Toucan Country Guides Earns Early Appreciation From Travel Agents

It has been less than a month since its launch, and Toucan Country Guides - a dedicated travel guide publishing portal - is already making waves. It has already notched up impressive registration figures, and the response from professional travel agents is unanimously positive.

Toucan - a product from Teksmobile Australia - has 80+ fully white-labeled country guides for agents, that can be branded, customised and shared by the latter. Speaking about the portal, the Teks CEO said that the guides were information-rich, and were intended to be used on a post-sales basis. Put in another way, travel companies can use the Toucan guides as a value-added service for their customers. And clearly, the companies are loving this proposition.

The fact that these country guides are not promotional in any way has helped to bolster their popularity, feels a senior executive from the Toucan family. As she correctly pointed out, the guides are all about curated, relevant and updated content - information that travelers would find handy at every stage. The guides are updated on a weekly basis (apart from information like exchange rates, which are updated real-time), ensuring that only the latest information is shared through them.

The user-friendly nature of the Toucan Country Guides portal has also received the thumbs-up from travel agents. From the dashboard, agents can actually select the information they wish to display on each of the guides (from over 30 subcategories). Since the guides are white-labeled, adding branding elements like company name, logo and theme colours are also easy. There are multiple templates available as well, making things that much more flexible for users.

With a product like Toucan Country Guides, understanding the business paradigms and being patient are key, explained the CEO of Teks. Instead of making the folly of having a sales-first approach, the team has made a sincere effort to understand the precise B2B needs of travel companies, and design the country guides accordingly. “We understand and respect the fact that travel companies are busy”, said the CEO, “and we are happy to get back to them at their convenience.”

Speaking of convenience, the pricing of these country guides for agents has been another masterstroke. Agents can access all the guides by paying as low an amount as $5/month (billable annually). According to reliable sources from Toucan, the 7-day free trial feature has also received a lot of love from travel agents worldwide. The overall registration process is quick and simple, ensuring that companies can get onboard in a matter of seconds.

Given that Teksmobile is a worldwide leader in software and mobile app development, it’s hardly surprising that Toucan has high-end technical features as well. In particular, the option of using APIs to access the country guides’ information has come in for quite a bit of praise. With the Toucan APIs, travel companies can share/display the information on their own systems and/or official mobile apps.

Since Toucan has been positioned as a value-added service that agents can deliver to their customers, the guides need to be easily shareable. The developers have made sure that registered agents would face no difficulties in this regard. Agents can customise and email the guides to their customers, send direct links, download as PDF files and print, and of course, access via APIs. After signing up, the preferences of the travel agents take centerstage.

The start has been encouraging, but the Toucan team is not taking anything for granted. The competition is big, and reaching out to professional travel agents - without coming across as overly promotional - is tricky. That’s precisely why the team is currently focused on building a strong brand presence, through various channels. Plans for adding more countries in the portal are also already in the pipeline. The CEO of Teks is quietly confident that, once more and more companies understand the concept of the Toucan guides and the advantages they deliver, the number of signups will pick up further.

To know more about these white-labeled travel guides, visit www.countryguides.io. If you have any query, send along an email to ss@countryguides.io. Toucan Country Guides is an ambitious endeavour on the part of Teksmobile - and early signs indicate that it’s going to be a big success. This product truly takes travel business to the next level.