve put together a team with many years experience in product contracting, content optimisation, market development and distribution strategy that we can assign to an Operator account depending on their specific needs. Using this approach an Operator can spend a modest amount of money each month and in return have experienced professionals helping them get their product “ready for prime time” and pitching it to key OTAs and resellers. It’s a particularly relevant program for the market as it emerges from 2020’s severe downturn.”
Li says Magpie Promotes also makes sense for resellers. “Resellers, particularly the larger OTAs, have very specific demands around quality, availability and other issues that operators often don’t fully understand. The Magpie Promotes team will bring them products that are already loaded in Magpie, meet all their quality and related standards, and are 100% ready for onboarding. For resellers, that’s a real plus,” she said.
Among early customers for the service is Singapore-based culinary tours and cooking experience operator Wok ’n’ Stroll. Founder Karni Tomer said her company had worked hard to create a product range that should be attractive to OTAs such as Tripadvisor and Airbnb, but the company did not have the resources to tackle the task of managing content across multiple, resellers, or building a global distribution channel. “I am full of product ideas and there are new markets I’d like to focus on. Right now we just don’t have the people, the connections or the time to make that happen ourselves. With Magpie Promotes, we can get our product content optimised, updated and managed in a single location, and the Magpie team helps me strategise and negotiate contracts with the most important resellers and OTAs. I am really impressed by their technology and expertise” she said.
Operators using the service will pay a fixed monthly fee which includes the loading of their product into Magpie’s cloud-based content management system. Additional services such as translations and product rewrites are charged separately. Magpie Promotes is available now. Click here to learn more.
