Founded in 2001, DER Touristik Partner-Service (DTPS) is the travel agency umbrella organization for Galeria Reisen, the DER Touristik partner company franchise system and the travel agency cooperations TourContact, Pro Tours and Deutscher Reisering. The DTPS represents the interests of more than 1,000 sales agencies. The DTPS supports its members in particular in the areas of technology, marketing, commission, further training and networking. Thanks to its proximity to the DER Touristik Group, DTPS members benefit from the best conditions with DER Touristik tour operators. The DTPS is part of the travel agency sales division of the DER Touristik Group.

One of the basic prerequisites for successful cooperation between DTPS and its affiliated sales organizations and travel agency partners is effective, fast and targeted communication. This became all the more important with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

Even before the pandemic, DTPS recognized the need to be able to exchange information promptly and efficiently within its own established network to defined user groups in a targeted and needs-based manner. At the beginning of 2019, the company put out a nationwide tender for the "introduction of a comprehensive extranet to connect all partners". The desired solution was to replace the outdated existing extranet.

A decisive criterion in the tender for the new extranet was therefore a complex read authorization system, which ensures that only information relevant to the respective user is made available. 

It was also desired that, depending on the user, the corporate identity of the respective sales organization is also displayed, certain areas are hard-coded, but others remain customizable for DTPS or individual sales organizations, such as the creation of special landing pages depending on the user group.

A comprehensive specification was therefore drawn up and made available to interested service providers.

Several agencies were finally invited to pitch. In the end, it was IntranetBOX GmbH, a subsidiary of K3 Innovationen GmbH based in Düren, Germany, that came out on top. The company's more than 20 years of expertise and its solution, IntranetBOX, based on Ibexa's award-winning software, were decisive factors.

The new DTPS extranet was successfully launched back in November 2020. Not a day too soon, as the coronavirus pandemic was at its peak. Since then, the affiliated sales organizations and their travel agency partners have benefited from up-to-date, targeted information in all areas of their daily work in a clear and modern presentation.

An editorial team from DTPS and the head offices of the sales organizations was given writing permission and has since provided the various travel agency partners with relevant information in the form of text, images and video. Ibexa's basic software can also meet the need to create individual, customized landing pages with its Ibexa Page Builder, which editors can easily use without any prior knowledge.

These advantages of the software and the fact that IntranetBOX GmbH not only has many years of digital expertise, but also a strong team that can react quickly and efficiently to customer requests, convinced the DTPS team.

"The cooperation and communication with the experts from IntranetBOX GmbH was goal-oriented, on an equal footing and very pleasant right from the start," says Oliver Fuchs, project manager at DER Touristik Partner-Service. 

"The collaboration could not have gone better. With IntranetBOX GmbH at our side, we were able to launch our new extranet during the peak of the pandemic, which put our partner companies in an economically advantageous position. To this day, all affiliated travel agencies are happy to work with the new extranet and appreciate the benefits of the greatly improved communication. For the end user, i.e. the employees in the travel agencies, information can now be found much more quickly, which has greatly increased overall satisfaction."