Booking Engine Customization & Mobile Readiness Becoming Critical

Flexibility in how an online travel booking engine can be customized as well as where and how it is made available have become important factors when selecting a technology partner for your travel business. “Out of the box” online booking engines may work for some travel agencies, but more and more are looking to tailor their customer experience and branding with custom online booking engines.

An XML booking engine can be an ideal solution for those in the online travel business looking to customize the layout and flow of their booking engine without taking on the complex development of live connectivity with travel suppliers or the multifaceted business rules engine most need. Many of today's Air XML booking engines can provide a travel business owner much more than a simple “live” connection to check pricing & availability or to book a flight. These innovative products can provide any size travel business the ability to take full advantage of the powerful business logic and processing capabilities of an established booking engine while customizing the User Interface to their own specifications, at their own convenience. Customers can host all User Interfaces on their own servers while using the Air XML for business logic as well as live pricing, availability & booking capability. An XML booking engine can take full advantage of the powerful features an established booking engine provides such as the ability to easily adjust a products selling price easy price and robust reporting capabilities.

For those looking to service those customers who are always on the go, a mobile booking engine is an option you may want to consider for your travel business. All signs indicate that the general population will increasingly use their smart phones as more and more people become constantly connected to social media. As a result, mobile technology is becoming increasingly important for any business looking to reach them. People are not only using today's mobile devices to interact with each other, they are also using these devices to make a significant number of purchases online.

Some consumers may use various different devices as they research and eventually purchase products online. For instance, many consumers may start their initial research using their smart phone, but switch to a Laptop to complete the purchase. Others will choose to use their handheld device exclusively and access a mobile booking engine via a website or dedicated mobile App that they have downloaded on their device. Either way, your business needs to be ready to serve these customers on the device they choose to use.

Today's state of the art mobile booking engine can take full advantage of the easy access to content and powerful features that an online booking engine offers combined with the ease and mobility of using a smart phone. Finding an online booking solution with the right combination of options for your business can be a critical decision. Finding a technology partner that will help you reach today's consumer where and how they shop for travel can be just as important.

In this article author writes about Odysseus Solutions. 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.

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.

Can One Type Of Booking Solution Serve All Customers?

All online booking engines are not created equal. Today's online booking solution needs to be a mobile booking engine with flexibility in how business rules are applied and where content is sourced. It is also becoming increasingly important for many successful online retailers to have greater control in customizing their travel booking engine's user interface and overall branding.

Let's face it, the internet is full of websites with online booking solutions, many of which look the same and access the same exact content as the others. So how can your travel agency compete and succeed in the crowded online travel marketplace? One way is by offering something different or extra to your customers and incorporating that distinguishing factor into your overall branding.

Online travel booking engines are designed to reduce the time and effort required to complete a booking by automating much of the process. Many of the air booking engines available in the market today offer live access to airline pricing and availability to be sure the most up to date information is used as well as live booking capability to book an airline seat on the spot. However, finding an affordable booking solution that protects your businesses unique brand identity can be a challenge.

The typical "out of the box" online booking engine provides some minimal capability for customization or branding. Some offer the ability to change booking engine elements like headers, footers or even the colors and font used. Others provide the ability change certain features in the template such as adding a customer or membership number, an additional phone field or even a promotional code input box depending upon your specific business needs. Complete private label versions are also available where you can design the complete layout of the booking engine to meet your specific requirements.

There are even XML Booking Engine options for those business owners who want to completely control their own User Interface while taking advantage of the powerful business logic and connections to multiple content sources that an established online booking engine can provide. More than just a "Live connection", an XML Booking Engine can help your business take full advantage of powerful administrative features such as the ability to easily mark up or mark down selling fares and include "value add" offers in the display.

Robust reporting capabilities that can help you easily track and analyze your business are often available. And some XML Booking Engines offer the ability to simultaneously search multiple content sources for the best airfare. There are even a few that can serve as a tool for clients to integrate their own negotiated airfares into some of the most popular online meta search engines. And remember to consider a mobile booking engine so that no matter what device your customers use to research and eventually book their travel plans, your booking engine will be available and ready to help you serve them.

A little research will go a long way when you're looking for the best booking solution to serve all your customers.

Different Customers Require Different Hotel Content

Picking the right hotel is one of the most important aspects of planning a trip. Different types of travelers will look for different features in a hotel. Understanding the different types of traveler is critical to identifying the hotel that meets their specific needs.

There is so much more to booking a hotel room than simply availability and price. Luckily, easy to use hotel reservation software is available to help agents as well as consumers research and book the right hotel based on a customer's individual needs and preferences.

Business travelers may look for a hotel close to the city business center that provides access to conference rooms & business services.Onsite catering and ballroom facilities combined with a large number of guest rooms may be important for those planning a conference or large family gathering. Proximity to sporting venues or concert facilities may be important for leisure travelers looking for a long weekend getaway to support their team or seea favorite artist perform live. And those planning their annual vacation will look for hotels and resorts that offer the activities they enjoy most whether that beeasy access to the Ski slopes or being steps away from the beach.

Just like each hotel is different, so are the different hotel content options available. Many content providers specialize in certain geographic locations or type of hotels, while others may focus primarily on room rates or special amenities. Even travel agency consortia agreements may impact which content provider your hotel booking engine should use to best to meet your customer's needs.

Today's hotel reservation software combines a variety of tools and content to make the process of researching and booking a hotel much easier than even just a few years ago. Most have some type of Geographic Coding to help find a hotel in exactly the right location. You can check a hotel's proximity to anything from a city convention center to a favorite beach.

Searches can be performedby property "star" rating and special amenitiescan even be booked for your guests. For the budget conscious, most have the ability to easily search for a hotel room by price.

If you do plan to compete on price, you'll need to keep a close eye on the market and make sure your hotel booking engine has access to the best room rates at the right hotels. Here the key is for you to identify the provider with the hotel content your customers are looking and negotiate the best price. Hotel booking software with reporting capabilities that help easily track what customers are booking as well as searching for will be helpful with this endeavor. This type of information can be extremely valuable when considering hotel content providers and help you determine what hotels are most important to your business.

The key to success is finding a technology partner that offers a hotel booking engine with the right features combined with the flexibility to access the content your clients are looking for. With a little research, you can find an online booking solution that will have your business working smarter and earning more. 

In this article author writes about Odysseus Solutions. Some of the more advanced hotel booking engine  available today will even track the number of searches made for a specific cruise line or itinerary, helping travel agents identify what their customers are looking for online.  

Why Your Business Needs To Go Mobile

Getting your business noticed in a world overloaded with media messages from every direction is not an easy task today. With some many different devices, offering so many different methods of communication, it's difficult to know where any business needs to be present to reach potential customers. The answer today is EVERYWHERE!

By the year 2020, one of every three adults will be what are commonly referred to as Millennials. This is a generation that grew up being constantly connected and is by far the largest group using social media and mobile technology today. Millennials grew up interacting with each other via email and text messages as well as social media like Facebook and Twitter.

They not only use today's technology to interact with each other, they also use various technology and devices to make a significant number of their purchases online. Many will even use several different devices during the research and purchase cycle. For example, some start their initial research using a handheld device and may switch to a Tablet or Laptop to complete the purchase. Others may exclusively use their mobile device to access a company's mobile friendly website or dedicated mobile App to research and make a purchase.

Simply put, today's consumer demands options in the technology and device they use to research and purchase just about anything. Want to order a Pizza for lunch? There is an App for that! Need to make an airline reservation for an upcoming trip? There is a Travel Booking Engine with a mobile App for that! Just about any business has had to quickly respond to this growing demand and Travel Agents are no exception.

The Travel Agent Software available today provides some of the most innovative and cost effective ways to complete a travel related booking. Whether your business needs an Air Booking Engine, a Hotel Booking Engine or even a Cruise Booking Engine, chances are there's an online booking engine to meet your needs. But you need to remember how important it is for today's Travel Booking Engine to be built using mobile friendly technology so it is accessible via any of the devices today's potential customer may be using.

In addition to providing distribution of your product and services across a range of devices and selling channels, today's Travel Agent Software comes with the tools you need to properly manage your business. These B2B and B2C web based applications are designed to automate processes, increase revenues and reduce time and effort required to complete a transaction. Most include revenue management tools which allow you to control the selling price while providing the ability to offer special promotions. Many have robust reporting tools that track the number of bookings made by each distribution channel. Some of the more advanced Travel Agent Software available today will even track the number of searches made by Origin and Destination from a particular website to help travel agents identify what their customers are looking for online.

Finding a Travel Booking Engine for your travel business is important. Finding a technology partner that will help you reach today's consumer where and how they shop for travel is even more important.

Get Your Sales Cruising!

Cruising has been one of the fastest growing sectors in the travel industry for many years and recent industry figures indicate there is no sign of it slowing down anytime soon. Several cruise lines continue to build larger, more advanced ships and many are adding new itineraries and tour options every day. Savvy Travel Agents continue to make the majority of cruise bookings and earn good commissions doing so.

The popularity of Cruising and the amazing growth the cruise industry has experienced overall have encouraged many travel agencies to switch focus away from other travel products and focus all their resources on selling cruises. Travel Agents can be a great resource for consumers who are trying to choose the right cruise itinerary as well as the right cruise line or cabin type. Travel Agents are even aware of the vast number of special promotions offered by the cruise lines and can help you access the best deals. In other words, they are experts in the cruise industry and have the knowledge needed to help you navigate through the research and booking process.

Today, an online Cruise Booking Engine provides some of the most innovative and cost effective ways to research and book a cruise vacation. Whether a consumer is looking for a quick 3 day getaway to the Bahamas or a two week trip through Europe, chances are there is a cruise line with an itinerary that matches what exactly what they are looking for.

Many consumers start their search for a cruise vacation online, so it is critical that any Cruise Booking Engine contain the information a consumer needs to choose the right cruise vacation for them. Cruise Line, Cruise Ship and Cabin descriptions must be readily available during the shopping process and should be linked to pictures and rich media files for shoppers to view and compare. Detailed descriptions of ship itineraries, ports of call and shipboard activities are also helpful.

Today's Cruise Booking Solution also needs to use mobile friendly technology so it is accessible to potential consumers via any of the devices they may be using to research and book a cruise in today's mobile, online world.

In addition to providing access via a range of different devices, you will want to find a Cruise Booking Solution that comes with the powerful business tools that you will need to properly manage your business. Revenue management tools should allow you to control the selling price while providing the ability to offer special promotions. Robust reporting tools should allow you to track the number of bookings made by each distribution channel. Some of the more advanced Cruise Booking Engines available today will even track the number of searches made for a specific cruise line or itinerary, helping travel agents identify what their customers are looking for online.

Choosing a Cruise Booking Solution can be a critical decision for your travel business. Finding a technology partner that will help you reach today's consumer how and where they shop for a cruise is becoming increasingly more important every day.