Offer Your Best Deals When, Where And To Who You Want

With the Holiday shopping season here, it’s impossible to ignore the messages constantly bombarding us with offers of deep discounts and special promotions. With so many special offers and discounts available online today, it can be difficult for any size business to keep up and compete. Consumers expect to receive the best value possible for their money and nothing can drive traffic to your website more than an exclusive, targeted online promotion or sale. Today’s online travel business needs the flexibility to define Business Rules that target promotions to any number of specific parameters in order to succeed.

Can your Travel Booking Engine properly handle special sale events like Happy Hour Specials, Early Booking Bonuses or a Last Minute Sale? How about a Black Friday Sale or a Cyber Monday Special? Since these types of Sale events occur on a specific day or time, flexibility in timing promotions and special sales for exactly when you want to extend the offer can be crucial to the success of a promotion.

The world of online commerce continues to evolve rapidly and your online travel booking needs to keep pace or your business will be left behind. Many of today’s Travel Booking Solutions come with the basic Revenue Management Tools that allow for the product price to be adjusted up or down by Supplier for example, but is this enough considering today’s “ Sale Crazy World”? Travel Booking Solutions also need the ability to easily adjust a product’s selling price and value add offers based on the specific day or time of day that a booking is made. Offers can even vary based on a specific set of travel dates, the travel supplier used, the number of days before departure or even the passenger’s age. What about offering a lower price on your website to drive consumers to this cost effective channel to research and make their bookings? Or perhaps you want to charge a service fee when clients use an agent in a call center? An advanced online Travel Booking Engine will allow for you to make price adjustments and extend special offers that target a specific sales channel such as B2B or B2C.

Managing all these criteria with your online booking solution can be complicated unless your application has an advanced Rules Engine to help you quickly and easily manage all these parameters in a single place.

Even parameters like length of trip, origin city and class of service used can impact the price a customer pays and your online travel solution should allow you to define, manage and enforce these Rules quickly and easily. A little time researching and understanding the extent that a Travel Booking Engine can accommodate these different types of business rules can save a travel business an enormous amount of time when it comes to managing it’s online business and can actually help increase sales in the process.

So the time you spend doing a little research to find the right booking engine for your business can save you time and money in the long run and provide you the ability to quickly and easily offer your best deals when, where and to who you want.

Are You Accessing The Best Airfares?

The business of selling airline tickets today is more competitive than ever and agency owners are constantly looking for ways to access the best airfares. Airlines have reduced the standard commission they pay travel agents for published airfares over the past few decades which has forced many travel agents to change the way they do business. Some agencies have given up selling airline tickets all together and now focus on other areas of travel. Those that continue to focus on selling airline tickets have been forced to implement changes to operate their business on lower profit margins and find ways to access the lowest airfares in the market.

Some are able to charge the customer a service fee in exchange for their expertise and service. This is a good example of when the right online Flight Booking Engine can be a valuable tool to define how and when service fees are charged. With the right booking engine, agencies are able to provide today's traveler the industry expertise that only a travel professional can offer combined with the ease and convenience of promoting special offers or added value online.

Other agency owners have looked to Air Consolidators to access the best fares for their Flight Reservation System since many airlines offer reduced Negotiated or Private Fares to Air Consolidators that book high volumes of tickets with them. These fares are usually priced below those made available to the general public and provide the Consolidator and agent the ability to mark up the fares with a service fee and still be competitive with published fares. Some Consolidators even offer a Flight Booking Engine for affiliated agents to cost effectively research and book these reduced airfares online. This can be a “Win/Win” situation for both since the agent is able to offer their customers access to lower airfares while increasing the Consolidator's overall sales volume further with the airline. This incremental sales volume not only helps the Consolidator increase their overall sales revenue, but it also improves the Consolidator's negotiation power further with the airlines in some cases.

Air Consolidators can be a great source to access these low fares and many focus on a specific geographic market or ethnic group. Many travel agents may choose to work with several different Air Consolidators simultaneously and will choose the best Consolidator for a specific market. In some instances an agency may want to designate a certain Consolidator when booking a certain airline. Others may want to check a Consolidator just for possible lower Private Fares and use their own agency's GDS for Published fares. These are just some of the options that can be quite beneficial and cost effective ways to find the lowest airfare available in the market. This is where a Flight Reservation System needs to provide the powerful, flexible tools that allow the agency to control specifically how and when multiple simultaneous searches are performed.

So whether you decide to work with a Consolidator or not, choosing the right Flight Booking Engine can be crucial to the success of your travel business.

In this article author writes about Odysseus Solutions. So whether you decide to work with a Consolidator or not, choosing the right Flight Booking Engine can be crucial to the success of your travel business.