Many travel operators are overstretched – there’s no sugarcoating it. We may be seeing a boom in tourism, but we’re also seeing an industry-wide labour shortage. Add to that the pressures on companies that are still using outdated back-office systems, and you have a recipe for stressed, unhappy teams.
Investing in the tech that helps your team manage their day-to-day workload is one thing, but how do you find tech that also allows them to think about tomorrow?
Here, we share five key features to look for in travel booking technology that the whole team can get on board with, so that you can accelerate your business growth.
If a booking platform doesn’t slot seamlessly into your processes, it might just disrupt your team further. To avoid this, consider the following:
With half of travel purchases predicted to have 30 travel and tourism touchpoints, you’re likely to be sitting on a lot of data. Being able to get the best from it could help your team in multiple ways, whether it’s by equipping marketing with the insights to personalise their engagements, or helping sales to keep tabs on customer journeys in your CRM.
We know that a big pain point for travel and tour companies is keeping up with changing traveller expectations – and carving a niche is tough when your system is overly complex and monolithic.
When you enable your IT team to customise your platform easily in-house, such as by adding custom-built APIs or integrating with third-party add-ons, you can keep evolving your business in the way you want to.
For example, you can integrate with payment gateways that give travellers the flexibility they want over their payments. As we dive into in this blog, this might be by allowing payments to be split across cards or bookings to be made in travellers’ preferred currency. Full API access means that your platform can evolve as your customers' expectations do.
If your team members are spending hours of their week on the phone to your travellers, it might be time to invest in a better way. When looking for your next booking platform, consider one that allows your travellers to serve themselves with an intuitive customer portal.
Allowing digitally confident travellers to log onto a portal to update their group details or make a payment can enhance the booking process for everyone. It gives them a more convenient way to make changes, while freeing up time for your customer-facing teams to handle more nuanced requests (or to support the travellers that prefer to talk over the phone).
Your IT team or developers may be nervous at the prospect of using a new booking platform, particularly as many IT professionals say they’re under pressure to prove the value of new investments quickly.
Maybe your team is worried about the downtime involved with onboarding, for instance. In this situation, consider looking for a flexible SaaS platform that doesn’t require complex configuration. Perhaps they’re stressed about ripping and replacing a legacy system that is part of your company’s fabric. If this is the case, why not look for a scalable platform that allows you to migrate your data and processes bit by bit, so that you’re not taken offline?
Alongside handling bookings, some platforms – like RezKit, for example – also give you the option to manage your tour and travel products. Not only does this centralised approach benefit your product managers, but it also creates opportunities for the rest of your team. For instance, sales could help to personalise tour content to continue enhancing the traveller’s experience post-booking.
Even if you have a niche product, you might not need custom-built product management capabilities. Instead, you might simply benefit from customisable capabilities – formats that allow your product managers to update everything from tour content to itineraries easily.
Travel companies could benefit massively by modernising, such as by integrating SaaS booking software. We’ve seen this again and again with our own clients – like for the small team at Mountain Tracks – but research also backs this up. For instance, McKinsey estimates that in the long term, the travel and tourism industry could manage a labour shortage of up to 15% by digitising and becoming more flexible.
If you’d like to read more about accelerating your business growth in an industry that keeps moving, while also freeing up time for your team members, we recommend checking out our free whitepaper. All you need to do is fill out the form below, and we’ll send you...
