Beachcomber

Beachcomber Tours - Building "BeachBook," a B2B Agent Portal

Beachcomber Tours specialises in luxury holidays to the Indian Ocean - including Mauritius, the Seychelles, and the Maldives - as well as the Middle East. The company is predominantly trade-focused, with travel agent business accounting for approximately 75-80% of its operations, and prides itself on strong, longstanding relationships with travel agents, supported by a dedicated team of Business Development Managers and a knowledgeable inbound call centre team. This setup ensures agents receive high-quality support for Beachcomber's product portfolio.

Challenge

Beachcomber Tours' trade business ran on relationships and phone calls to their sales team. Beachcomber's team put in significant manual effort whenever agents wanted a quote, which created a ceiling on how agents (and increasingly, homeworkers operating outside standard hours) could get quotes and make bookings.

Our brief was clear: build a self-service trade portal that let agents quote and book packages themselves, integrated cleanly with TigerBay, without compromising the account-management relationship that made their trade channel so successful in the first place.

Solution

ZOLV built 'BeachBook' as a bespoke B2B portal layered directly on top of Beachcomber's existing TigerBay reservation system, giving agents and homeworkers 24/7 self-service access to quote and book, something Beachcomber had never offered before. It's a completely standalone, complementary website to Beachcomber's existing tour operator site, built specifically for the trade.

The build launched with Mauritius (which encompasses 70-80% of Beachcomber's business and its natural starting point) with content mirrored from TigerBay so agents see the same information on the portal as on their generated documents, plus additional agent-facing detail (fact sheets, destination key points) not needed elsewhere.

The platform includes a clean, user-friendly agent dashboard designed in alignment with Beachcomber's visual branding guidelines. It incorporates intuitive filtering, sorting options, and free-text passenger search functionality. Behind the scenes, the system seamlessly manages complex backend logic and TigerBay extras, including multi-hotel stays across a single booking duration, transfers, flight upgrades, and board basis upgrades.

The project ran end-to-end over roughly six months, timed deliberately to be fully live and tested ahead of Beachcomber's January peak trading period.

Results

  • 4,700+ individual agent sign-ups since the October 2024 launch, with a strong initial surge in the first one to two months.
  • Reduced pressure on the call centre and reservations team - agents can now get a price and progress a booking themselves, rather than everything routing through the inbound team.
  • Unprompted demand for more: Beachcomber's own Business Development Managers report agents regularly asking for more destinations on the portal, and a customer survey run around the site's relaunch surfaced "more product on our B2B site" as a recurring request - validating the platform enough that Beachcomber is now planning a phased rollout of further destinations (Seychelles, Maldives, Dubai).
  • Strong client satisfaction: in Beachcomber's own words, the team could not "really fault ZOLV at all."