Digitising Complex Tour Planning, Supplier Management & Payments at Scale
Client: Love Irish Tours
Industry: Tourism, Travel & Hospitality
Services: Business Process Consulting, Custom Application Development, UX/UI Design, Supplier & Booking Management Systems, Payments & Accounting Integration, Deployment & Support
Overview
Love Irish Tours is a highly successful specialist tour operator, delivering bespoke and template-driven holiday experiences across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Their business model involves managing complex itineraries that bring together accommodation, transport, attractions, suppliers, rooming lists, payments and margins—often across multiple currencies and extended booking timelines.
As the business scaled, Love Irish Tours recognised that off-the-shelf booking tools could not support the depth of operational control, financial oversight and flexibility required to manage their tours efficiently. ERS was engaged to design and deliver a fully bespoke tour booking and management application that would centralise sales, operations, supplier bookings and financial processing into a single, authoritative platform.
The Challenge
Love Irish Tours operates in a domain where no two bookings are the same. Tours may be built from predefined templates or assembled entirely from scratch, often involving dozens of suppliers, staggered dates, customer-driven changes and variable margins. The existing processes relied heavily on manual coordination, duplicated data entry and disconnected tools for sales, operations and finance.
A key challenge was managing itineraries as living entities. A single itinerary could progress through multiple quotations, date changes and pricing revisions before being confirmed. Once confirmed, bookings needed to be issued to suppliers in bulk or selectively, with supplier responses tracked and acted upon in real time. Any supplier rejection, comment or pricing adjustment had downstream impacts on margins, customer communications and payment schedules.
Financial complexity further increased the challenge. Love Irish Tours needed granular control over margins, the ability to override pricing at both global and line-item level, accurate handling of euro and sterling suppliers, and clear visibility of deposits, balances and outstanding payments for both customers and suppliers. Supplier payments often occurred months in advance and required reconciliation against invoices, remittances and accounting systems.
Operationally, the business also required structured management of rooming lists, vouchers, notes, tasks, audit trails and internal communications—areas that were previously fragmented or handled informally. Delivering a system that could manage this level of complexity without slowing down staff or introducing risk required a deeply tailored solution built around Love Irish Tours’ real-world workflows.
Our Solution
ERS partnered closely with Love Irish Tours to design and deliver a custom desktop and database-driven booking platform, engineered specifically to support their sales, operational and financial processes. The engagement began with detailed workflow mapping across itineraries, bookings, suppliers, payments and communications, ensuring that every feature reflected how the business actually operates rather than forcing it into a generic model.
At the core of the solution is a powerful itinerary engine. Users can create itineraries from structured templates or build them manually by dragging and assigning suppliers and services into a booking grid. The system automatically manages date sequencing, duration logic and rate application, while allowing legitimate exceptions such as customer-arranged accommodation or mid-tour departures. Templates are managed separately from live bookings, enabling clean reuse while ensuring that pricing and availability update correctly when dates change.
Supplier management was designed as a first-class feature. Each supplier maintains a catalogue of services, date ranges, pricing options and warnings, all of which can be updated efficiently through structured screens or Excel imports. When bookings are issued, suppliers receive structured confirmation emails containing secure response links. Their responses—acceptances, rejections or comments—flow directly back into the system, triggering alerts where action is required and updating booking statuses automatically.
To support financial operations, ERS delivered comprehensive customer and supplier payment management. Customer payments are recorded per itinerary, per individual or per group, with Stripe integration enabling automated transaction capture. Supplier payments can be filtered, grouped, marked as paid and reconciled against invoices, with support for remittance tracking, credits and confidence indicators. Integration with Xero provides a clear bridge between operational bookings and formal accounting.
Additional modules support rooming list management, voucher generation, structured notes, follow-up tasks, audit reporting and advanced search across itineraries, suppliers, contacts and bookings. The system also automates the generation and sending of customer quotations, confirmations and vouchers, while retaining the option to download documents as PDFs when required.
The Result
The Love Irish Tours booking platform has transformed how the business manages its tours from enquiry to completion. Staff now operate from a single system that provides full visibility into itineraries, supplier commitments, margins and payments, eliminating duplication and reducing the risk of missed actions or incorrect pricing.
Sales teams can generate accurate quotations quickly, operations teams can manage supplier confirmations and changes with confidence, and finance teams have clear oversight of deposits, balances and payment obligations. The structured handling of templates, rooming lists, vouchers and notes has significantly reduced manual effort while improving consistency across customer and supplier communications.
Most importantly, the platform has given Love Irish Tours a scalable operational backbone capable of supporting continued growth, more complex itineraries and increased transaction volumes—without compromising control or profitability
Conclusion
ERS delivered a deeply customised tour booking and operations platform that reflects the real-world complexity of Love Irish Tours’ business. By combining detailed process consulting with robust technical execution, ERS provided a system that brings together sales, supplier management, payments and accounting into a single, cohesive solution.
This project demonstrates ERS’s ability to design, deliver and support mission-critical business systems where flexibility, accuracy and financial control are essential to success