Overview
Chukka began in 1983 when an idea for a tour was born after visitors were encouraged to enjoy swimming the polo ponies in the warm Caribbean Sea. The combination of the scenic ride along a spectacular coast and a thrilling swim on horseback proved to be a launching pad for the company. Today, Chukka delivers over 750,000 tour experiences annually through roughly 85 tour packages across 15 independent excursion locations in Jamaica, Belize, Dominican Republic, Turks & Caicos and Barbados.
Chukka excels at showcasing the natural side of the Caribbean through unique value-added experiences. We however struggled with our booking system. We lacked a proper online presence and had almost close to zero website sales. Inefficiency was the norm as our sales process was quite manual and tedious.
Our existing booking system was inconsistent, lacked flexibility and didn’t allow us to connect to the outside world. Our team faced daily frustrations as we were constantly facing system outages, restoration of data, manual updates and delays due technical support.
Results
Approximately 10 years ago we had reached a peak of challenges and needed to find a partner who could help us to take charge of our booking process with a dynamic system. We went to the market with a RFP and engaged numerous developers but none seemed to have the experience and forward thinking for our industry. After many months we stumbled upon Rezgo’s website, they offered an immediate signup, no hassle and I could test it quickly without having to commit.
Within a few hours of signup I recognized that there was definitely a partnership brewing. I reached out to the company and the CEO at the time emailed me back the same day. Now that, I thought, was the right way to begin a relationship that has lasted close to 10 years.
Over the next few months and a few trips to Jamaica the team helped us to not only understand how Rezgo works but also gave us insight in how we could tweak our business process to maximize Rezgo’s potential.
Since then, we have built our entire booking process, systems and sales departments around Rezgo, from our now big presence online with direct web sales to dynamic capacity management to reseller connections and API integrations. Rezgo has allowed us to get away from having a Reservations department locked away in a building to having our sales reps having the ability to make a booking, check availability at anytime, anywhere.
With COVID-19, we’ve been able to utilize the check-in and electronic waiver features that have greatly improved our paperless environment.