African Encounters Travel Tips

09 May 2007

We Get Our Own Plane!!!

Some of you must think we are either rolling in cash or we are mad hatters. We are neither.

In our quest to give our customers the best service and at the best prices, we decided that the only way to do this was to partner up with someone who owned planes. We have joined forces with AVSTAR who own a fleet of aircraft and who lease their aircraft to some of the major names in South Africa. We are now running our own charter flights into Zanzibar from Johannesburg starting on the 10th of June 2007. The benefits for our customers are massive, purely because we backwardly integrated the flight aspect of the package. You will start to see how the prices of our packages are phenomenally cheaper than anybody else in South Africa!!! If you want, you can read our press release by clicking here. We really love the ad we are running for this special. Click here if you want to see a pdf version of it (it is a little big as it is full colour).

We will be flying a Boeing 737-200 with a total of 96 pax every Sunday from 10 June - 22 July (depart back to SA on 29 July). We compared our pricing to some of our competitors and we were up to R3000 per person cheaper than some companies. Shows how greedy they are!!! We also partnered with the best fully inclusive hotels over this period giving our customers exclusive awesome deals. Click here to check out these fantastic holidays.

Once again, we are the first to do something like this in South Africa! Companies have been running charter flights into Mauritius, however we are the first for Zanzibar. We will continue to strive to be a market leader and give our customers the best deals through innovative ideas!

01 May 2007

African Encounters Goes Live On SAP

For almost a year now we have been working on a new ERP system, and finally we went live today. This is a first in our industry and South Africa, having partnered up with SAP to develop a solution tailor made to our company. We searched around, and could not even find an international tour operator using SAP.

As many of you are aware, SAP is more affiliated with large multinationals utlilising their R3 system. It is not very common for tour operators to implement this sort of ERP system, but in our quest to give the best to our customers, we decided that this solution would be best for our business. It has been a long hard slog and we are very confident that the benefits are going to filter down to our customers by means of quicker quotes, quicker confirmations and better quality all round. Our suppliers and staff are also going to benefit tremendously with the enhanced reporting functionality that we now enjoy.

Implementation has been a challenge, but this is normal with any new system implementation. New systems have to be learned and new work procedures have to be discovered, documented and formalised. Melissa has been promoted to Operations Manager from 01 June and it is going to be her responsibility to develop and train all our staff.

We look forward to any comments you may have on the new system, as these can only benefit us.

Rodger
01 May 2007

30 April 2007

Sometimes we don't get it right

We have to admit, sometimes we do not get it right and this is the story of that time:

We started up a company www.travesphere.co.za early 2006. This was a retail arm of our company selling all destinations. We promoted Juan run the company and the ploughed resources and some funds into getting it up and running. What we discovered was quite amazing... the website would generate hundreds of hits a day, with a healthy amount of unique visitors every week. The visitors would spend hours looking around the site at all the packages we offered. Unfortunately, the customers would not enquire, and used the site more information purposes than as a portal for travel. We did get the odd enquiry and most of them we converted into sales. However, the amount of visitors we received every day vs the amount of enquiries we got was dismal. The site is stunning (go and have a look) and we just could not understand why it was not generating the leads we wished it would. Our final conclusion was that we were perhaps a bit ahead of the market, and pulled Juan back to African Encounters.

Travesphere.co.za is now on hold until the market gains more confidence in online travel. So we "lost" a company and paid some school fees, but we gained Juan and boy are we happy to have him back with us at African Encounters!! Welcome back!!

30 November 2006

We're now official!!

We are now even more official than we used to be. We are pleased to announce that we are now a fully accredited IATA agent. Basically what that means is that we have been checked out be some clever chaps in Geneva who assessed our financial and operational worthiness to see if we can issue our own airline tickets. Turns out we are very good at what we do, so they said yes. We provided them with some financial security, so that you as the consumer will always be protected. Sounds easier to do than what it was. Together with our ASATA affiliation and our IATA licence, we have made sure that you as our customer are in very safe hands. This is just an added benefit to our already excellent customer service.