18.09.2007 - 5 Years YachtBooker

This year the YachtBooker Reservation System celebrates its 5th anniversary, continuing its growth and confirming its position as the global leader for yacht charter online reservations.

During the first 5 years, more than 180 international charter companies joined YachtBooker, together offering more than 3000 yachts via its Centralised Reservation System (CRS). On the brokers’ side, more than 150 yacht charter agents rely on YachtBooker as a professional tool for placing their clients’ charter reservations.

The YachtFinder® - Finding a perfect yacht charter holiday

Since 5 years, charter brokers and charter clients benefit from the power of the YachtBooker system by using the YachtFinder®, the Integrated Booking Engine (IBE) to easily book boating holidays online. In the first 6 months of 2007 the YachtFinder® received more than half a million online charter requests from more than 30 countries, resulting in thousands of successful online reservations.
 

Yacht Charter - The additional brick in the house of tourism

Thanks to the enormous investments into technology during the last years, YachtBooker is now able to provide the product “Yacht Charter” as an additional brick in the house of tourism.

Version 2.0 of the Provider System was launched at Boot Düsseldorf 2007. Providers now benefit from new interactive listings, like the CharterCockpit, and user-friendly info tool tips within the CharterManager. Numerous other improvements have been applied to the system as well as a new desktop design.

The new innovative Agency System PRO 2.0 will be launched at INTERBOOT in Friedrichshafen in mid of September 2007. The result of 15 months of development, the new system boasts an exciting new back office and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) functionalities. Agents will save a lot of time since all inquiries, booking details and client data will be stored automatically in the back office database of the agent. A task list reminds the charter broker not to miss important payment dates or transfers of crew lists, sending of welcome back emails etc. Charter clients benefit from their own login, viewing reservations, payment status, online crew-lists and upload of essential skipper and travel documents. The e-mail and text template editor allows the agent to manage and store different types of client and provider correspondence. Creation and sending of payment reminders, confirmations or travel vouchers are just a mouse-click away.

The YachtBooker Content Management System (CMS) for agents and providers allows partners to manage and edit their own charter websites easily. All yacht details, up-to-date prices and booking data are displayed on the web and directly connected with the central YachtBooker Reservation System. Users can check availabilities, prices and book directly online via the integrated YachtFinder®. The system is multilingual and designed to fulfil requirements for essential Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

The YachtBooker software development centre provides steady development of innovative system features and guarantees immediate support for technical problems.

Especially exciting is the Charter Content XML Data Web Service (XML-Feeds) of YachtBooker, which enables contract partners to perform progressive web marketing with dynamic charter data on their own yacht charter portals. 

The new booking server launched in August 2007 allows direct online reservations from external systems without using the YachtFinder®. As the first result, a very promising and innovative cooperation with a US American travel data aggregator was signed. Aggregators, which bundle flights, hotels, rental cars and distribute them to reservation platforms, can soon combine yacht charter offers with any other tourist service and sell them over the leading travel distribution channels.