I have been in travel since 2010: online travel agency, trip planning, coordination, then destination management. Reservations first, then operations, then fixing the parts of both that kept breaking. The unglamorous version: group series carried from first quote to final reconciliation. Loading next year's rates in September, a year before the first guest arrives. Peak season with four hundred files open. The handover between sales, ops and finance where money quietly disappears.
I know where the failures are because I spent those years finding and fixing them, not reading about them in a case study. A booking that was never confirmed. A rate loaded against the wrong season. A driver who arrived at the right time on the wrong day. None of it is exotic. All of it is preventable with a system and someone who checks.
Run by Aalz started as consulting for other DMCs, which taught me the problems are the same everywhere. Now I run the ground operation myself, out of Cape Town, because doing the work is more useful than advising on it. I want two things from that. The first is broad: a trade partner should be able to hand us a booking and stop thinking about it, because it gets confirmed, it gets monitored, and the fault gets caught before it becomes a complaint.
The second is narrower. South Africans should be able to travel their own country without being quoted a foreign price, and without spending three weekends assembling an itinerary from nine browser tabs. I have the rates and the suppliers. Publishing the real price is the only honest use of that.
My husband builds the technical side: the rate handling, the reconfirmation reminders, the checks that catch a booking before it goes missing. None of that is marketing. It is the reason a two-person operation can carry the file count we carry without one going quiet.
