Company type:Travel Agency
Company location:Costa Rica
I think of Lemax as another member of our team that can do more work than five people could in the same amount of time. Lemax revolutionizes sending quotes and reservations from straightforward software made by a company you can trust.
Challenge: eliminate manual work and errors, save time and be faster in quoting and creating itineraries
We talked to Jason Bateman, General Manager, and Lorena Guillén, Operations and Product Manager, who explained to us how important it was for them to have a unified platform to manage products, build nicely designed itineraries, and improve their efficiency to stay ahead of the competition and create a better customer experience for their partners and travelers.
This is the 17th year that they are operating. Before implementing Lemax, they created itineraries by hand using Word and endless copy-pasting. They had a server filled with hundreds of contracts! The team had to use a calculator all day long, and unfortunately, many mistakes were being made.
Those mistakes impacted their revenue; they used the wrong currencies, forgot to charge special dinners, and transfers. But not only were they charging too little, sometimes they charged too much in their offers, so no bookings happened as they were not competitive. Prices needed to be exact and managed much better.
“It would take almost a whole day to quote a full week for 4 different families manually.” Jason Bateman, General Manager
Jason stated that he, as a salesperson, ended up having several assistants whom he tried to teach how to manually create itineraries, do quotes, add taxes, add passengers, all of which was very complex, and finding staff was very hard. They wanted to be faster, more efficient, and more accurate.
Solution: a central place for all products and contracts, eliminated manual calculations, professional customer-facing documents
They had a demo with 5 different travel software vendors and decided to go with Lemax. They didn’t want to install anything on their computers, but use a cloud-based solution.
“Products are a great part of the platform. You can easily view and manage tours, hotels, packages, everything is connected with prices and now the system does all the calculations.” Lorena Guillén, Operations and Product Manager
They also love the itinerary builder! They invested a lot of time designing itineraries, creating images and descriptions, and building templates. Now all the documents now look professional and beautiful. As they stated, half of their competition doesn’t have documents that look as professional as theirs.
They have hundreds of hotels and thousands of tours. Jason said that he used to have a file cabinet behind the desk with all of the contracts printed, did calculations manually, and sent reservations via fax, so he is now happy to be using Lemax.
Impact: 3x faster itinerary creation and a 35% increase in revenue
- They are even 3x as fast and can send 25 very complicated itineraries every day.
- They use already created templates from Lemax, which enables them to send a quote with 50 services in just 20 minutes.
- They saw much better sales results since they started using Lemax – they had around 35% increase in revenue!
Commissions on the packages went up. Not in 2020 because of the pandemic, but they were the most profitable years before. Lemax helped them monitor and report which provider sells the most, the number of reservations made, and similar.
“It’s a great comprehensive platform that allows you to do all different things, not just itineraries. You can manage products and partners, analyze revenue, and much much more. It can take time to fully implement, but learning new software takes time. Putting in products takes time, but it’s worth it in the long run!”
As Jason and Lorena stated, they are actually grateful for this year; they had to learn how to automate their process with fewer people. The new normal will be investing in good software and re-thinking how a travel company works.
Another member of our team that can actually do more than five people
General Manager
My Costa Rica, Costa Rica