Retail Tourism Management Made Easy in Eight Steps

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Retail Tourism Management Made Easy in Eight Steps

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As we mentioned in our previous article, What is Retail Tourism, retail is an important aspect of tourism and vice versa. Once the tourist industry booms when Covid-19 subsides, travelers will like to shop and dine in the host country to have a real cultural feel. Shopping, in fact, is one of the motivating and decisive factors in selecting a destination to visit.

Retail Tourism Management

While there are many souvenir shops that cater especially to travelers, the main stream retail industry of the host country can form collaborations with tour guides and tour companies to boost local retail. This involves a complete cycle where tour guides, operators or tour companies play an active role in bringing tourists to selected retail outlets. This understanding involves managing the various stages of this collaboration. For instance, retailers need to keep track of the following:

The outlets where the tourist companies or guides can bring tourists
The name of tour companies, guides, or tour operators with whom they collaborate
Commissions of tour companies and guides
Names and number of articles sold
Insights regarding profitability of each tour. Which tour company or guide is bringing the maximum number of tourists, tourists from which country generate maximum sales, etc.

Retail tourism management module in Candela can seamlessly manage and track all important facets of retail tourism for retailers.

Let’s get started.

Step1. Retail Tourism Management: Configuration

The first thing that we need to do is to enable the retail tourism management module in Candela retail software

And this is simple. Go to Go to Configuration>System Configuration>General tab

Mark the checkbox ‘Activate Retail Tourism Module’

Save.

Now your Candela Retail Software is ready to handle tourist retail.

The next step is to decide which outlets should be prepared to received tourists.

Step 2. Prepare Retail Outlets to Receive Tourists

If you have a single store, you can simply enable it for shopping tourism. But if you have multiple stores, you have the option to enable tourist retail on selected outlets. The decision regarding outlet selection can be made based on the location of the outlet, or any other consideration you think can make a certain outlet more viable for tourist retail.

Once you have selected the outlet, this is what you need to do:

Go to Configuration>Store Configuration

For multiple outlets, go to Shop List tab and select the outlet

Click Misc tab, the Misc screen will open up

Mark the checkbox ‘Enable Retail Tourism’

Step 3. Make Preparation for Tracking Tourists’ Shopping Details

After you have enabled retail tourism for a store, you need to track shopping details of the tourists to be able to calculate commissions of tourist companies/ guides.

Tourists tracking is normally done by barcodes wristbands or simply giving a barcode to each tourist customer. To prepare tourist barcode bands, you can either get them especially prepared or you can also generate such barcode in candela.

Making Barcode wrist bands Mandatory or Optional

While enabling tourist retail for a store, Candela gives you the option to select the radio button mandatory or optional (check step 2). If you select the radio button Mandatory, it will become mandatory for the store to have a ready supply of barcodes in wrist-bands or any other form when the tourist-customers come.

It’s a common practice for hotels or tourists guides to inform the store before-hand about the number of tourist they will be bringing. The store can thus scan the exact number of wrist bands beforehand and speed things up when the customers arrive.

If you select the radio button Optional, you will print the barcodes from Candela (check Step 6)

Step-3 Decide Commission Structure for Tour Operators

After selecting the retail outlets where tour guides and tour companies can bring tourists, you need to configure the commission percentages agreed upon with the tour operators or freelance tourist guides who will bring tourists to your retail outlet.

You can configure different commission percentages for individual operators and tourist companies and identify these commissions with different names. For example, you can choose to call the commission percentage for individual operators as Freelance commission, and for companies as company commission. There is no limit to the number of commission percentages you can configure in Candela.

To configure commission percentages, go to Configuration>Misc>Retail Tourism>Commission Structure

Enter Name of the Commission (it could be any name you want to identify the commission with)

Enter Commission Percentage

Save

Step-4 Define Tourist Companies or Tour Guides in Candela

The next step is to define all tour guides and tour companies, and tour operators with whom you want to do business. The tour companies can be attached to some hotels or they may be independent companies and guides. In Candela, you can define each company and also attach the hotel operated tours with the hotel from where these tours operate.

Step-5 Register Tour Leaders, Guides, Driver, Driver, Transport, and

Other than tour companies, there can be independent tour leaders, guides and bus drivers who may enter into an agreement with retailers to bring in customers. You need to define all entities with whom you want to do business to be able to define and calculate their commissions.

To register tour leaders, go to Configuration>Misc>Retail Tourism>Register Tour Leader

To register Tour Guides, go to Configuration>Misc>Retail Tourism>Register Tour Guide

To register Tour Bus Driver, go to Configuration>Misc>Retail Tourism>Register Tour Bus Driver

If tour leaders, guides or bus drivers are attached to a particular company, select the company from the Tour Company drop-down field, and from the Commission drop-down field select whatever commission you have configured for the company.

in case of free lance tour leaders, mark the checkbox is Freelance, and select whatever commission you have configured for freelance tour leaders.

Register Transport

Generally speaking, if tourist services are offered by hotels, they also provide transport services. In Candela you have the option to register all such transports and select them while registering a tour.

To register a transport, go to Configuration>Misc>Retail Tourism>Register transport

While registering a tour, you can select the transport from the Transport drown-down field

Step 6: Register Tour

Now that you have made all the configurations, you are ready to register the tour when it arrives at the retail outlet.

To register a tour, go to Shop Activities>Register Tour

Enter Tour Code

You can assign any code to a tour. This will help in generating and checking tour specific details.

Enter Date of the tour in Start and End Date fields

Enter other Tour info like Company, Tour Guide, Tour Leader, Driver, Transport

To enter the information, click the box with three dots against each field and select the name from the list.

Select the applicable Commissions from the commission dropdown field.

Visitor Info

In this section, add all the information about the visitors.

From the Type field drop-down, select the visitor type (all types are hardcoded in the system) . Selecting the visitor type and entering visitor information is NOT Mandatory. You you can save the tour without entering visitor specific information.

In the Barcode field, scan the barcodes for the tourists/customers.

As mentioned above in Step 3, once scanned, the barcodes will automatically attach to to the purchases by the tourists.

Note: If while enabling retail tourism for an outlet, you selected the radio button Optional, you will need to generate barcodes for the tourists.

Enter the tourists/customers number in the No of Tourists field and click the plus sign.

Candela will generate the barcodes and all generated barcodes will load in the grid.

Click the Save button, the system will print the barcodes.

You can the stick the barcode on each customer or just give it to them.

Whenever the customers purchase something, their barcodes will be scanned and the system will save each sale against the scanned barcode.

If the retail tourism module is optional for an outlet, instead of Barcode field, No. of Tourists field will be visible. Enter the number of tourists/customers and click the plus sign to generate barcodes.

Step 7: Selling to Tourists

After registering the tour, you are now ready to record purchases made by the tourists.

Go to Shop Activities>Sales and Return

Load products

Click Tourist Information button

Note: If Retail tourism module is Mandatory for the outlet, you don’t need to click the tourist information button. The tourist information pop-up will appear when you save the sale. You can then scan the barcode. But if the Retail Tourism module is Optional, the only way to enter the tourist information is by clicking the Tourist information button.

Scan the tourist barcode in the Pop up and click OK

Save the sale.

Step 8: Commission Management

The system automatically saves the company commission or any other commission that you have configured for a particular tour.

To check and pay commission that’s due to the company, go to Utilities>General Utilities>Tourism Company Company Commission

Select the Company, enter date range and click Search

The commission amounts due against various tours will load in the grid

Mark the checkbox ‘Print Invoice‘ and Save

The system will generate the commission receipt

To Generate commission receipt for tour operators, guides, leaders or drivers, go to Shop Activities>Register Tour>Tours tab

Select the tour from the grid and click Claim Commission button

Commission claim screen will pop-up

Mark the checkbox ‘Print Report’

Click Claim Commission on the pop-up screen