07:07 | 17.03.16 | Articles | exclusive 4499

Wandelion to offer tour orders from April 10

Tour order will be available on Wandelion online tourism platform from April 10.

Wandelion co-founder Zorik Tsaturyan informed Itel.am that a website with both one-day and long-term tours presented will be available from April 10.

“The platform offers equal conditions for large and small tour operators. The opportunity to present one-day tour packages is convenient especially for small tour operators. The idea of one-day tours was suggested to us by the guests at our DigiTec Expo booth, who saw the website and inquired whether they could use it or not. It was a sign for us to research local market. Our research showed that travellers generally take one-day tour packages on the internal market. We decided to create an opportunity on the website for those tour operators too, who offer one-day tour packages convenient for local tourists,” noted Zorik Tsaturyan.

According to him, organized tourism is in the centre of Wandelion’s attention. The team is working on a new “Tour Design” tool for the website, which is now in testing phase.

“It will allow tourists to independently design a tour, choosing not only the route but also accommodation they can afford, currency and travel guide, and as a result they will get a price offer and buy the designed tour. This all takes place in real time and very quickly. “Tour Design” tool is very useful especially for those tourists who decided to travel in regions where tourism infrastructure is under-developed,” noted Wandelion co-founder.

An established online system for tour order is already working on the website. According to Zorik Tsaturyan, if a tourist didn’t manage to participate in some tour, he or she can make an order in a preferred time period (of course, if the tourism season allows it), and get a price offer in real time, depending on the number of people. The system allows tour participants to pay each for themselves.

Wandelion co-founder noted that their platform also creates interesting competition between tour operators, which will result in increase of their services’ quality.

“Experience indicates that users’ feedback plays a significant role in increasing sales at current web platforms. Participants of tours bought at Wandelion have an opportunity to rate the services they receive, which increases or, on the contrary, decreases the rates of the given tour. So in the case of identical tour packages, the tour package with higher rates will have more sales, even if it costs more,” stressed Zorik Tsaturyan.

Zorik Tsaturyan believes that one of Wandelion’s advantages is that tourists no longer have to go to tour operators’ websites one by one to find a package they’re interested in, as all tours are gathered on one platform along with all necessary tools.

The idea to create Wandelion was born in 2012. “Wandelion” was derived from “dandelion”. According to the platform’s creators, dissemination of this flower’s components by wind symbolizes a road. Wandelion won in Enterprise Incubator Foundation’s Innovation Development Grants contest last year on March 23-24.

Narine Daneghyan