Note that unlike the normal search content module, you cannot choose which search fields to include. The Search box has different basic and advanced searches. Clicking the Advanced Search link shows the additional search options.  Clicking Basic Search takes you back to the regular view.

NexCite Cruise Search - Basic Search

NexCite Cruise Search - Advanced Search

 The search box allows your customers to use many of the more powerful features of the agent search, such as selecting a cruise line, ship, port, and more. 

Your customer can be as broad or as specific with date searches as desired.  They can select a month/year from the drop down, and then optionally choose a specific day.  If a specific day is selected, then a “Start Date Options” box appears that allows them to choose their flexibility options.  That way, they can say “I really want to leave on this day, but show me things that depart before or after that date by some number of days”.

To add the search box to one of your NexCite pages, simply complete the following steps:

• Edit the page you would like to place the Cruise Search Box on
• Click the sideways “Edit” button for the area of the page where you want to place the Cruise Search Box
• Click the “Insert Content Module” icon
• Choose “Cruise Search” from the Module Type dropdown list
• Enter your selections
• Click “Update“
• Save your page
• Publish your page

I can see where it would normally take a lot of time, not to mention the creativity to write an interesting article or tweet, however in only a few minutes I can go in and find a couple of tweets on travel topics, an interesting blog from a supplier and now a couple of hot deals and click to send to both my Facebook and Twitter followers. The beauty of the Share a Resort, Top Vacation Values and Supplier Guest Blogs is that they include links back to my website.

I did a Tweet a few days ago of a Funjet Vacation Value. It went to my Facebook and Twitter. If my followers were interested, they could click and view the entire promotion on my website. And, because I have the Funjet (GoFunjet) booking engine integrated into my NexCite, my clients could even proceed through the entire booking process online.

Now I can see using Social Media Marketing in several ways to sell travel. Using Agent Socialink enables me to keep sending interesting articles, blogs and even deals to my followers. I can also see adding special group promotions and working the viral marketing side of social media to market to friends of friends. The potential of social media is tremendous for travel agents, you just need to get started, build your followers and use Agent Socialink for your everyday Social Media Marketing. Get started today.

NexCite users will find this group when you select to add a new section or feature on a page and choose Offer Group, then:  GOGO Deals of the Day (Global).  VacationPort users should contact support@passportonlineinc.com to request a link to the group that is properly coded for your website.   

We fully anticipate that other suppliers will move to this marketing practice and we will work with them to provide similar display options.  Let your clients know once you add these daily deals to your site.

•  Traveling is good for the soul and spirit. If you are ready for your next travel experience, we are here to make it happen.
• Window shopping is fun no matter what you are shopping for! So if today you are shopping for travel, we’re here to tempt your senses and help you dream. And if you want to move from shopping to buying, we’re ready to make your dreams reality.
• Travel is experience. Put our experience to work for you. We have been around the globe. We’ll help make your next trip a life time experience.
• So glad you came here to begin your next travel experience. We love using our expertise to help our customers truly see the world.
• Welcome to our digital travel store. We are so glad to have you exploring the world with us today. We want you to know we have live travel experts ready and waiting to share their experience and create your next vacation. Click around and explore, and we’ll do the rest!

According to tnooz, the study (of nearly 2,800 US travel buyers in the US) found that 57% will only wait three seconds before abandoning a site if it has failed to load properly.  TravelPulse cites that Sixty-five percent of 18 to 24 year olds expect a site to load in two seconds or less. A third of travelers would be less likely to visit a site after experiencing technical problems like slowness or errors on the page.

Making your website easy to navigate and quick to load is absolutely essential to retain your customers.  Here are a few quick tips on how to ensure your NexCite runs up to speed:

• Make sure you are using less than 20MB of space within your Images and Files storage inside your NexCite admin
• Only use one slide show per page on your NexCite
• Make sure your banner image is less than 50KB
• Don’t litter your pages with flashing 3rd party ads (one of the biggest culprits for increasing page load time)
• Create pages with your customer in mind and don’t make them think.  Direct call to actions and logical navigation will allow them an easy shopping experience, one that leads to more booking.

NexCite is designed to run light and fast.  Follow these tips and you won’t need to worry about your customers abandoning your website.  As always, we are here to help.  Get in touch with our Support Team if you would like any other suggestions on how to keep your site optimized for the travel consumer.

We have been working hard to expand our selection of Canadian suppliers to offer our northerly neighbors equally compelling content. We are pleased to announce that we have created two new Global Offer Groups dedicated to cruises with Canadian pricing.

• Celebrity Exciting Deals Canada
• Royal Caribbean Sales Event Canada

These two groups will populate every Thursday with the appropriate CAD pricing, instead of USD. They are available for you to promote on your website now!

Some of you may be asking, “what is an offer group?” and “how can I use an offer group to promote specials on my site?”   If that’s the case, then you don’t want to miss our Open Q + A webinar on May 18th (10am PST). We will show you examples of how to use offer groups and target searches to promote your preferred offers on your website.

If you already subscribe to our Supplier Highlight Pages, this content has been updated for you automatically.  If not…

Supplier Highlight Pages are a great way to add regularly updated content to your website, without having to make any changes yourself. The Supplier Highlight Pages are managed by Passport Online on behalf of the individual suppliers.

Want us to add Supplier Highlight Pages to your NexCite? Simply fill out our Supplier Highlight Page request form and we will add them.

To add:
The Cruise Supplier option uses the standard way of building the Quick Search options. Only now, you can add “Cruise Supplier” to the list of included options when creating a Quick Search Module.

After  that:
The Cruise Supplier option will show up as a pre-populated dropdown list in the Quick Search. The list of cruise suppliers is specific to your agency’s custom filters and preferences to not include any that are “excluded”, or filtered out.  The search results will then include only the selected cruise supplier’s offers.

If you need help adding this option to your search, just give us a call or send us an email.

Check out this interesting video from VFM (a company that helps hotels distribute their rich media content to the OTAs). It will give you an idea of just how valuable rich media content is becoming to the consumer in their decision process. Agents – be sure to mention ResortPort to your key resort partners. We already have close to 50 Starwood properties in ResortPort, and will have 16 Outrigger properties in by the end of the year!

• 20 photos downloaded directly from your camera (I’m assuming that each photo is only 1MB, which is a low estimate, so you may only get 5, or even two)

OR

• 585 photos properly sized (I’m assuming images between 20 – 30KB, which should be big enough for most uses)

Which would you rather have? Of course you’d rather have 585 properly sized photos. In addition to simply being able to use more photos, each photo will also download faster for your customers. Remember that no matter how good your site is, if it takes a long time to load your customers will never know that your site is great because they’ll click the back button before it even finishes loading.

So how do you properly size your photos? There are a number of options ranging in cost from FREE to $700 or more. If you are just getting started with your web site, you will probably want to start with one of the free options, and move up to a fully functional graphics program later.

Here are a few of the better free options:

ShrinkPictures.com: Simply upload your picture, choose a size and save your newly resized picture.

Image Resizer by Microsoft – Part of their PowerToys collection: Download and install image resize, and then simply right click on a photo you want to resize and choose the size you want. It’s that simple.

Perhaps you’ve been using one of the free options and are ready to move on to something with more features – in that case Adobe’s Photoshop Elements provides many more options than a free program, but is still priced reasonably at $140.

If you are looking for something that provides you with nearly every option you could ever want; Adobe’s Photoshop might be right for you. However, keep in mind those added features don’t come cheap – starting at $699 you will have to pay for all the extra options (but if you are willing to make the investment, you’ll love being able to do things like create panoramic photos out of several individual photos, retouch photos and much more) .

There are probably hundreds of other programs you could use, find one that works for you and start using 585 photos instead of 20!