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Here’s how they brought task management, shared inbox and Gmail together to unify their team and processes.
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COMPANY
GetAway Vacations
INDUSTRY
Travel
COMPANY SIZE
1-10 employees
LOCATION
United States
5 inboxes
shared in Gmail.
50% faster
responses to emails.
3 apps
replaced by Drag.
The context
Based in Vermont (U.S.A), GetAway Vacations is a premier vacation rental company. They enable travellers to enjoy unforgettable vacations, from an adorable barn-style home to a chic condo with all the amenities of a luxury resort, while supporting 2nd-home owners to yield extra income by renting their properties out.
The company supports homeowners across the entire rental process – from housekeeping or property maintenance all the way to promoting properties across a number of websites or handling guests arrival.
Like in a traditional travel company, the GetAway Vacations team constantly communicate with a series of stakeholders such as homeowners, guests, travel agencies and other partners, and most of this communication is done via email.
The challenge
Previously to adopting Drag, their team was struggling with managing email conversations as a team. Exchanging emails back and forth for internal communication, frequently including cc’ing or fwd’ing, was a pain:
First, this led to lack of clarity around what team member was responsible for each conversation. And this lack of clarity often led to the same emails being replied more than once or falling through the cracks.
In addition to that, their team was using Trello to keep track of team tasks – which, often, originated from emails – and to document company procedures. This means that, on top of the challenge of communicating via email collaboratively, they also needed to constantly switch between different apps and run constant manual work to make sure that both Gmail and Trello were up to date.
GetAway Vacations’ owner Fred Cercena started looking for other alternatives. He realized they needed a tool able to help them communicate via email as a team, and to unify emails and tasks into their daily workflows.
“Drag provided a lot of transparency and unified our team. It allowed us to bring the entire team together to manage emails and tasks collaboratively, as opposed to working in silos, across different tools.”
Fred Cercena
Owner @ GetAway Vacations
The solution
They tried different shared inbox solutions before coming across Drag. However, adding extra tools to their workflow resulted in added complexity, higher subscription costs and higher maintenance costs, besides keeping their team fragmented, as they still needed Trello to manage tasks and Gmail to check their individual inboxes.
Fred saw in Drag a solution that could unify their team, was more cost effective and worked directly in Gmail, where they spend most of their day. The GetAway Vacations team have migrated their shared inboxes, as well as tasks from Trello, into Drag boards. The entire team is using Drag and can stay on the same page across different areas of the business.
The use case
The GetAway Vacations team manage a series of workflows inside Drag and use a mix of Google Groups boards, Shared Inbox boards and empty boards. A few examples are:
For personal tasks, individuals have their own task boards, not shared with others users, so they can keep track of their Todo’s. Shared tasks boards are also used, for the team to manage tasks they need to go through together.
The Reservations board is linked to the reservations@ email address and shared with reservations agents to coordinate new inquiries from RingCentral, Booking.com and other systems. There is also an OTA’s board, that receives onboarding forms from Online Travel Agents.
The Onboarding board is where they manage the onboarding of new properties to their portfolio. Their info@ shared inbox serves as a ‘catch all’ for general inquiries.
And there is also an Owner Leads boards, where they manage the new inquiries from homeowners interested in listing their properties with GetAway Vacations. They also have an Accounts board, where receipts, bills and other documents are sent from systems such as QuickBooks.
“Drag is so simple, yet powerful. Their Help Center is very intuitive and easy to find useful materials, as opposed to so many software that require lots of help to set up.”
Fred Cercena
Owner @ GetAway Vacations
