Vacation Side Travel – reducing costs with free business tools | Travel Research Online

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Vacation Side Travel – reducing costs with free business tools

I hope all of you have been as busy as I have lately! Who doesn’t enjoy being busy and booking business, selling products and services that change people’s lives and create ever lasting memories? It definitely beats worrying about where your next booking is coming from – or your next dollar for that matter!

Have you ever been so caught up trying to catch up that certain aspects of your business fall by the waste-side or slip through the cracks?

Maybe it’s sending out those thank-you-cards or taking time to reconcile your incoming commission checks. Recently, I fell back into what I like to call “subscription hell.” Everything these days is subscription based–at home and at work. At my house, just to occasionally watch TV and listen to music, we have a subscriptions to Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, Comcast, Tivo and Google Play. That’s crazy and that only covers home entertainment!

I sat down a couple of weeks ago and looked at my expenses only to find a similar story unfold for my business. I have a subscription to a FAM website, ClientBase CRM, iZento for detailed itineraries, BudgetYourTrip, SmileBox for graphics, BombBomb for personalized client videos, Passport Online’s Agent Social Link for help with social content, web hosting, Virtual PBX, Contactually and SendOutCards, to name a few. Well, hopefully I’m only forgetting a couple but you get the point.

While all these services serve a purpose or perform a particular function, I was determined to free up as many as possible by finding free alternatives. I spent hours searching for open source alternatives (free) and thought I’d share with you some of what I found. I haven’t personally tested every solution I found so I’ll share only the one’s I have personally tried today:

  • Invoicing – Simple Invoices offers a server-side, self-hosted script as well as a downloadable desktop application for Windows. As the name implies, very simple but very effective, nice looking invoices which you can customize to your heart’s content. You can check it out by visiting www.simpleinvoices.org. Another free alternative is PayPal – if you don’t already have a business account with them, you can have your personal PayPal account upgraded to business for free.
  • Client Relationship Management (CRM) – Tree.IO is a great open source project which can either be hosted by your web hosting provider or it can be installed on a Linux machine loaded with Ubuntu O/S, for example. This one takes a little extra time and effort to setup but it does everything! Pipeline management, contact management, reporting, accounting, marketing, mass-email, task system, project management, quotes, live chat for your website, help desk system, client portals so that your client can login to see a history of all their quotes, itineraries and invoices. http://tree.io
  • FIT Itineraries/Trip Planning – Check out Travel for Agents, an online social platform which allows you to create highly complex itineraries you and your client can both access, collaborate on, request and make changes to, and much more. There’s an invoicing system, a place you can post deals, packages, custom tours and the really cool part is that you can invite your entire client base to join and as they share their travel plans, their own family members and friends will likely sign up too which means they will all roll up to you as their agent. That means you’re information shows up in their profile so if they ever need help with their travel plans, you’ll be first to come to mind. Super cool, definitely worth checking out. http://travelforagents.com
  • Image Editing – I wish I would have known about PICMONKEY a long time ago – it would have saved me countless hours! It’s totally free, you upload any image you need to edit or modify with special effects. You can add text overlays for Facebook posts, there’s a “nip-tuck” tool, a wrinkle remover, and all sorts of other correction options. I love it! http://picmonkey.com

I’ve got several other free alternatives to paid subscription-based services I’d be more than willing to share. If you’re interested, leave a comment below with what you’re looking for and I might just have the perfect solution!

Steven Talbott is the founder of Vacation Side Travel, a gay owned-and-operated agency located near Nashville, Tennessee specializing in gay & lesbian (LGBT) tours, cruises, vacations and travel. Through their division Gay Travel Experts, clients are offered an expert travel concierge, unbiased personal assistants who help research and plan travel. Connect with Steven!

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