“We’re agent-friendly, that’s our business”: Busabout launches new booking platform

Busabout has just launched a new booking platform focused on creating flexible, personalised trips.

The “design your own trip” based platform, Adventure Planner, allows agents to work with their clients to design and book their own door-to-door itinerary with coach transport, onboard guides, accommodation and experiences.

“We’ve created a personalised travel product to match the personalised travel advice our trade partners give their clients every day,” Duncan Robertson, Busabout’s global managing director said.

“[Adventure Planner] takes the flexibility Busabout is famous for and turns it into an amazing way to visualise how to create a perfect journey across Europe.”

Robertson said the new platform was the result of feedback from travel trade marketers and insights from the company’s Travel Trends Report, an independent survey of travellers aged 18-48 conducted by the company.

The research showed 82 per cent of travellers take inspiration from non-traditional travel resources such as social media and blogs.

“Social media has created a demand for more unique, niche experiences and a greater variety of travel styles and activities. It’s not just Gen Z and millennials who use social media either, there’s an increasing number of more experienced travellers looking online for inspiration.” Robertson said.

Adventure Planner uses the hop-on-hop-off coach network Busabout runs annually from May to October across Europe for independently minded travellers who want to avoid the stress of negotiating public transport in foreign countries.

“Travel agents have this amazing ability to understand their client’s needs and they provide that sort of personalised travel advice and support to everyone who comes into the store but sometimes they don’t have the ability to back that up,” Robertson said. 

“So we thought we’d make this digital tool to give our travel agent friends the ability to create that perfect trip based on what their client needs in seconds or minutes.

“We are a travel agent first business, a majority of our business comes from the trade which is why we want to provide them with tools like adventure planner. We’re agent-friendly, that’s our business.”