Case Study: Breakaway Tours achieves increased sales and operational efficiency with BlackBerry

Tour Operator Uses Blackberry Smartphones To Help Drive Sales, Improve Efficiency And Build Competitive Advantage

Breakaway Tours is a Toronto-based student leisure tour operator that takes more than 22,000 high‑school and university students on trips each year, supported by about 30 full‑time staff and 200+ seasonal reps. The company struggled to stay connected with a young customer base that communicates outside regular business hours and found office phones and older cell phones inefficient for coordinating logistics and sales while staff and tour leaders were on the road.

Breakaway deployed BlackBerry smartphones (23 for sales staff and 60 for ground reps) plus BlackBerry Enterprise Server and social apps (BBM, Twitter, Facebook, foursquare) to enable email, messaging and real‑time coordination. The result: fewer time‑consuming calls (daily outbound calls dropped from ~120 to less than half), faster issue resolution across multiple locations, protected contact data, improved safety and logistics, stronger engagement with students and measurable sales growth in recent years.

Breakaway Tours

Brad MacLellan

Operations Manager