VoyageTrek’s AdventureMatch Program Overview: 

Our AdventureMatch program sends you real-time inquiries from travelers interested in you tours, cruises, and vacations. These travelers have read a summary of your company on VoyageTrek.com and want your sales and reservations staff to contact them with quotes and more information. We send your sales people these customer inquiries by email within seconds of receipt, or route traveler phone calls to you during business hours.  These travelers were on Google, Yahoo, or Bing search engines doing keywords searches about your destinations, then came to VoyageTrek.com for more information and to read about your company, and are the most qualified and targeted travelers you can reach online or offline. VoyageTrek funds the upfront cost of setting up your customized campaigns, paying the search engines, and filtering out unqualified travelers. You only pay a referral fee for each traveler’s inquiry email or phone call, with no other fees or contracts, and you can pause or cancel the program anytime.  Our program doesn’t interfere with your existing search or marketing campaigns and you only receive inquiries from unique, new customers who you would likely not have otherwise ever met, and only for travelers who meet your exact criteria.  AdventureMatch is run by staff that conceived and built search marketing and customer acquisition programs at Microsoft MSN and Bing.com, Princess Cruises, Dell Computer, and the largest online ad agency (Avenue A/Razorfish).

·         Get real-time email customer inquiries routed to your sales staff

·         Get 1-800 customer phone calls routed to your sales staff only during your defined business hours

·         Only get customers who meet your exact criteria and who are expecting to hear from you

·         Only pay for each customer inquiry with no other fees or contracts, cancel anytime, pay conveniently via automatic recurring credit card billing

·         Receive automated weekly summary reports of all inquiries and credit card payments on a weekly basis by email

This is an invite-only program and we especially want to work with travel companies that:

·         Are leaders in customer service and their destination markets

·         Are savvy marketers who run other marketing campaigns and know how to track and determine return-on-investment of our program

·         Offer mid to high budget options targeting upscale travelers with customized packages and/or a lot of packages or itineraries that would match most upscale travelers’ needs

·         Employ great marketing and sales staff who proactively contact customers and answer customers promptly

·         Run their own search marketing campaigns and have had success converting the inquires/leads

To Apply for this Program, and also get a free and enhanced listing on the VoyageTrek.com directory, please click on the ‘Continue’ button at the bottom of our travel supplier registration start page:

http://www.voyagetrek.com/operator/

Additional AdventureMatch Program Details and Terms:

Company and Destination Summary Pages:

AdventureMatch only targets online traveler researchers who are actively keyword searching in the major search engines.  We do not target general travel researchers or do online display, magazine, contextual or other types of less targeted advertising.  We only use keywords advertising in the four leading search engines:  Google, Yahoo, Bing (Microsoft), and Ask.com.  For example, a person in the US or Canada looking for a heli-ski lodge and vacation in BC, Canada, who has typed in ‘heli skiing bc’ into Google would be taken to a page similar to this (note:  inactive and unbranded page… example only):  http://www.voyagetrek.com/match_heli-skiing_wp_93.html.  Once the consumer describes their ideal heli-ski vacation then the information is filtered by VoyageTrek.  VoyageTrek would send emails to our heli-ski operator for customers with matching criteria only. 

Inquiry Filtering and Email Routing:

AdventureMatch filters out an average of 30 to 40% of all inquiries that do not match our clients’ criteria, and our travel supplier clients do not receive or pay for these unqualified inquiries.  Only travelers matching the travel company’s criteria are forwarded.  All inquiries must come from a major search engine from a highly related keyword.

Default Filters and Fields:  All inquiries have the following information fields:

·         Estimated departure date

·         Number of days to travel (min/max range)

·         # of Adults

·         # of Children, and age ranges

·         Budget level

·         Note:  Comments and Questions are optional but usually filled in

·         First name, Last name, Valid Email Format, Valid Phone Format

·         Preferred initial contact method (Phone or Email)

·         Country / State

·         Brochure or DVD requests:  Customer can optional enter their street, city, zip code to get literature by mail

Custom Fields, Filters, and Forms:  our clients can also set individual criteria filters or customize the information asked to travelers.  Common customization and filters include:

·         Seasonality:  Only showing certain months as available

·         Days:  Only forwarding travelers available to travel more than X days

·         Children:  Only forwarding adults or children above X years of age

·         Budget:  Only forwarding travelers interested in spending at least your minimum spend/day or week

·         Location:  Only targeted travelers from certain countries

1-800 Phone Call Option:

You can optionally receive and pay for traveler phone calls transferred to any of your phone numbers and sales people and only during your business hours.  How this works:

·         VoyageTrek only displays the 1-800 toll free number and your 3 digit extension number on your company’s destination summary pages

·         The pages are scheduled to only display during your business hours

·         We only route calls that have the caller ID on and unblocked so you can tell the number and name calling

·         We send you an email when you receive one of our calls, and an optional text message

·         We only charge on a per-call basis, only for connected calls, and only for calls that last longer than 60 seconds

·         We include the call log on your report and payment summary statements

Credit Card Payments and Reports:

By participating in the AdventureMatch program, you agree to be liable for payments for all inquiry charges, and authorize VoyageTrek to do automatic and recurring on your credit card.  We can accept wire transfer and PayPal, but prefer the ease of credit cards and recurring billing.  VoyageTrek will send you frequent reports that summary all inquiries for the past period, and statement summaries of all inquiries and all credit card charges and balances.

‘Bad Inquiry Discount’:  All inquiry lead referral programs have a certain percentage of bogus or mistakenly matched inquiries.  We believe our rate for these across all clients is about 4%.  Since the rate is low, and neither party once to waste a lot of time on a refund process, VoyageTrek just builds in a ‘Bad Inquiry Discount’ into its pricing and reduces the price of each inquiry to account for this total.  Right now this is 10% across all clients.  We may lower this rate at any time as we continually work on new ways to get even more qualified inquiries, but for now the 10% should more than exceed your incidence of bad inquiries.  So our official policy is ‘No Additional Refunds’ – but if for some reason you do get a high percent of bad inquiries and see reoccurring problems, then please alert us immediately as our goal is to try to make every inquiry a ‘good’ customer opportunity.  Note:  We do not consider a non-response from a customer a ‘bad inquiry’, and you will get a lot of such non-responsive customers, but overall the vast majority of people will respond to you within a call or email or two.

Inquiry Pricing:

You only pay a inquiry referral fee for each inquiry, with no other fees.  VoyageTrek spends about 70% of all our revenue on search engine advertising, and another 3 to 5% spent on credit card processing fees and other direct per inquiry expenses.  It costs proportionally more to acquire a highly qualified traveler for a $15,000 Antarctica cruise than it does for a $4,000 Alaska tour.  Customer acquisition costs (the cost we spend in advertising) tend to be proportional to the average booking amount of each destination.  Therefore, our pricing system charges more or less depending on the market and destination.

VoyageTrek charges 1% of the inquirer’s budget for the cruise, tour, or package.  So, let’s say an inquiry has selected the following tour request:

·         2 adult travelers

·         $300 per adult daily budget

·         6 to 8 day tour range

We would charge:  $38.  Here is the math:

2 people     x     $300/day     x     7 day average   =   $4,200 tour budget     minus     10% ‘bad inquiry discount’   =   $3,780     x     1% VoyageTrek inquiry fee charge   =   $37.80  (we always round to the nearest dollar, so $38)

We currently ‘cap’ inquiry fees at $95, so that is the most you will pay for any inquiry.  Some of our clients pay an average of $30 per inquiry, while others pay $70.  It just depends on their markets, but the fee reflects the revenue and profit potential of each individual inquiry.

Other pricing terms and strategies:  VoyageTrek can also charge on a set-fee basis for inquiries, but the math will be based on the calculation above with the target being 1% of your average booking.  VoyageTrek can also list your available tours and packages on your summary and form pages and travelers can select the price & tour in which they are most interested, but this doesn’t always work well for clients with too many options or where the focus is on building customized packages.

Additional information links:     FAQ        Program Registration       Tips on Closing Bookings

Last Update:  July 8, 2009.  Terms may be changed at any time without notice but will be honored for 30 days past the date the changes are posted, and clients will be notified of major changes.