Success Stories

Reef Unlimited improves reservations and ticketing with Cobber, saving $180,000+ each year.

Who
Reef Unlimited tours offers easy access to the Great Barrier Reef from Cairns with full and half-day tours handling more than 5000 pax a year offering activities include snorkeling, diving, swimming, glass bottom boats and submarine coral viewing tours.

Their tour management practices were ad hoc and manually intensive. Too much time was spent on administration. Not enough on customers. The Reef Unlimited team wanted a seamless solution that could take bookings online, over the phone and internationally to capitalize on agent and wholesaler networks.

How we helped
Cobber was selected because it’s a complete reservation management tool that enables operators to manage bookings by phone or website. Everything happens faster. Reservations staff can take quick, consistent, and accurate bookings by feeding preconfigured commissions, prices, discounts and payments into the booking. But perhaps the most interesting and significant saving has been Big Cat’s ability to stop people defrauding its reservation system.

Two years after implementation, Reef Unlimited can identify savings across the business as a result.

“We save five hours per month on report preparation. Before Cobber (formerly ResPax), you had people solving reporting issues for half the day. Cobber solves these problems automatically and saves us hours each day in bank reconciliations.

Cobber has created tangible savings for the business by streamlining the reservation processes and simplifying reporting so we don’t have to manipulate data to the same extent. I estimate this saves us around $180,000 each year on previous lost earnings.

There are still some features of the system that we are not using to full capacity, but as we roll these features out, we will see even greater savings for the business.”

Ian Douglas
Reef Unlimited

Experience Co introduces direct bookings, saving 20 per cent on call-center staffing costs each year.

Who
Experience Co is an established web store with many thrilling tour activities in its range, from cruising coral reefs through to jumping out of planes. With 20+ years’ experience in the travel industry, the adventure company excels at packaging experiences in exciting new ways for sale online – the backbone of its business.

Multiple Tour Bookings
However, in the early days prior to Cobber (formerly ResPax), it was a different story according to Experience Co’s Scott Lahney. Enquiries were coming fast, and the back office needed to keep up, ensuring the entire customer experience was outstanding – not just the canyoning or white-water river rafting trip.

How we helped
Automation, Scalability and Distribution. Experience Co chose Cobber for its ability to package tours elegantly. 20 years later, it stays because Cobber helps it adapt early, from online bookings through to B2B channel manager integration.

And they can market tours globally, connecting with some of the world’s largest travel agents including Viator through the Cobber channel manager. Agents love this ability because they can access all operators on the network at the low cost of a single integration.

Scheduled Reporting
Being able to schedule reports for email delivery has also made a difference. Scrambling at the last moment is a thing of the past says Lahney. “Critical documents such as bus-pickup manifests arrive automatically, even after hours. We no longer rely on staff to send them manually.”