CiviCRM and Bookings (tourist industry)

[herebydesign]

I am researching a CRM integration for a customer in the tourism industry
and would appreciate your advice regarding CiviCRM.

Given the specific operation of the organisation I am dealing with, I am
struggling to find a CRM to meet their needs well. They are looking to
combine 2 key sets of data: Contacts & Tour Bookings (they run a small
tourist attraction that runs up to 10 tours a day), each with individual
fields and linking with employee schedules & feedback, meal preferences etc.

The bookings would need to feed into google calendars, and they would need to
be able to pull out reports on Contact activity, as well as pulling out
segmented lists of contacts for email marketing.

It would be great to know if these kinds of features would be possible to
work through CiviCRM, and particularly the 'bookings' - could these be worked
through your 'Events' interface? I have also seen a CiviBooking module - is this operational?

Any insight from the experts would be greatly appreciated!

[Upperholme]

Hi there.

On the face of it I'd say that CiviCRM should be able to cope with most if not all of this.
The CiviEvent component enables you to set up events (and enable online registration and payment through your website assuming it is integrated), so people booking for a tour would automatically be entered in to the contact database. Custom fields can easily be created for contacts and events, so you can display and collect whatever data suits your needs.

with 10 tours a day thats a lot of repeating events, so the new recurring capability that is coming along very soon should help with that, but in any event you can create event templates to simplify scenarios where there are lots of similar events.

Linking with employee schedules - not sure what this means in practical terms? The CiviVolunteer extension offers some tools to set up roles and shifts tied to events, so that might be helpful in this case, not sure.

You can create an upcoming events calendar on your website or feed into a third party calendar tool such as Google.

Civi comes with a bunch of reports and templates that meet a lot of common needs, and if you are integrating with a Drupal site you can use Views to do more on that front. Or create custom reports to suit any requirement. Also there are a couple of extensions available that enhance reporting.

Segmenting the contacts is easy using groups and/or tags, and Civi provides excellent bulk mail tools or easy integration with things like MailChimp.

CiviBooking is geared towards a scenario where an organisation has meeting rooms to hire out - that type of thing.

Hope this helps. Check out the demo at demo.civicrm.org and the online documentation at book.civicrm.org

Regards
Graham

[herebydesign]

Thanks Graham for this info.

One more question - I think I need to understand better whether I need to use Events or Bookings as my main type of content and move on from there.

In my mind, the kind of bookings I am dealing with (in this case tours around the site), are more like resources that can be hired out rather than Events - as I feel this will clog up any calendar to have recurring events for every hour of the day, every day! It is more important to know what is available and have data gathered from every booking that has come into the site for future intelligence.

Do you know if bookings in CiviBooking have the same versatility to add different fields as with Events? If the answer is yes, then I'm pretty much sold!

Thanks again for your help,

Ricki

[Upperholme]

Hi Ricki

I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently familiar with the details and constraints of the CiviBooking extension to be able to answer definitively. I would encourage you to set up a test site and install the extension. Then you can see for yourself what's going to work and what isn't for your particular use case.

[herebydesign]

No problem,

Thanks for your help...

Ricki