Here is an aticle from the Mafazine named "Latitud 21" from Cancun, please read the 2nd aticle named "Guerra Frontal" Frontal War and give me your comments. http://66.218.71.231/language/trans...latitud21.net/septiembre07/empresariales.html
I for one agree with you and Enrique. If you are selling a better product at a lesser cost, the people will come find you. With such high commissions, it starts becoming too expensive to be a Tourist. You just do less, therefore there is less commission to go around. Additionally with such high commissions, who knows how many people have their hands in the deal. If something goes wrong, who has to bear the cost of the sale? The guy that actually sold it, one of the four guys between him and the actual company, or the company itself? Most sellers that are 3rd or 4th down the line will cut and run rather than deal with an angry customer for their 7% commission cut. So everyone gets a bad name. Giving $40 dollars commission on a $25 tour is outrageous. Even $30 on a $25 tour is real excessive but its a start in the right direction. Knowing what I do now, you can be sure that I'm going to push much harder for deals on tours. Jamie
I am certainly no expert but I think a lot of the blame can be placed on the greedy hotels. They have something of a captive audience and they have those silly receptions, etc. to sell you overpriced tours. And you also have to compare apples to apples. You can get a whale shark tour on Isla Holbox for about $800 Mxn but to buy the tous in Cancun is almost $2,000. But you have to get to Holbox from Cancun and you have to eat and there is a cost to that. You could ride the public bus and take the ferry to the island and then a golf cart taxi and you could buy the tour for $800. But who wants to do that when they don't have a clue where they are going or how to get there and they may not have enough Spanish skills to risk it. A friend was staying recently at Cancun Palace and had 4 tours to I cannot remember where and the price seemed deadly to me. I suggested they go to the Entertainment Plus website and Live Chat with Trina and she hooked them up and I think the savings was $15-$20 US Per Person. Something is not right when that can happen and I think what is not right is at the hotels. Companies like EP have to make a profit of course but they cannot gouge or they would have no business. So if they can make profit at fair prices that are dramatically below the hotel prices for the same exact destination with basically the same service, it should be obvious where the problem is. Tightwad that I am, when I travel anywhere I do my homework in advance to the extent possible. However, sometimes you have to trade price for convenience in a strange place. But EP (and I don't mean to be pimping for them) does a great job, with personal service, and the prices are as low as you can find. And they have been doing this for 10 or so years and are not broke yet. Go figure. Over and out.
True that!!! I was supposed to leave for Xel-Ha the next morning and mentioned it T.J. and he told me that I could get a better price so I ran down to the lobby and told the lady that my mom was old and sick. LOL And there is no way that she will be able to go on the tour. The lady was not happy but she gave me all my money back and I gave part of it to EP. I did not feel bad about my sob story because I felt like they were ripping me off. So there!!!
Alternativley go and see my wife, she'll give you free tours!!! All you need to do is sit through a very pleasant 90 minute presentation, eat a delicious champagne breakfast, take a stroll around a stunning property, chat a little, laugh a little, part with your life savings, max out your credit card, and she'll send you anywhere you want for free! :lol:
I think the point of the article was that people have driven the commissions up to more than half the cost of the tour. No doubt that if EP took a 50% cut in the commission they would under cut everyone by 25% and still make a good commission. And that's the point; the commissions are way too high. The tour operator gets constantly pushed to cut the cost of the tour while the resellers push to increase the commissions. So in reality the resellers are making more off the tour than the operator who does 90% of the work is. That's bogus. When you can sell 10 tours and make $500 a month doing that, something is wrong. Either that or we're all in the wrong business. :shock: Jamie
I was going to stay out of this one as I have friends on both sides of the argument and I'm somewhat one sided myself as are Ana and Enrique on the other. But I think I'll have to reply to Jamie's comments as I really think he's way off the mark here. It's a very difficult article to read given the translation but the way I read it was that the huge commissions spoken of were from many years back (certainly before my time) but what Grayline claim they have done since then is to slowly reduce commissions to World wide levels. From the article: I would say that that is around what it is here at the moment. Tour providers in general pay around 20-25% to the middle players like EP and the smaller guys like me are lucky if we make half of that. I can tell you from checking my stats I've sold 8 tours today so far, and made a total of $70.50. It's unlikely they are for singles so you can call that at least 16 people, possibly more. Nowhere near $50 or even $25 a sale. If it were $50 a sale then I'd be a millionaire by now and so would Jamie's bald headed Mexican friend who regularly rounds up 50-100 people on the BBG booze cruise every Friday. Imho there's only one person who controls the price of a tour and that's the provider. Even in my 4/5 years involvement I've seen commissions fall, yet the retail price has only ever increased, so who is making that extra money? No they wouldnt. If EP did that they'd be making $10 on a $50 tour and I'd be making $5. EP have operating costs too as do I, although mine are minimal by comparison. It's not worth either of our time or trouble to work for that kind of money. One thing I as an internet marketer understand (and this is not just to do with Cancun tours but anything sold online or on the ground) is that without affiliates or resellers the providers would have much less of a business without us.
I agree with Steve. Cancun Care is more of an affiliate in most cases, like a commissioned salesman but they have overhead like any other business. The same thing for Entertainment Plus and they are one notch up the food chain, BUT EP has to pay its affiliates. It's a different version of Nike having a pair of shoes made for $3 in some third world country but by the time you buy retail they are over $100. If Xel Ha and others did not have companies like Entertainment Plus, who has companies like Cancun Care, then their attendance would be much less, and hence less profit for the Xel Ha's of the world. Good luck to these businessmen but I stand by my original post that the real gouging goes on at the hotel level, where they have a captive audience and a bunch of hard sell people pushing the tours in any way that they can.
Got a virus in my computer so just catching up, Do not agree 100% with both parts but will try to post tomorrow the facts; facts from daily healthy business.
