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MY TECH: Travel agency keeps tight focus on Italy, customized itineraries
07/10/2006
Just listening to Andrea Sertoli's melodic accent makes you feel like you're in Italy. "Italy is a showcase," he nearly sang. "The art, the countryside, the culture, the food. There is hardly another country that contains in a relatively small space so much."
Italy is his passion. Which helps explain why Sertoli, a native Roman, operates Select Italy, a thriving specialty travel agency based in Wilmette. Focusing only on travel to his favorite country in the world, Select Italy does a whopping 80 percent of its $5 million in annual revenue on its deep, richly detailed, award-winning Web site, SelectItaly.com.
That's a long way from 1999, when Sertoli started his travel agency with a phone and a computer. "Something must have gone wrong in my mind," he recalled. His very first client was a perfect snapshot of what the company has become. They were two local retired couples who wanted to tour Italy. So Sertoli set them up with a custom 57-day itinerary that featured "driving from head to toe throughout Italy. It was a dream trip. It was very cool."
Today, Select Italy organizes and arranges custom itineraries throughout Italy. For a basic itinerary, which includes hotel and a few activities (but not airfare), prices start about $250 per person, per day. "We do flights, hotels, tours, museums, travel insurance, yacht charters and a spectrum of travel service," Sertoli said.
Want to drive Italy in a Ferrari? Point your browser to the Select Italy Web site. Want to hang out in a ridiculously beautiful 14-bedroom villa on Lake Como? Sertoli and his 23 employees will hook you up.
"We will outline for you a draft proposal which will be largely based on what you want," he said. "We will tell you what we recommend. We'll suggest this hotel, this personal guide in Florence, and maybe a food and wine festival because we know it's in town."
Everything is handled on the company's expansive Web site, which attracts 250,000 unique visitors per month, according to Sertoli. He also estimates that this year, including maintenance, programming and advertising, the company will spend about $350,000 on the site. That includes $120,000 spent on Google advertising alone.
Here's how the trip planning process works on SelectItaly.com: You fill out an online planner form that details the areas you'd like to visit, what you'd like to do and how much you'd like to spend. Soon, you'll get a digital "draft itinerary" that will include hotels, transportation and personal guides, among other things. Then you talk to the Select Italy travel agents online or offline, depending on your preference, and massage the itinerary into a final schedule.
The Web site is designed and programmed (it runs on an SQL database) in-house by a "tech department" of five. Much of the site's content is generated from the company's Italian office, where a former university professor researches and writes up events, hotels and providers.
Of course, running a busy specialty travel agency through a busy Web site comes with a unique set of issues. For one, Sertoli said, the volume of content and details on SelectItaly.com makes it challenging to keep the front-end clean and easy to navigate. "This has been a continuous daily process," he said. "We work on this every day."
The back-end has also been strained by the site's ever-expanding details. "The recurrent technology questions that come up is managing all the data," Sertoli said, adding that the company is working on upgrading to a new content management system that "will make everybody's life much easier."
Sertoli also wishes that his goals and ideas can be translated to the Web site faster. "The biggest frustration is basically that it takes too long for the information to [go] from [my head] to bits and bytes," he said. "If I could afford to buy another 10 tech guys to put to work, things could go much faster."
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