Whether your travel agency concentrates on selling airline tickets or it focusses mainly on selling cruises and vacation packages, chances are there is an opportunity to include a hotel booking along with your customer's travel plans. While many travel agents gave up selling hotel accommodations due to challenges they experienced tracking hotel bookings and collecting commissions, the process has improved in recent years. Adding a hotel booking to your customers travel itinerary is easy to do and gives you the opportunity to assist with more of your customers travel needs. So you will want to consider adding a hotel reservation software component to your travel booking engine.
There are several approaches your business can take to include hotel bookings as part of your overall offering. An easy to use standalone hotel booking engine can be an excellent tool for agents or consumers to research and confirm hotel reservations. A custom packaging booking engine will allow you to create your own pre-packaged offers for your customers that includes not only their Air arrangements, but their hotel accommodations, transfers and even cruise vacations as well. For those looking to create their own packages, dynamic packaging solutions allow both agents and consumers to package and price cruises, flights, hotels and other travel products in real time. How you decide to integrate hotel accommodations into your offering depends on your individual business and customer needs.
And no matter if your customers prefer to book online, by telephone or by visiting your agency in person, look for hotel reservation software that is ready to serve customers how and when they decide. Applications should be developed using mobile ready technology so that consumers can access them using the variety of different devices today's mobile consumer uses to research and book their travel arrangements. Your online booking engine needs to access the content your clients are looking for at a competitive price, so make sure the hotel reservation software you can access the right content.
Choosing the right hotel for a particular trip can be tricky depending upon a customer's specific needs. For those looking to stay in a particular area of a city or near a specific point of interest, hotel reservation software with geo-coding to help customers and agents quickly find the right location can prove to be a valuable and timesaving tool. Your travel booking solution should include the ability to pre-define business rules and easily adjust a product's selling price or offer targeted promotions to your customers. Online hotel booking solutions need to include detailed product descriptions and rich content linked to media files that can assist agents as well as consumers throughout the research, shopping and booking process. And for those planning to expand into new markets, consider a solution that can handle multiple languages and currencies.
Finding a hotel booking engine with the right combination of options for your business can be a critical decision. Finding a technology partner with solutions that will help you reach your customers when, where and how they shop for travel can be just as important.
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