Online booking software is a system used for managing reservations for a specific service. Hotels, airlines, and even restaurants can take advantage of this application. Tourism companies can benefit from this online booking program in many ways as well. Read on to know five ways in which you can use an online booking system to your tourism business’ advantage.There are many ways that tourism companies can take advantage of the latest online booking software, here are five of the most relevant ones.
How Tourism Companies Should Use Online Booking Software To Their Advantage
24/7 Availability
Imagine this scenario: a customer tries to book for a tourism package from your company by going to your business’ physical location. However, that person is a few minutes too late, and it’s lights out for your shop for the day. So, the potential client may look for other tourism companies open at that time. Thus, that’s already a lost opportunity for extra revenue.
An online booking software alleviates this problem as prospects only need to access the system from their web browsers. If the software also has a mobile app, users can take advantage of it to deliver the details and payments of their transactions to your tourism business. Therefore, it’s as if your shop never closes, even when you or your staff members are fast asleep for the night.
Increase Bookings
Many people don’t like traveling to physical store locations. Perhaps your tourism firm is a few miles away from your customer’s home. If so, then the potential client may look for other tourism companies close to their area. Again, that’s a lost income opportunity.
Use an online booking application to let your customers find cheap flights online, among maximizing other features. Furthermore, your business’ audience can search and book from the comfort of their homes. Most of the time, there’s no travel involved. The user can access your booking application from a website or mobile app when they connect to the Internet.
Sync Activity
The online booking software populates data into a table whenever there’s a confirmed activity from a user. You don’t need to view the table regularly, but many reliable booking programs will populate information in real-time.
Hence, you can keep your inventory updated. It helps reduce accidental bookings, which may otherwise lead to apologies from your end and complaints from your customers.
Reduce Expenses
If you think that you don’t have the budget or resources to buy or develop an online booking software, then you might be losing more of your capital than you think. For example, if each booking activity is worth USD 50 and you lose 700 bookings per year, then your losses might equate to a whopping USD 35,000.
Furthermore, if your tourism firm isn’t using booking software, you might think that it’s cheaper to hire more people to take more bookings from customers. Now, if you offer a USD 8 per hour salary to a full-time employee, your company is shelling out an extra USD 64 per day. That’s about USD 1,300 per month.
Conversely, there are reliable booking applications that cost about USD 49 per month. That’s spending only USD 1.63 per day. Furthermore, you can even use a trustworthy customer and technical support system whenever you have trouble using the program.
Up sell Products and Services
One of your staff members may not be proficient in upselling additional products and services to customers. Upselling is a technique used by businesses to try and get customers to spend more than initially intended. For example, if a customer tries to book for an economy seat in a particular airline, you may want to convince that person to upgrade to a business or first-class ticket.
However, using this technique requires excellent marketing skills. On the other hand, you can let the online booking software handle the upselling instead of your employees.
For example, a customer tries to book a hotel using your online booking application. Before the checkout process, you can show ads to try and increase the “want” factor from the customer. After seeing the advertisement, the person may upgrade the standard suite they were trying to book into a more superior room.
Thus, this software allows for better selling opportunities as opposed to using conversational techniques to upsell.
Your customers can use an online booking software to book flights for less, search for available hotels, call for a taxi service, reserve a table at a restaurant, or create entire tour packages. Make sure the booking app you choose goes in line with your tourism business’ offerings. You don’t want to develop or buy software to reserve movie seats when you’re offering flight booking services.
