Stories

Big Cat Green Island Reef Cruises improves reservations and ticketing with ResPax, saving $180,000+ each year.

Workflow Automation

Big Cat tightens day cruise operations in every way, from manifests to morning tea. Reduced workloads and salary costs are just the beginning.

With full and half-day tours, Big Cat Green Island tours offers easy access to the Great Barrier Reef and is hugely popular with visitors to Cairns. Activities include snorkelling, diving, swimming, glass bottom boats and submarine coral viewing tours.

But Big Cat had a big problem. Tour management practices were ad hoc and manually intensive. Too much time was spent on administration. Not enough on customers. The Big Cat team wanted a seamless solution that could take bookings online, over the phone and internationally to capitalise on agent and wholesaler networks.

All-in-one Reservation Management

ResPax was selected because it’s a complete reservation management tool that enables operators to manage bookings by phone or website. Everything happens faster. Reservations staff can take quick, consistent and accurate bookings by feeding preconfigured commissions, prices, discounts and payments into the booking.

Two years after implementation, Big Cat can identify savings across the business as a result. Ian Douglas from Big Cat said “ResPax has created tangible savings for the business by streamlining the reservation processes and simplifying reporting so we don’t have to manipulate data to the same extent. These two areas alone save us around $80,000 each year in reduced workload and salary costs.”

Automated Workflows

Operators can use the system to create reports and manifests, to issue tickets and vouchers, and to collect data such as sales yields. It also exports to most accounting systems for easy integration. But perhaps the most interesting and significant saving has been Big Cat’s ability to stop people defrauding its reservation system.

“Components and timings of bookings such as submarines, lunch, diving and snorkelling sessions, and extras such as buoyancy vests, are included on vouchers and reports for staff on the boat and in the office. The savings are starting to add up. In the past, we issued laminated tickets that were easily duplicated. The personalised ticketing system put a stop to that. It is estimated that saves Big Cat around $100,000 each year on previous lost earnings. There are still some features of the system that we are not using to full capacity, but as we roll these features out, we will see even greater savings for the business.”

Less Manual Effort

The ResPax tour reservation system automates monthly reports, ticketing, bus manifests, combination itineraries, tax invoices and snorkel deposit forms - tasks Reservations staff used to complete manually.

“We save five hours per month on report preparation. Before ResPax, you had people solving reporting issues for half the day. ResPax solves these problems automatically and saves us hours each day in bank reconciliations”.

The new personalised ticketing system has put a stop to fraudulent activity and duplication.

I estimate this saves us around $100,000 each year on previous lost earnings.

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