TravelCarma

With lockdown restrictions easing in many parts of the world and borders reopening, there is a renewed sense of optimism in the industry.

Travel searches on Google and online portals have started going up, and understandably so.

With increasing competition in the travel industry, it has become necessary to take your travel agency online to reach your target customers effectively. For that purpose, you need an engaging travel agency software and travel mobile app, and it takes the right travel portal development company to make it happen.

As face-to-face interactions reduce and remote working becomes a norm, travel agencies need to have the right tools to manage their business remotely. To this end, agencies across the globe are increasingly turning to online solutions to get their business ready for this new reality.

One of the biggest challenges with this new reality, if you are an agency owner, is streamlining your back-office operations and running your business as efficiently as possible.

How do you manage reservations, cancellations, customers, sub-agents, accounting reconciliation, and other aspects of your agency as cost-effectively as possible?

Spreadsheets? You might be relying on them to save money, but do you realize how inefficient they are? All that manual data entry takes up so much time and leaves a lot of room for errors that can cost you big time.

Using different software tools for different purposes? That’s a slightly better option, but then, do you really want to waste precious time switching between different systems all the time?

Not to mention that your data is scattered across all these systems, and you can’t get a consolidated view of your business unless you export and organize everything into a single spreadsheet – which means you’re back to square one!

So, what’s the best option?

The days of people walking into a hotel and asking – “Do you have a room available?” are long gone. Now, everybody likes to book their hotel rooms on the internet in advance. That’s why, whether you are a hotel or a travel intermediary, you need an online hotel reservation system to keep up with the demands of the industry and scale your business.

If you are looking for an online solution for your travel business, you typically have three options:

Build it in-house

Outsource it to a services-based IT company

Outsource it to a travel technology company

You can exercise the first option only if you have an in-house tech team. Even then, it might be a challenging project depending on the type of application/solution you’re looking to develop. Your in-house team is likely to lack the skills and expertise required to plan and build a solution that can match what’s available from specialized vendors out there in terms of quality and features. If you hire external consultants to assist your team, it’s going to cost you a ton of money. So unless you are a very large organization, this option isn’t really viable.

Tourism is among the fastest-growing industries in the world, particularly in emerging economies. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has put the brakes on travel, it’s only temporary and travel will restart once things get better.

Travel providers need to get ready for the resurrection of travel demand with more efficient tools to keep up with customer expectations in the new normal.

One tool that’s going to become essential tool for travel agencies and tour operators going forward is a Travel CRM.

As remote working is expected to become a norm in the industry, you need to invest in the latest online tools to efficiently manage your back-office operations, bookings and customer relationships remotely.

The days of people walking into a hotel and asking – “Do you have a room available?” are long gone. Now, everybody likes to book their hotel rooms on the internet in advance. That’s why, whether you are a hotel or a travel intermediary, you need an online hotel reservation system to keep up with the demands of the industry and scale your business.

Moreover, without a reservation system, you would be handling all your bookings manually, which is just massively time-consuming, inefficient and prone to errors. We’re sure you have faced the overbookings situation at some point, right? Well, a hotel reservation system ensures that doesn’t happen.

If you are looking for an online solution for your travel business, you typically have three options:

Build it in-house

Outsource it to a services-based IT company

Outsource it to a travel technology company

You can exercise the first option only if you have an in-house tech team. Even then, it might be a challenging project depending on the type of application/solution you’re looking to develop. Your in-house team is likely to lack the skills and expertise required to plan and build a solution that can match what’s available from specialized vendors out there in terms of quality and features. If you hire external consultants to assist your team, it’s going to cost you a ton of money. So unless you are a very large organization, this option isn’t really viable.

If you’re still relying on spreadsheets and outdated tools (or worse, pen-and-paper!) to manage your travel agency, it’s time to upgrade! There are a plethora of wonderful tech tools out there that can help you simplify operations, increase your productivity and elevate your customer experience.

In this article, we have curated a list of the must-have tools for your agency to effectively manage different areas of your business.

Online Booking Platform

With the rise in online bookings over the last few years (a trend that will intensify post-COVID), it’s important for agencies to invest in an online booking engine to enable your clients to book your live inventory on your website.  Here’s what we recommend:

Whether you are a budding travel agent or have an established agency, the most basic requisite for your business is a competitive inventory of flights, hotels, rental cars, cruise and vacation packages that you can sell to your customers.

Joining affiliate programs of reputed travel companies not only helps you provide your customers with a wide range of inventory but also helps you earn money at a very low cost to your business. Here are some of the most well-paying travel affiliate programs in the world.

1) Expedia

When it comes to Affiliate programs, Expedia is probably the biggest name out there today. The Expedia Affiliate Network or the EAN helps travelers find the best inventory of hotels, flights and vacation packages. They offer 5% commission from the Expedia Collect Inventory and earn further 50% commission on every hotel reservation and completion of stay. Your customers can check ratings and review of the hotel and then go ahead with the booking.

As an affiliate partner you have access to the Affiliate center of Expedia and you can view the details of payments in the stats section of the Affiliate center. You get paid once a month and the payment is made once you you cross the $50 mark.

2) Booking.com

It is one of the leading companies for hotel reservations and offers unbeatable prices and does not charge a fee on booking through their website but charges its accommodation partners a small fee.

Its affiliate partner program has a track record of providing great earning potential. You get paid on each finalized bookings. The commission starts from 25% and goes up to 40%  depending on the number of bookings finalized from your website.

3) Viator

As an affiliate partner of Viator, which is the largest source of activities and sightseeing, you can sell activities from your website, blog and email marketing. You can simply place widgets, banners and links on your travel website. You get paid once the customer books and travels the sightseeing tour. Viator pays 5% commission after you have acquired a minimum payment threshold of $100 for cheques and $50 for EFT.

You can use popular widgets and feeds as marketing tools to generate more traffic and hence more commissions.

Your customers can browse and book from thousands of attractions, sightseeing tours and transfers in 75+ countries and over 450 destinations across the world.

4) TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor offers your customers to access millions of ratings and reviews and as many as 5000000 hotels to compare, which is the USP of this affiliate program and will in turn make it easy for your customers to compare, search and book through your website. This in turn will help your website attract a lot of traffic. In this program you do not get paid according to the traditional criteria of commissions per booking, rather they pay you on the basis of how much quality traffic you redirect to their website.

You can earn a 50% commission on the revenues generated when your customers click on the commercial links on your website. It offers a wide range of advertising options like banners, text-links, widgets, logos, buttons and badges. You can earn additional incentives if you can drive a certain volume of traffic to the website. The average click-out rate is $.15 to $.75 per click-out.

You can track and monitor commissions 24/7 after signing in to the Commission Junction where you can get update on the sales and commissions on a daily basis.

5) Dohop.com

Dohop has been named as the “World’s Leading Flight Comparison Website” at the World travel awards and they combine flight and rental cars. They offer 5 EUR (approximately $ 5.6)  on every booking, which is quite profitable.

They offer commission, pay per click and also on every booking that is made on your website. Pay per click simply means that when your customers browse through various options of flights and click on them to know more about them, you get paid for each click. So,you an earn both ways and the best thing is that the higher is the traffic on your website the higher will be the percentage of commission you can earn. There are vendors who pay 50% commission on every booking that is made on their site.

6) CruiseDirect.com

An affiliate partnership for cruises is promising because cruises are becoming increasingly popular.

As a CruiseDirect affiliate you have to put links on your website and  you will get paid a commission for every booking through your website. Any new websites or established websites are encouraged  to work as affiliate partners. You can get approval within 24 hours of application.

You get 3% commission on bookings and you get paid as soon as the payment is received by the supplier.

7) Hotels Combined

This affiliate program will help your customers access a huge inventory of hotels, compare prices and availability from the best travel sites on your website or mobile site. It offers seamless integration of its hotel inventory with the travel agent’s website so that you do not have additional development costs to your business.

It is well known for high payouts and you can earn anywhere between $1 to $4 per click and what’s more appealing is that you can earn multiple times from the same customer.

You can view traffic stats and earnings in real time. You can analyse and optimize your performance through Advanced  reporting options.

You get free customized solutions and tools for your sites and apps.

You can get help in building your own mobile app and monetize mobile traffic from it.

8) Priceline Partner Network

Priceline Partner Network provides a customizable booking engine which suits each partner’s needs. They offer flights, hotels, vacation packages and rental cars.

For airlines you  can earn a 3% commission on the bookings, on hotel bookings you can earn 3% to 7% and a 3% earnings can be earned on vacation packages and car rentals.

While Affiliate programs are the easiest way for a travel agency to start selling tourism products, it also means dependency on the supplier to pay the commissions as the booking fulfillment and payments are taken care of by the supplier itself.

What is IATA?

Founded in Havana, Cuba in April 1945, IATA(International Air Transport Association) is the leading body of the aviation industry. IATA now represents 265 member airlines and over 80,000 travel agents in over 120 countries. The international scheduled air transport industry has grown manifold since inception. Keeping up with the dynamic growth standards of the industry, IATA is now handling over 95 percent of the world’s scheduled air traffic. What mainly had members from Europe and North America, today has representatives from all across the globe.

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