Extranomical Tours: It’s easy to switch to Ventrata

Gary Lillian explains how Ventrata’s expertise meant moving systems caused little disruption to Extranomical​

“I believe that we were able to launch far faster, by months, and at a far lower out of pocket cost,” Gary Lillian says about moving to Ventrata. “You’re specialists in the industry — the learning, the improvements, the continuous tinkering with the consumer-facing side of it.”

Lillian is the CEO of Extranomical Tours in San Francisco. Recently, the tour operator decided to stop building their own website and move to the Ventrata booking engine for their front and backends.

Not only has the switch saved Extranomical time, money and stress, the transition was smooth and caused little disruption to the business.

Tours with multiple components are no bother

Despite the complexity of the tours provided by the Tripadvisor Travel & Hospitality award winner, setting up their products and packages didn’t present any difficulties. For example, 5-day tours to Yosemite come with a number of different components and optional extras such as hotels.

“I think I expected there to be moments when there were surprises about what the site could do and what it couldn’t do, but there was nothing that we can’t create workarounds for,” Lillian says.

“I would say Dustin [Reed, Head of North America] and Holt [Lau, Head of Growth] were there when we needed them to help with the migration to the new site. Dustin was here in our office for three days during the critical hours of the migration.”

It’s not just the support provided or Ventrata’s ability to handle complexity that eased the switch for Extranomical — it’s also the way we think about how the industry works. Ventrata has now spent years concentrating specifically on working with tour operators, and we know the industry inside out.

“A lot of the architecture and ways that you approached building Ventrata had different names from what we used,” Lillian says. “But the actual architecture and activities to do a passenger manifest were remarkably similar.

“Therefore, we imagine that the transition, including for our drivers and our travel consultants, would be smoothed by the fact that it really wasn’t a dramatic change in how we do business.”

As Lillian says, Ventrata are “specialists in the industry”. We’re here to provide the software and hardware that you need to streamline and grow your business. And to make switching platforms as simple as possible.

For more information on Ventrata, check out Customer Success or request a demo

Contact sales@ventrata.com to chat to a member of our sales team