America by Rail

Objective: Run a tour company from one system

America by Rail sells escorted rail vacations across the US, Canada, and beyond: national parks, coastal routes, rail-and-sail trips, each led by a tour director. Behind every tour is a lot of moving parts: travelers and their spouses, travel agents, room and railcar inventory, deposits, final payments, waitlists, catalogs, and name tags on day one.

Off-the-shelf tour software didn’t fit how they worked. They asked Web Ascender to build a system around their process, and to keep the website and marketing feeding it with new travelers.

What Web Ascender Did

• Caboose, a custom booking and CRM system - contacts, couples, bookings, and travelers in one place, with a dashboard that shows each staff member their incomplete bookings
• Tours and inventory - tour dates, capacity, per-person pricing, and inventory such as roomettes, bedrooms, and fly-option savings, color-coded so staff can see what is filling up
• Waitlists - travelers held in order, reordered by hand when needed, and cloned onto a booking when a spot opens
• Invoicing and payments - invoices, cancellations, refunds, and credits, with online card payments, non-US payments, and printed invoices that line up with window envelopes
• Travel agents and agencies - agent profiles with required industry ID numbers, agencies grouped together, agent notes, and an automated email report of new and updated agents
• A loyalty program - points earned on every tour, shown on the contact record, and star badges printed on traveler name tags
• Reports and exports - daily inventory, past-due and deposits-due reports, rooming lists with room counts, tour director call lists, an audit log, and Excel exports
• Mailings - catalog mailing labels, folder labels, and name tags, with CASS address certification and periodic list cleanup so catalogs reach real addresses
• Website forms into the CRM - catalog and reservation requests from the website create contacts in Caboose automatically
• The website - a DNN site with tour pages, tour director profiles and a director forum, a blog, and a responsive redesign, plus SEO, redirects, and analytics reporting
• Facebook lead campaigns - traveler personas, three ad campaigns with their own landing pages and thank-you emails, and leads flowing straight into Caboose
• Hosting and server management for the website and the booking system

The Outcome

For a decade, Caboose was where America by Rail ran its business: a request from the website became a contact, the contact became a booking, and the booking became an invoice, a rooming list, and a name tag. The website and campaigns kept new travelers coming in, and the system tracked each one from first click to the last day of the tour.

The header photo is representative stock photography.