Hi. I am new to the forum. I hope someone can help me. I am wanting to start a tour website that is monetized by pay per click. The website will have 3 main areas. Front end where user can do a search for tours based on basic criteria such as budget, destination etc etc. Which will return sortable results. Sorted by date, lowest price, length of tour... you get the idea. Merchant area where a Tour Operator can upload their tours with a good wysiwyg editor.. a bit like writing an ebay listing. Also have access to editable account info, and also control their ppc budget. (all costs per click will be a single set cost for everyone). So will need ppc tracking similar to a modified affiliate tracking setup, that can measure clicks and record visitor stats such as ip address, date, time, etc etc. Main admin area, where we can run the main setup, compiling invoices for billing Tour ops etc etc. What i need to know, is what would you suggest we can use a a framework script that already exists, and can be modified to suit our needs. Or even if someone reading can provide us with what we need, that would be great. I was thinking about either a price comparison script or even an online auction script that can be modified to give us what we need. We have a decent budget, and I am capable of looking after all the design and css work myself... but I am no php coder, although i do have a good idea about php and mysql. Any suggestions or even offers to provide would be greatly appreciated.. We have around one month to get this up and going. What would you use??? Thanks in advance for any help.
If I were you, I would do some research in Content Management Systems. It doesn't sound like a really difficult job, that requires custom scripts.
Have you spoken to tour operators? I somewhat disagree with ssmm987, whilst on the surface it is fairly simple the location aspect could be a pain depending on if you restrict people to simply choose a country or allow them to do free text search. My bigger concern however is if your tour operators are going to be willing to spend time to manually upload all of their tours into your site. My limited experience in this sort of area was that it is predominately about being able to hook into their software to get the details rather than expecting them to be manually uploading.
I am based in Thailand, and it is common practice for tour ops to post their tours on webboards etc... they have simple websites without checkout systems... bank transfer and a phone call is leading edge technology here. There are 9000 group tour ops here, and the main culture here for the 66 million citizens are group tours. 25 or 30 people on a coach for 4 or 5 days taking a million photos. the main destinations are rarely beyond south east asian countries, although i believe Japan is not favourable at this time of year. Mostly 7 or 8 countries are the common target, such as malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Phillipines, Hong Kong and of course Thailand. There are a sprinkling of group tours run to Europe, Egypt and USA but these are usually far beyong the budget if the typical Thai. The industry is massivly competitive, yet there is no single tour directory website.. Out of the 9000 registered tour ops, approx 1500 have a simple website showing tours, the rest will spam forums, webboards, and use sites like hi5 and facebook to drum up interest and email details to any enquirers. I want to change this... i want to put as many tour ops on a single directory website as possible. Most of these ops are only promoting 5 or 6 tours at any one time, so i don't think it toomuch hassle to spend a few hours copying and pasting their tour info which is mostly text based and should notpose a bother to them. We will drive a huge amount of traffic to the site, and we will charge a very small amount for every click a tour op gets on one of their tours.. something like 2 cents, so it is more than affordable... Weall know how much google ppc is for travel related keywords Hope this is enough info to give you a fair picture of our needs.
Not sure if that was intended to be a very bad taste joke or not. If you are comfortable that tour operators will be happy to make the manual postings then your good to go. Some investigation would need to be done on the balance between simple free text entry and explicit values but the overall project would not be massively complex. The only other complexity to work out would be the pricing structure for the tour operators. Is it a simple flat fee paid on posting? Are there options like a Featured Tour they can pay extra for? Is it end of month billing? Do they buy credits up front? Is there an option to have a subscription ensuring you have X adverts live at any one time? If there is a subscription does it auto renew?
Is it a simple flat fee paid on posting?... Nope... free to post as many tours as they wish. (but the ability to set as active/inactive would be a bonus on helping them boost more traffic to lesser performing listings. Are there options like a Featured Tour they can pay extra for?... I was figuring on having a rotation setup on the homepage featured, where the script will rotate all tours with the least amount of clicks, giving them a little exposure boost. This is free. Is it end of month billing? Do they buy credits up front?... Yes we will bill for all clicks on their tour listings at the end of each month. We allow them to list without up front payment. So no need for a top-up system. Is there an option to have a subscription ensuring you have X adverts live at any one time?... The tour op will subscribe, but we will set up their account for them, we are approaching all the tour ops in Thailand over the coming months, we will set their account up... they will be permanentl subscribed until we delete their account or they ask to be deleted. The subscription is 100% free.... we only collect a flat 2 cents per click fee at the end of every month. Hope this helps. I like simple, i think the only real complexity would be the homepage featured rotation, which means a league table would have to be kept in the database that will help to assess which tours get rotated on the homepage featured list.
On the surface it feels a fairly straight forward system you want. If we were to look at a project like this we would use an off the shelf CMS for the main part of it and simply write a couple of plugins/ webparts to handle the tour entry, display, search and tracking. As per my previous comments, you need to consider what fields you want them to enter, which are mandatory etc and also if you want any form of protection against click fraud. If so, what sort of rules you will impliment.