Adventium Technology: Capitalizing on the Hottest Trend in Travel: Experiences Distribution

The dominance of the ‘big three’ product lines of flight, car, and hotel in the online travel industry has been upturned in the last few years. Today, travel is much more about in-destination experiences. Travelers no longer wait until the last minute when considering how to spend their time at a destination and thoroughly research about activities to indulge in prior to booking flights or hotels. The omnipresence of social media, coupled with the undeniable impact of travel bloggers and Instagram influencers evoke ideas of perfect, experience-filled pictures even before travelers pack their bags. With the ‘experience distribution’ trend becoming stronger by the day, many big players, including Expedia, booking.com, and Airbnb, are extensively adding ‘experiences’ to their offerings. That is where Adventium Technology comes in, providing a range of applications to help tour operators, resellers, and wholesalers win in the ‘experience distribution’ space.

“We believe around 80 percent of the tours in APAC are still sold offline, either in-destination or through tour operators and resellers. However, the tours and activities space is gradually reinventing itself and is experiencing disruption from how tours are packaged to the way products are marketed and sold. Much of this is driven by customer expectations and the rising importance of experiences as part of an overall trip, including the impact of social media,” explains Andrew Cox, owner and managing director of Adventium Technology. As a consequence, operators are finally realizing the importance of making their tours available online with real-time booking. Adventium Technology is uniquely positioned to capitalize on these developments in the APAC region and has been solving a variety of challenges for tour operators and resellers since 2008. By providing a full circle of technology solutions, Adventium Technology helps eliminate multiple layers of costs and complexities within tourism operations, thus allowing clients to focus more on creating appealing travel experiences.

Adventium Technology is built to streamline tourism business operations, with a focus on improving operations and automating manual tasks. The company provides operators with access to all their data and reports to increase their control over the business along with enhancing distribution capabilities and providing customers with a better online experience through dynamic online manifesting. “Besides dynamic manifesting, we offer digitized waivers as well as third-party products like tour videos that can be integrated into the online experience, which customers receive automatically without any human intervention,” adds Cox. Adventium Technology also enables operators to sell add-ons and upsell to customers during a trip with mobile access. The company focuses on empowering tour operators to establish their online presence and effectively distribute products while delivering the live availability to resellers to capitalize on the evolving trend of how people browse for and purchase travel online.

Adventium Technology’s suite comprises OperatorHub, TravelDesk, WebsiteTravel, and MySites.

OperatorHub serves as a complete reservation and operation system helping tour operators manage their entire operations from manifesting and accounts payable to receivable and marketing all while receiving automated bookings from Adventium Technology’s distribution channels (among many others). Then there is the company’s front-facing application TravelDesk, which is used by resellers all over the world enabling them to book more than 20,000 accommodation, activity, and transport options on one platform. TravelDesk resellers can also sell directly to their clients using MySites—a one-stop-shop to help resellers and online travel agencies provide thousands of products and booking options on their websites. Furthermore, as the engine room behind TravelDesk and MySites, WebsiteTravel Global Marketplace is a monolithic virtual data warehouse that buys and sells tourism products, handles all data calls between connecting systems and processes financial transactions.

Many of the company’s clients are challenged by constraints unique to the adventure markets— non-standard bedding setups on dive boats, signing legal disclaimers before engaging in activities, and more. Adventium Technology’s operations and distribution platforms have been built in-situ to cater to these. “We primarily focus on adventure and experiential tourism across the APAC region, where we transact hundreds of millions of dollars annually, and hence, we know the ins and outs of the market,” remarks Cox. “We do not service business travel or the family staying at the Marriot in Circular Quay. Instead, we can get you on a fantastic sailing trip in the Whitsundays, bungee jumping in Cairns, or camping on Fraser Island. In fact, our main development center for OperatorHub is located in Queenstown New Zealand, the home of adventure tourism. By concentrating on this market, we intimately understand its operations and distribution as well as customer behavior and preferences.”

A standout example of Adventium Technology simplifying tourism business operations and helping a client better serve their customers involves the Imperium Tourism Group, Adventium Technology’s parent company owned by Andrew Cox. More than 90 leaders of the Imperium Group attended Adventium Technology’s Global Summit at Cairns, Australia. “One of our long-term clients, A. J. Hackett hosted us for an afternoon of thrill-seeking team bonding. The entire 90+ team bungee jumped and canyon swung, and part of the success of the day was A. J. Hackett’s ability to process our check-in and legal digital waivers quickly and efficiently using OperatorHub—which meant they could focus on prepping my team for the jump of their lives,” highlights Cox. “The energy and experience provided by A. J. Hackett’s team in terms of customer service were astounding, and it was simply because they had time; they were not bogged down in paperwork and therefore could focus on the customer experience. And boy, they nailed it!”

Adventium Technology now plans to expand and grow across the entire APAC region along with bringing a strategic pipeline of innovations to market over the next 12-18 months. The company will continue its focus on bringing efficiencies and automation to its partners streamlining tourism operations by automating manual tasks while helping them to improve their distribution capabilities and providing them with access to all their data to increase control over their business.

“Earlier this year, we appointed Jordan Digby as our chief technology officer (CTO). As the founding CTO at Viator, where he led the team developing its web-based leisure travel reservation platform, Digby has vast experience in the industry. We look forward to benefitting from Digby’s caliber and expertise to further enhance our technology suite,” mentions Cox. From ensuring operators have the best distribution channels and the most streamlined business processes to guaranteeing resellers access to the most extensive range of live availability products on the market, Adventium Technology consistently strives to help travel businesses improve operations as well as enrich the customer experience.