An online booking engine will offer instant payment and booking confirmation. This affordable and convenient service seems to gain more efficient than traditional bookings, which required agents to take and manage the reservations manually.
The situation pushes travel businesses to seek for a fully automated booking engine to meet various daily needs and adapt to market changes. These will be how a solution able to help travel agents to expand to new customer segments.
- Happier customers
Many travellers prefer to make an online booking for hotels, flights, or activities themselves. In 2016, 39 percent of travel was booked online in the U.S. and is growing each year. They will be happier should they have greater freedom and control of their trips and expenses. Online and mobile booking, access to all travel products at the best prices, personalized offers, and other abilities powered by automation foster that freedom and control. You do not want to lose this growing segment.
- - Ability to expand to international customers directly instead of just local
A fully automated booking platform enables online businesses to reach customers globally. It can also track which country the customer is coming from by tracing its IP address. With a dynamic booking engine that supports multiple currencies and languages, it will display the currency and language based on the country they are from. It is ever ready to receive customers from any new region which previously dependant on your overseas partners. Besides, with an online payment gateway integrated, it can receive payment from any part of the world.
- - Faster sales cycle
Immediacy and urgency in sales are critical to a travel business’, especially to the business travellers’ segment. Upon travel agent receiving a confirm payment for online booking, the system will instantly send invoices and vouchers to the customers. With an automatic confirmation and notification, this ensures a customer with a secure reservation and a happy travel agent with a secure payment without any staff intervention. A travel agent can spend more resources to target a new customer segment than resources to maintain its operation.
- - Wide choice of inventories to meet different customers’ expectations.
With the vast inventories of different products be it flights, hotels, tours, and transportation, it can meet any new customer segment expectations. The technology of application programming interfaces (APIs) allows connection to a variety of suppliers. This ensures up-to-date pricing information and availability at the moment of search, it gives the customer the best options to select.
- - More sales
If a travel agency takes inquiries only during working hours, it loses many potential clients from other parts of the world. Automated communications can solve the problem, being able to reply to customers 24/7. A Chatbots can facilitate these leads. Faster response with appealing in the customer’s language increases conversion rates. With automated communication, the number of booking that employees can manage may increase ten times.
- - Effectively promoting to targeted market segment
Social media integration broadens the market reach immensely. Integration of a website with Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel can help retarget visitors for additional bookings. Businesses can identify the best performing website traffic segments, create similar audiences, and run highly targeted marketing campaigns for them.
- - Expanding to corporate travel segment
Automated booking systems also relieve the burden of corporate travel management. Corporate self-booking tools and loyalty programs will be appreciated by existing clients and will attract new ones. A corporate portal will enable them to find and book services, amend and cancel reservations, check purchase and payment histories, and download necessary documents. All expenses can be easily accessible and trackable through the booking tool and firms may access their travel spending reports from one location.
Thanks to automated communications and sales operations, employees can handle more leads and bookings. This means companies can do more business with the same staff.
