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BIG NEWS!
Dear <<First Name>>,
Today we are excited to announce (finally!) that we now have our very own "looking & booking" engine on our website!!
Now you can search for pricing and/or even book your own vacation, and still have it booked with your favourite travel agency. Now it's as if we are never closed, we don't sleep, and we never go on holiday!
If this news has got you excited enough that you want to try it out right away, then by all means click here to jump straight to the booking tool...
Some highlights...
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Looking & Booking: Many, (though by no means all), of our vacations can be searched and even booked via our brand-new booking tool. This is a robust and relatively simple system, similar to many/most travel websites in Canada.
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Monarc: A really nice feature is the ability to easily connect to hotel rating/review site Monarc.ca which aims to be an improvement on TripAdvisor by only offering Canadian reviews from people that can prove that they have actually stayed at the hotel they are reviewing.
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Please note: We are not able to add our own enhancements to this system, so it will search all properties that are available, whether or not we might actually "recommend" them. If you wish to use our agents' specialist knowledge, you'll need to contact us directly as before!
The vacations that will probably NOT be the most suitable for booking via the looking/booking engine would actually be some of those that our agents are already "known for", namely:
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Walt Disney Travel bookings
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Club Med bookings
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Cruises
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FDR resort in Jamaica
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Beaches Resort bookings
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Villas
Essentially, these are either not offered in the system, or, if they are, we have other - better - ways that we might usually book them (for better pricing, better terms & conditions, more flexibility etc.etc)
BUT THAT'S NOT ALL!!!!
Also brand new, we have some "affiliate" pages too! Some of our suppliers (ones that are not in the main booking engine system) offer their products via affiliate programs. We are extremely pleased to announce that we have 5 companies already "up and ready to book" and are working on a couple more.
Companies offered are:
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TIPS Travel Insurance: This is an alternative company to RBC insurance which is "built in" to the looking/booking engine. As TIPS has specially-priced family plans, it is often more cost-effective than RBC for families, while offering practically identical coverage.
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Beaches resorts: We have had a link to Beaches resorts on our existing site for a while, though it was not featured particularly prominently. It will now be easier to find on our affiliate page.
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Trafalgar Tours: We are excited to be able to offer Trafalgar, an excellent tour company which have recently come out with 6 European tours that are just for families. (We featured them in a previous newsletter). We have had clients on a couple of these tours already this year, and their opinions were overwhelmingly positive.
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Insight Tours: a sister-company to Trafalgar, specialising in medium-high-end bus tours.
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Contiki: another of Trafalgar's sister companies, Contiki is probably the best-known tour company for travellers 18-35.
Our venerable old website is still creaking along, in need of a complete revamp to its structure, look, feel and some content too, but we nonetheless feel very happy to be able to roll out these latest additions. Personally, I describe the website as a real Frankenstein's monster now with a bunch of bits "bolted-on" to the original pages; multiple blogs and now the booking engine and affiliate pages. Still, we hope you find that it is all still "works"!
Newsletter Preferences:
Finally, we are aware that our newsletter readership is growing (it is now 3 times the size it was when we launched it in 2009), and we need to get a little better at this whole newsletter business to continue to offer you interest and value.
So far, we have been sending each newsletter to everyone on our list, regardless of the subject, your physical location, your personal travel preferences etc. This is mainly because we haven't really given you any options to choose the content that you receive. So, we have updated our "newsletter preferences" to give you more options. This is something that we will undoubtedly continue to improve upon over the coming months, but in the meantime, do please take the 2 minutes needed to "update your subscription preferences" and hopefully help us to help you better. (If you don't update, then you will simply continue to receive all newsletters.)
If you have any topics that you really would like us to cover in a future newsletter, please let us know. Seriously. We want to know what you want. That way we can hopefully give it to you! And please remember to make use of the "forward to a friend" link below. If you see value in what we are sharing, perhaps your friends will too.
We look forward to hearing your feedback (particularly on the new looking and booking engine) and maybe even seeing your online booking come through. We have already had some of our advance testers complete their bookings online. Woo-hoo!
All the best,
For Warna, Edmundo and Myself at
Let's Take the Kids Travel
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