Eurolynx
Meet Eurolynx
When travelling to Europe many people think of great castles, ancient cities and diverse culture. All too often, travellers overlook the less obvious gems and methods of exploration. Thankfully, Eurolynx, work hard to ensure travellers can enjoy wonderful journeys on Europe’s 45,000km of waterways, rivers and canals.
Specialist wholesale travel company, Eurolynx Travel Limited, proudly and passionately represent and promote European destinations and travel experiences to New Zealand retail travel agents and their customers. They work with hand-picked operators across Europe to give their customers an in depth coverage of Europe, with a waterways focus, including River Cruises, Hotel Barges and Self Drive Canal Boats.
Cochem, Germany
Enforced Relaxation- on a floating hotel. What’s not to love?
Hotel Barges, canal boats and river cruises are arguably one of the best ways to explore Europe’s waterways. Imagine floating around Europe in an all-inclusive Hotel Barge, offering you a unique opportunity to travel in comfort without the strains of unpacking and repacking together with a perfectly balanced blend of daily excursions and relaxing cruising.
Daily excursions provide travellers with the opportunity to wander, or bike, around riverside villages and towns. On board there are also plenty of great options to choose from; relaxing on deck, socialising in the saloon, reading a book, listening to music, or just admiring the landscape slowly rolling past.
Edstone Aqueduct, Henley-in-Arden, United Kingdom
Unsurprisingly, Canal boat holidays are also very popular. Eurolynx describes these as ‘Enforced relaxation while drifting along at no more than 4 miles per hour. Stop when you want – tie up at the pub for lunch or visit historic sites. Every bend brings forth new delights, every mile a new feature’. They also cater for the classic rivers cruises, with Europe being the foremost region for river cruising. Customers can enjoy sailing along at a gentle pace, soaking up the scenery, with plentiful opportunities to explore riverside towns and cities en route. Their floating hotel will take them from one sightseeing highlight to the next, into the heart of most cities and through unspoiled landscapes.
Their Success Story
Croatia, ‘Boutique Coastal Cruising’
Eurolynx is a truly independent wholesale company and fully Kiwi owned and managed. They have been developing strong customer relationships throughout the 25 years they have been in business, which serves them well when planning the specialist holidays they are known for. Despite being a small business, their Europen presence is significant as is their reputation, experience, passion and knowledge…
Eurolynx Travel Limited collaborates with operators across Europe to give their customers a comprehensive choice of top quality European suppliers and products with an emphasis on the waterways. This attention to quality assurance ensures their agents travellers enjoy once-in-a-lifetime holidays.
When asked for a tip on how to run a successful small business, they suggest the following: “We operate an ‘invite only’ Facebook page to communicate specials, product updates and posts from our trips to Europe when ‘sampling’ the experiences in our product portfolio.”
Like a fish in water…
The business started in the early 90’s when it was set up by its original owners. They saw a gap in the market for a specialist wholesaler who focussed purely on Europe as a destination, At this time eastern Europe was just opening up, and they saw a growing tourism opportunity.
Amsterdam, Netherlands
In 2004 ‘Eurolynx Tours’ was bought by Tony and David Franklin-Ross and renamed ‘Eurolynx Travel’. Tony left his career as an accountant behind, David was made redundant from his career in the Entertainment Industry, as such, the couple found themselves well equipped to take on the new challenge. David’s progression to managing the day to day operation of Eurolynx was an easy transition thanks to a redundancy and he has not looked back since. “Eurolynx has taken me places I would have never dreamt of visiting”, says David. Although he couldn’t have seen this coming, David explains that many years ago he was having his fortune read and one distinctive premonition that a very wise lady said was “I can see planes, many of them, going up and down” little did he know that travel was his destiny.
Copenhagen, Denmark
The purchase deal of Eurolynx included buying the European contacts and the retail agent relationships. Tony and David have since fine-tuned the offerings to the travel industry with a specialised focus on the Waterways of Europe while still retaining most of the original contacts for niche enquiries.
The past 15 years have truly shaped the business as it is today. They both travel a lot to keep their inventory sharp, interesting and relevant. David travels to Europe at least twice a year (one year 6 times!) for 3 to 6 weeks at a time. Although Tony’s trips are not as frequent, while there they personally experience the products they promote to ensure they are representing quality operators and experiences. To this end, David and Tony are particularly happy at the ease with which Tourwriter fits into their lifestyle. “Tourwriter has enabled Eurolynx to operate from anywhere in the world either on or offline fitting into the Franklin-Ross lifestyle”. says David.
“This is the moment you forget about the cost and just enjoy life” David Franklin-Ross – Work / Lifestyle balance
Their Tourwriter Journey
Eurolynx joined Tourwriter in 2014 and since then Tourwriter has become a significant part of their daily business operation. David explains that the reporting functionality allows him to operate efficiently with all tasks working optimally, especially the easy output for both invoices and vouchers. He also adds that this used to be a very manual process doubling if not tripling information. With Tourwriter, data is now streamlined, only entered once and easily used across all outputs.
Venice, Italy
David explained that as his business is quite unique in the way it uses data, the team at Tourwriter worked with him step by step to fine tune the way Tourwriter captures and reports his data in a way that fits their business model rather than the ‘normal’ way most Tourwriter users use the data.
When asked about the benefits of Tourwriter for a solo operator, David shared ”Tourwriter has freed up time to focus on other aspects of my business like marketing and profile and as a solo operator to have more ‘free time’ is in harmony with my ‘lifestyle’ choice”.
Sadly due to the effects of COVID-19, Eurolynx is no longer a Tourwriter customer. As a proud supporter of their business, we continue to share their story and hope to welcome them back to the Tourwriter community in the future.
