If you’re running your tour business on a legacy system that no longer fully serves its purpose, but is too difficult to update and extend, you’re not alone. We speak to many tour operators facing the same travel technology conundrum.
The thought of dismantling your entire back-office system – one that has likely been extended and customised over the years – can be daunting. On the flip side, with 80% of global travellers saying they want to book their trips fully online, modernising isn’t something you can avoid.
So, here are our tips for minimising disruption while upgrading your legacy travel technology, plus the features we’d recommend looking for in your next platform.
Before you begin your digital transformation, here’s a quick tip. Make sure that your next travel technology investment isn’t a legacy platform in disguise! Many platforms on the market look and feel modern, but in reality are sitting on dated tech..
Find travel technology that is a true SaaS application, so that you can take advantage of every new update with little stress.
Many tour operators are nervous about ripping and replacing a system they’re so reliant on, and rightly so. But here’s the thing – you don’t need to. If your system manages everything from booking to sales to operations, then you might not need to replace it altogether.
Instead, find ways to modernise the systems that need improving the most urgently, and scale up as your needs do. For instance, you might begin by migrating the website content from your back-office system into one that can handle higher volumes of data with more speed and security.
This incremental approach also means that other teams can continue processing bookings and travellers’ queries if some parts of your back-office system go down.
Find travel technology that has a modular structure, so that you can build it up bit by bit, instead of taking on a large, bulky system that requires you to onboard every feature at once.
When it comes to replacing your current back-office system, the last thing you want is to lose functionality. Having your system go down for even a few hours could see you lose revenue, especially if travellers’ bookings don’t go through.
That's why we recommend layering a modern platform on top of your current one – like we did for KE Adventure. When onboarding RezKit, we ‘layered’ it on top of KE Adventure’s existing platform, so that we could dismantle its back-office system bit by bit.
Find travel technology that has robust APIs for seamless integration with your current platform, alongside third-party marketing, sales, and operations apps.
Deciding which areas of your business to digitally transform first can be challenging. But, as McKinsey puts it:
“The key is to define a domain that’s large enough to be valuable and noticeable to the company, but small enough to be transformed without being unduly impacted by dependencies with other parts of the business.”
Consider this in the context of one of your teams for a moment, like finance. Maybe they could begin by automating financial reports – a fairly low-risk use case that could be corrected easily. Then, once they’ve had the chance to identify and address potential issues, they could move on to a use case that requires more confidence in the tech, such as offering new payment solutions to travellers.
Find travel technology that can be customised easily in-house, so that you can trial new use cases without relying too heavily on external (and costly) technical support.
Throughout your modernisation journey, it’s your employees who will be impacted the most. Not only will they be testing out your new platform day to day, but their jobs will also be affected by any downtime as you begin to use your legacy platform less and less.
It’s therefore a good idea to make sure you have representation from each department as you begin trialling new features and use cases. This collaboration will give you insight into any teething problems that need to be addressed, but could also help to overcome any employee resistance. Getting buy-in from your team will make the process of upgrading your technology much smoother.
Find travel technology that prioritises ease of use and comes with plenty of training and documentation.
Having worked in the travel industry for a long time (more than 40 years!), we know what it’s like to be stuck with tech that is no longer fit for purpose. That’s why we’ve created RezKit, a revolutionary booking platform with a simple yet extensible structure, integrations with the platforms you already use and love, and functions for the entire business.
If you’d like to learn more about how we minimise disruption for tour operators as they upgrade their travel technology, read about our project with Mountain Tracks.
