Do our suppliers have to send contracts differently?
No. In Durban they came as 278 PDFs, 270 emails, nine Word documents, six spreadsheets and five zip files, some of them scans. That's normal, and it's the point.
We don't run Tourplan. Does that rule us out?
No. The intelligence is in how the data is extracted from any file format, structured or unstructured, and with that it can update whatever system you use: Tourplan, Travelogic or anything else. If the integration with your system isn't built yet, I'll investigate, scope and build it at no additional charge.
Does it use one of our Tourplan licences?
No. It runs over productConnect, Tourplan's own documented API, so it holds no licence seat and nobody gets locked out while it loads.
What stops a wrong number going in?
Several things, in order. Two independent reads have to agree. Every figure has to be found in the contract's own text. The result is checked against your own book and last year's numbers. A person ticks it. Then the book is read back, and checked again every hour. In Durban, 17,269 rate figures were compared contract against live book, and 17,257 matched. The twelve that didn't are known and listed.
What happens when a contract is unclear?
It asks, rather than guessing. The question goes on one shared sheet with the reason attached, and it holds only the figures it's about. The rest of the contract still loads. The answer is kept, so it isn't asked again next season.
Will it overwrite work my team has done?
It won't touch bookings, quotes or itineraries, or curated data like addresses and contacts. What a new contract doesn't restate, such as an offer or a supplier's own cancellation terms, is kept. And a load that would lower a live rate or re-price existing ones stops and asks first. In Durban that happened nineteen times.
Who can see our rates?
You. What a supplier's contract looks like is learned once and reused, which makes the next operator's load of the same lodge faster. Your rates, discounts and markups are never part of that.
Special offers too?
Yes: stay-pay, honeymoon, long stay and the rest. In Durban, 325 agreed offers were loaded. It also found 163 offers sitting in Tourplan with no contract on file, which is worth knowing about.
What about renewals, new rooms and changing levies?
That's the steady state. New contracts and specials go in as they arrive, renewals are checked against last year's numbers, and a levy is read like every other figure. Two pages or ninety, the contract goes through the same checks.
How quickly does it go?
In Durban the first load landed on the tenth of September, 179 properties had been loaded within fourteen days, and the whole book, 381 contracts, was done in 38 days. Your backlog and your answers set the pace, so I'd rather show you on two of your own contracts than promise you a number.
What would you need from us?
Access to your system, wherever your contracts arrive, one person who can answer commercial questions, and your house rules once. That's it.