Historic Tours of America Improves Guest Shopping Adventures with Oracle

For nearly 50 years, Historic Tours of America has been the nation’s premier storyteller—entertaining and educating over two million guests a year with their tours, attractions, and historic ships. Millions more visit their festival marketplaces and themed retail gift stores to complement the experience. To meet the evolving needs of today’s consumers, Historic Tours of America upgraded its in-store technology to Oracle Retail Xstore Point-of-Service (POS). With the system, Historic tours can now deliver seamless transactions, and enhance day-to-day operations, while improving the customer experience. Oracle delivered the Xstore upgrade in just three months, one of the fastest on record.

With an emphasis on guest satisfaction, service, and product value, Historic Tours of America wanted to take advantage of the new advancements in Xstore to improve mobile resiliency and better serve customers. In addition, the company wanted to implement EFTLink to leverage new card payment technology.

“We were already using Oracle Retail Xstore Point-of-Service and were extremely satisfied with the features and functions supporting our day-to-day business operations,” said Michael Cates, Retail IT Manager, Historic Tours of America. “After working with the highly skilled and knowledgeable Oracle Xstore team, we chose to initiate the upgrade project. Throughout this entire process, the Oracle team remained very consultative. Oracle Retail Consulting advised our team on best practices to ensure that the implementation aligned with our overall business objectives and goals.”

With Oracle, the Historic Tours of America teams can manage customer dynamics better, offering store associates the freedom to move throughout the store and interact with customers looking to buy souvenirs and gifts to remember the experience. The tightly integrated technology is enabling the brand to streamline and automate operations, enhance mobility, increase personalization, inform business decisions, and improve how customers shop. In addition, understanding the urgency at hand, Oracle devised a fast-to-market base implementation of Oracle Retail Xstore POS and worked to ensure that EFTLink for payment processing using an OPI-certified core was implemented expertly and on schedule.

“Recent consumer research shows that many people are looking to invest more in travel and experiences in the coming months and no doubt pick up mementos to make the most of these special memories,” said Mike Webster, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Retail. “As the retail and hospitality industries rise to meet this demand, removing friction from the customer journey becomes a top priority. By enabling its staff with the right tools and insights, Historic Tours can free up time to engage with customers versus just the transaction to create moments that last a lifetime.”

With the rapid deployment of Oracle Retail Xstore Point-of-Service and EFTLink, Historic Tours of America can leverage more secured payment mechanisms, utilize mobile extensively in stores for improved customer experience, seamlessly integrate systems, and create a sophisticated customer shopping journey.

About Historic Tours of America

Historic Tours of America, Inc. is an entertainment company which provides historically oriented vacation experiences for our guests through the operation of trolleys, street trains, high speed ferry, themed retail stores, festival marketplaces and other historic tourist attractions in Key West, Florida; Boston, Massachusetts; San Diego, California; Savannah, Georgia; Washington DC and St. Augustine, Florida. https://www.historictours.com/

About Oracle

Oracle offers integrated suites of applications plus secure, autonomous infrastructure in the Oracle Cloud. For more information about Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), please visit us at oracle.com.

Source – Oracle