How Travel Agencies can Build Complex Itineraries in Minutes!

As a travel agent you must have experienced the challenges in creating complex itineraries for your customers. Just imagine that your customer wants you to create a multi destination trip plan wherein for each destination you have to book hotels, transfers and flights suitable to your customer’s needs.

How do you do that? You browse various sites and log into multiple accounts for multiple hotels and flights, comparing the rates for the most suitable and budget friendly options for your customers, making a list of all of them either on paper or copying and pasting the fare details onto a spreadsheet and then mailing the details to the customer.

Then you call the customer to discuss the plan prepared by you so that you can build a quotation. If the customer doesn’t like the options, you have to repeat the whole process!

Doesn’t this sound cumbersome and extremely time consuming?

The fact is, a lot of travel agents out there still do business like this. This is not only an extremely inefficient way to run your business but it also results in you spending more money than you ought to on manpower.

Travelcarma offers a simple yet extremely effective solution to this problem, through it’s Trip Planner and Quotation Management modules.

These tools offer many useful features that can help you save precious time and effectively help you make more money because as they say -Time is money!

How TravelCarma helps Travel Agents work more efficiently

1) It helps agents create an itinerary in minutes

Suppose your customer asks you to create an itinerary for a multi-destination trip, say Dubai to London to New York. Wouldn’t it be too time consuming to search for hotels, flights and transfers in all of these locations on different websites of suppliers and GDSs, then entering their fares into Excel and then shortlisting the most suitable options and ultimately sharing these to the customer.

This process can take anywhere between 6 hours to a day or even two days, which means that your customers have to wait for this long to get a quotation from you. If you want to speed up this process you will need to hire more staff, which will add to your overheads.

On the other hand, things would be so much more convenient if you have a tool which allows you to search for hotels and flights on a single screen. Just add the most suitable options to the trip and they automatically become a part of your trip plan. Sounds like a cakewalk, doesn’t it? So, this feature allows you to aggregate hotel and flight options from a single screen.

2) It saves the trip plan for you

Suppose you have created a package tour to Brazil in which you have included everything from flights to hotels and wish to use it later, there are chances that when you want to sell it to a customer over a period of time, the room and flight rates change. But with the save feature, you can create a trip and save it in the system so when the customer is ready to buy, at the click of a button the system would update the prices of the items in the trip along with the availability and you can sell the package with the latest fares of the flights and hotels.

3) It helps you reuse quotations for popular trips

There are times when you need to use the same itinerary very frequently owing to the popularity of the destination or perhaps it’s an often frequented destination for a business organization’s employees. So, will you create the same itinerary over and over again?

Save yourself from such hassles by using this feature which allows you to save the itinerary so that you can reuse it later with some modifications if required. It is majorly useful for destinations which are frequently visited by travelers.

4) It helps you track the status of all items in a trip with a single PNR

Even for complex itineraries like multi-destination tours, the customer’s itinerary is given a super PNR number which is a single booking reference number for all the bookings like hotels, transfers and flights. Through this super PNR no you can track the details of all trip items in the itinerary using a single booking reference no instead of having to check the status of each item individually using standard PNRs.

5) It lets your Customers log in and customize their trip

Customers can log in to the system and make changes in the itinerary if they wish. Once they customize the trip the travel agency can access the trip and book it for the customer.

The end result?

• Higher Efficiency

With the feature in which you can search and aggregate flights and hotels from a single screen it a lot easier and can be done in just a few clicks. So you can improve your productivity and serve more customers in very little time.

• Higher ROI

The quotation building module is a one time investment for travel agents which will help immensely in reducing their costs and services more customers which results in higher revenue. With a customer’s requirements served efficiently you are likely to build a loyal customer base for your business, which will provide you a constant stream of revenue.

• Fewer Abandoned Bookings

Customer loyalty in today’s world is short lived. Sometimes a customer may search for an item, say flight or a hotel and goes all the way to the checkout page but for some reason not book the product(s). When they are ready to buy, they generally have to make the search again and repeat the entire booking process. This can cause bookings to be abandoned forever. This can lead them to go on to your competitor’s site and make the booking there. But if they had the option to add items to a cart and book them later with live prices, they would come back and complete the booking.

TravelCarma allow customers to save their trips and come back and book them later which will definitely lower your your booking abandonment rate. It’s a feature which is unique to Travelcarma.

All these features can help travel agents greatly reduce their manual effort, turnaround time and improve their bottomline. This is what makes TravelCarma the ideal choice when it comes to a travel technology solution for your travel business.

To know more about these features and how they can be applied to your business to help it grow, please contact us.

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