December 19, 2012

INTRODUCING THE AGENT EMAIL SALES TOOL

Send desirable vacation options during the shopping process to help close sales and improve your value in the eyes of your customers. The Agent Email Sales Tool saves you time by integrating email functionality directly within the booking platform. VAX makes it easy to quickly email flight information, multiple hotel options, features, and rental car pricing to your clients to help them compare and make decisions.

Highlights:

• Emails include links to allow your customers to view the same interactive hotel profiles and destination information that you see
• Send details for up to 6 hotels, 3 cars and 6 features (car rentals, travel insurance, transfers and tours)
• You are automatically copied on all emails sent to your clients for easy recall
• Customize your email messages 

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ENHANCED E-DOCUMENTS

VAX VacationAccess is pleased to announce the launch of its new e-Document format for new bookings beginning in 2013. Benefits of this new format include:

Highlights:

• Easier readability with more consistent spacing, headers and font use
• More logical organization of vacation components in the following order - air, hotel, ground transportation and features/activities/add-ons
• Increased brand recognition with the headers/footers for each section
• The travelers names have been brought to the top to make it easier for you to manage all of your reservations
• Airline confirmation numbers can now be displayed
• Hotel, car & feature requests are now displayed

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November 26, 2012

THE NEW BLUE SKY TOURS BOOKING EXPERIENCE ON VAX VACATIONACCESS

VAX is pleased to announce a new booking experience for Blue Sky Tours on VAX VacationAccess. VAX and Blue Sky Tours are providing agents with more tools and a new agent-friendly design for their Supplier Showcase. Now you can Research, Market and Sell Blue Sky Tours vacations without ever leaving the showcase!

The Blue Sky Tours booking experience provides agents with:

• A Customized Booking Platform conveniently located within the showcase
• Dynamic multi-island itineraries and reservations using the multi-destination booking feature
• Real-time commission updates as you add components to itineraries
• Single-click-access to the Blue Sky Tours Offer Wizard where you can easily send offers to customers using the Send to Clientbutton
• Quick access to preferred Blue Sky Tours hotel and resort property details

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October 15, 2012

INTRODUCING THE NEW OFFER WIZARD IN VAX VACATIONACCESS

The NEW Offer Wizard allows you to quickly find only the most relevant offers for your customers from a variety of suppliers including tour operators, cruise lines and escorted tour companies available on VAX.

Offer Wizard highlights include:

• Increase your sales with the ability to quickly match the best offers that meet your clients' travel dates, desired destinations and other preferences
• Locate relevant offers from a variety of suppliers (tour operators, cruise lines and escorted tours)
• Enjoy convenient access to the Offer Wizard from multiple pages including the Offers & Incentives page, Destinations pages and Supplier Showcases
• Sell faster with offer details that populate automatically into the booking engine of specific suppliers
• Create demand – easily send offers to customers (up to 8 customer emails at a time) using the Send to Client button
• Maximize Revenue with ability to filter by preferred suppliers that boost your commission potential

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July 12, 2012

INCREASED VAX TIME-OUT FUNCTION

You asked; we listened! Recently VAX VacationAccess extended the automatic time-out feature on VAX VacationAccess to six hours. This means you will remain logged in even if you are not continuously working in VAX.
VAX strongly recommends that you set your desktop screensaver to activate after 15 minutes of non-activity as a security best practice to prevent unauthorized access to your VAX account.
To ensure you have the optimal experience on VAX, view our suggested settings located in our Frequently Asked Questions document.
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April 24, 2012

ENHANCED HOTEL PROFILES

Now VAX provides you with a "Best of Class" display of hotel details. VAX has enhanced the hotel profile pages to include more consistent display of hotel details.

Key enhancements include:

• Refreshed appearance
• Improved imagery
• Consistent profile design across participating vacation suppliers
• Room category upsell pricing for hotel and resort suppliers
• Room category images
• Bing map view
• Share hotel profiles with your customers

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AUTOMATED FINAL PAYMENT ENHANCEMENT

VAX VacationAccess has made enhancements to the automate final payment functionality. Travel agents have the ability to add the final payment after the booking is completed, if the vacation supplier chooses to allow this option.

Agents have 3 final payment options from participating suppliers:

1. Schedule your Automatic Final Payment
2. Schedule an Email reminder to manually add the Final Payment
3. Manually Add the Final Payment at a Later Date

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VIEW TRAVEL TIMES FOR FLIIGHT ITINERARIES

The display of flights on the flight availability page and within the itinerary summary has been improved to include total travel time and layover time. The Flight Availability page will show the total travel time for each flight leg, when the information is available from the GDS.

Travel time is calculated to include the flight time and any applicable layover time per flight leg. The total travel time will also be added to the Itinerary Summary and Email Itinerary pages.
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February 15, 2012

NEW ROMANCE SHOWCASE

Just in time for Valentine's Day, the Romance Showcase empowers travel agents to confidently promote and sell romance. You can find the Romance Showcase in the Agent Resources dropdown menu. It provides agents tools to connect client passion with the perfect romantic getaway. VAX VacationAccess knows that you are the experts for wedding, honeymoon, anniversary and other romantic escapes for your clients. Enter the "How Romantic are you" contest to share tips, stories and images for the Romance Showcase and you could win a 7 night stay with Palladium resorts! Be sure to check this page often as we will be adding even more resources to support your love for romance.
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NATIONAL PLAN A VACATION WEEK IS HERE

VAX VacationAccess invites you to participate in National Plan a Vacation Week beginning March 18 – 24. National Plan a Vacation Week provides you with free promotional tools including a customizable micro-website to gain new customers, showcase your value and increase sales with unique supplier offers. This event was developed by VAX to recognize and support the value of travel agents and stimulate further engagement with your customers. This is an opportunity for all VAX agents to come together to promote the value you bring to the traveling public.
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December 15, 2011

Improved Supplier Showcase Navigation

VAX has enhanced the supplier showcase page to include more intuitive vacation component categories to make searching for vacation supplier showcases even easier. In addition to having the ability to select categories via the Supplier Showcase dropdown menu with a single click of the mouse, you can select specific categories of suppliers by clicking the Supplier Showcase tabs on the main Supplier Showcase page.
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New Escorted Tours Reservation Page

VAX launched a new resource in the reservations drop down menu for escorted tours. This new page will provide information on promotions, training and other resources to help agents sell these profitable tours. Agents will have the ability to easily link off to the suppliers sight to book. Once an agent is registered to sell that supplier, they need only log in once, and from that point forward they will not have to login again. VAX is pleased that the Globus family of brands will be the launch supplier for this page.
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New Agent Resource Center Updates

VAX has added more resources such as the redesigned Destination pages and a direct link to Travel weekly in the Agent Resource Center. The Destination pages contain valuable destination information from Travel42 and other destination content providers. These new pages are designed to give travel agents everything they need to be able to sell a destination with confidence. Watch for new destinations to be added in the coming months.
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Ability to Assign Seats

VAX VacationAccess has an exciting new feature to help you showcase your value! VAX's new seat assignment functionality will enable you to request specific airline seats for your customers at the time of booking when seat availability is the highest.
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Flight Status Updates in Reservation Summary

New to VAX is access to flight status information upon retrieval of your client's reservation. When you retrieve an existing active reservation, the system automatically references flight status data if it is made available to VAX.
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Promotion Code Price Display

Immediate display of promotion code price adjustments are now shown on the availability panels in VAX. After a promotion code is applied in the Search panel, you will see the updated (discounted) price immediately on the availability screens. Discounted vacation components will show highlighted in yellow.
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VAX VacationAccess proactively provides new opportunities to deliver the vacations of your customers' dreams by giving you the right tools to research, market and sell customized vacations. We are committed to improving your productivity through evolving technology.