TAcentre offers wholesale portal

Asiatravel.com launched TAcentre.com, an online wholesale portal, Tuesday,  that includes package bookings with instant confirmation as a key feature to support SME travel agencies. TAcentre.com, co-developed with Amadeus, is an upgrade version of the Asiatravel’s B2B portal. Previously the site could support only flights, hotels, tours and attractions bookings as separate items. Now it cmbines them in a wide variety of ready-made packages that cuts the hassle for travel agencies, improves customer service efficiency and reduces communication costs. Asiatravel allows free access to all travel agencies. They just need to register once to get a password. Asiatravel.com CEO, Boh Tuang Poh, said “We built this booking engine after extensive research and consultation with customers, travel agents and travel suppliers… smaller players. “Big travel agents have similar systems, but small agents with small budgets and staff, need to buy from different suppliers and also in different currencies. There are a lot of challenges to  complete accurate  pricing. Our quotations are  in local currency wherever their customers go, no worries about exchange rates, no remittances,” Mr Boh elaborated. Selling the packages, travel agents are guaranteed a 4% commission, but also they can earn more if they mark-up prices. Other prices for individual booking – flight, hotels, tours, attractions and transfer, the quotations are net. Because prices are based on bulk purchase, there are savings of around 35%. Also, it is ideal for last minutes bookings, which suits the behavior of Asian travellers who usually plan short-term. Currently there are over 400 travel agencies using Asiatravel.com and the CEO aims to double that in a year. Workshops will be held for agents to  understanding the system. In the system, there are about 100,000 travel products; 200 legacy airlines with departures from about 1,000 airports; 60,000 hotels and a minimum of 20 tours at each destination. It is limited to just Asian destinations, but the company aims to increase to 1,000,000 travel products by the end of 2013 with inclusion of long-haul packages to  Europe and America. It will also increase hotel partners to 15,000 by the end of this year and it is discussing with low-cost carriers how to incorporate their fares. Asiatravel has so far launched Tacentre.com in Singapore, Phillipines and Thailand. It will launch the portal in China, Dubai, Indonesia and India by the end of this year.