How Booking A Flight Has Changed

Gone are the days when making a flight reservation was a time consuming and complex process.

Today just about anyone can book a flight quickly and easily using an online airline reservation system. The major airlines launched the first generation of flight booking software many years ago in an effort to automate bookings as their flight networks and number of bookings grew at an amazing pace.

Flight booking software has been around for decades and initially these internal airline systems were used by airline reservation staff to confirm bookings across their flight network. It was not long before the airlines began offering Travel Agents their own version of these systems for them to use as oppose to wasting time and resources calling the airline reservation center.

Today's online air booking engines are a result of years of technological evolution and have helped lead the online revolution in selling travel. Whether consumers use an airline website or one of the many online booking tools provided by travel agents, today's airline passenger is just a few clicks away from having their air travel arrangements confirmed.

Today's online booking engines can provide the tools for any size agency's website to compete with even the major online travel players. There are a countless number of online travel solutions available in the market today and choosing the right airline reservation system for your travel business can be critical decision. You need to identify what type of travel and how your clients prefer to book and decide what content you'll need access to.

Online booking engines for travel agents are designed to help travel agencies reduce their overall administrative costs while expanding their customer base and increasing revenues. Today's traveler research and book flights using a variety of devices, including their mobile phone or tablet. The increasing popularity of the air mobile app has been driven by a population that is always on the move and prefers not to carry their laptop with them. All they need to do today is to download an air booking mobile app on their cell phone and log-in. The features of an air mobile app can easily enable any travel business to cater to their clientele on the move.

An easy to use online booking engine allows agents to be trained quickly and has them selling faster. Some of the travel booking software available today can provide robust revenue management and reporting tools that give an agency owner the powerful controls they need to manage their business.

The introduction of the airline reservation systems has dramatically influenced how all travel products are researched and booked today. Flexible and customizable, the today's online travel booking engines are easily customized to support an agency's unique brand identity and selling style.

Today's technology options allow any size travel agency to compete with the largest OTAs while still providing the personalized service that booking with an individual professional travel agent can provide. With so much technology available, finding the right online booking engine can be a critical decision for your online business. Finding the right technology company to partner with can be even more important.

Rules Management

Let's talk about Rules. I believe it's one of the most innovative features we have added within our application. Rules basically allows for a client to define markups, discounts, value add offers that can be something as generic as a 200-dollar coupon booklet, or a 2-night free stay with something or something informative they want to communicate to the end person. They also have the ability to define onboard credits. An Onboard credit is something that we have designed primarily to meet market requirements. for example, when cruise lines stopped discounting, they allowed travel agencies to use a part of their commission to offer onboard credits or they themselves started offering onboard credits. Out of that came onboard credits which allows our clients over various complex rules to derive the exact amount that the customer is going to get maybe from the supplier, or from the agency or both. Or something that's very specific to cruise, which is the cruise deposit fix. The cruise lines came up with a promotion that allows someone to pay half a deposit. But their technologies do not support providing that reduced deposit amount. We actually had to build a rule type that allows our clients to go in and show that. The deposit amount, so the customers would actually be paying less rather than the full price the cruise lines weren't returning. Any of these rules, all share the same set of filters that they can be applied for. Our clients can choose from cruise line or airline, down to a ship, down to a particular sailing, down to a particular a flight number, on a given day. They have the ability to set these up. Their entire marketing campaign, so they automatically turn on and off without manual intervention, for activating or inactivating these rules. Some of the other complex rules we built have been built around that, would be the ability to define caps on what a customer can give away from their commission.

FUNCTIONALITY + THE RIGHT CONTENT = SUCCESS

Finding the right online airline booking engine with access to the content sources you are looking for can be a difficult and confusing process for even the most experienced and seasoned professional.

There several types of online travel booking engines available in the market today. Some offer specific travel products such as airline or hotel reservations and many provide the ability to target multiple selling channels including Business to Business (B2B), Business to Consumer (B2C) and even Business to Business to Consumer (B2B2C). A more advanced online airline booking engine might even utilize innovative responsive technology that supportsvarious mobile device screen sizes so customers can easily view and navigate through the booking process regardless of the device they are using.There are even state of the art Air Mobile Apps available that allow any agency to expand their brand’s presence to hand held devices with dedicated Air Mobile Apps. Understanding how your customers prefer to research and book their travel arrangements along with some research on the different options available will help identify the right type of airline reservation system for your business.

Finding the right online booking engine to match your distribution channel needs is only part of the solution. Content is key when it comes to the success of any online business, including those selling airline tickets online. Identifying and securing the right sources to access the airline content you need can be just as critical to the success of your airline booking engine.

Many agency owners choose one of the Global Distribution Systems (GDS) like Amadeus or Sabre to check availability and confirm airline reservations using their own specific agency GDS credentials. Accessing fares and availability via a GDS using an agents specific ID allows users to access not only the “published” airfares available in the market, but also any “private” or “negotiated” rates a specific agency may have with an airline. If you plan for your booking engine to use your GDS ID to make airline bookings, you’ll first want to find a technology partner who can connect the booking engine you choose with your GDS ID.

Others may choose to align themselves with Air Consolidators in order to access the lower, preferential airfares that these airline aggregators are able to negotiate. By aggregating sales from several smaller agencies, many Air Consolidators are able to drive significant volumes with airlines and as a result they are able to negotiate deeply discounted private fares as well as preferential fare rules and better commissions on published airfares. Some air booking engines even have theability tosimultaneously search multiple content sources for the best price, allowing an agency’s airline reservation system to combine their own content with fares and content from other sources such Air Consolidators or affiliated agencies they may work closely with.

With so many distribution channel options combined with the numerous airlines with what seems like countless different fare options, finding the right airline reservation system with the right content sources can be an important and critical decision that determines the success of your online business. Finding the right technology company to partnerwith can be even more important.

Differentiation

Let me introduce the Odysseus team, Glenn Dean, he manages our sales and marketing. He is the Vice president of Odysseus. We have Pramod Navani, that's our CFO/COO. He is helping us manage our operations both in US and in India. Rignesh Dave, who is our director of operations, but really that role's sort of just phasing into Pramod and he is being more of the CTO/architect. We have teams both in India and in United States. The core of our team and our development efforts come out of Vadodara, India where we have over 40 employees today. One of the other key things that make us different is our customer service. We focus and put a lot of emphasis on customer support and service. We believe every client is equal, no matter how big or small they are. We believe in the motto of ‘One size does not fit all'. No two clients of ours can ever sell the product the same way and we have learnt that from the 70 plus clients that we have acquired, that they actually don't like to sell the product the same way. And that's the core of how we built our product. It allows them for localization, to multiple languages, to localization to their currency. It supports their B to B model, a B to C model or perhaps their ability to distribute their product or fares through our platform in a B to B to C mode.

Affiliates Module

Affiliates Module was actually designed with the vision that any one of our clients could have subsites, agents, that are working from home, independent contractors, or just other referral sites that they want to provide their booking engine to. And then track sales, commissions and affiliate marketing. One of the other ways affiliate module can be used is, if clients are doing adwords on Google or Bing, they wanted to give in to metasearches, like skyscan or Kayak. They can give them unique id’s that allows them to price the product differently, it allows them to track searches, sales. They can completely customize the look and feel if they want. They can have multiple brands completely customized to their own look and feel. They can turn features on and off at an affiliate level, from something as simple as, if they want to make the email address required in the booking paths, to something more complex like, Oh I want to customize the header, the footer, the CSS. I also want different google analyst tracking or web trends tracking.

Introduction to Odysseus Solutions

We started Odysseus solutions back in July 2005, with this core interest of providing an out of the box solution to our clients that can be customized completely for one or more brands that they may have. Cruise is the core of how we started. That was the background that I came from. I started work at a cruise only agency and we were one of the first to launch an online cruise booking engine in those days. Over the four years that I was at cruise411.com, that was what I learnt, everyone was focused on how do we automate processes on air, car and hotel and not really many players were focused on cruise and that’s where I found that was an opportunity that would allow us to really excel. And its proven out to be the correct strategy.

Content, Business Rules and Distribution Are the Building Blocks for Online Success

Access to the right content with powerful business rules and flexible distribution capabilities are key to any travel business. Flight Booking Software that allows a business to aggregate travel content from multiple sources and distribute a Flight Reservation System to a network of affiliated agencies or home based agents can be a valuable tool in today’s competitive online marketplace.

There are multiple content source options for a Flight Reservation System to choose from today when booking a flight. The ability to search multiple sources for content with your own online booking engine can be important for those businesses that are taking advantage of the special rates and content that many consolidators or aggregators bring to the table. Some air consolidators focus on a specific geographic or ethnic markets for example and work with a network of affiliated agencies to book airline seats for their customers using the consolidator or host agency’s credentials. These consolidators are able to aggregate sales with suppliers such as airlines and leverage their overall volumes for better prices and access to special deals. Some focus on specific destinations or regions of the world and are experts about every aspect of travel there. Others serve certain ethnic or specialty groups and have developed a vast network of sub agents entrenched in these markets. By using your own fares and those of air consolidators or aggregators that you work closely with, you are able to remain competitive and provide your clients with the best value possible whether they shop online via your website or contact you directly.

The ability to expand your agency footprint while taking advantage of what the specialists have to offer can be a valuable tool for you to have as well. Your Flight Reservation System should allow you to easily extend the reach of your agency to serve customers whether in person, via a call center or online. You may also want to consider an application that allows you to easily extend your online air booking engine to other agencies and home based agents as well. And of course for those always “on the go” mobile consumers you’ll need a mobile ready application that adjusts the screen display to fit the device they are using.

Flight Booking Software must allow you to easily control business rules such as price adjustments, value add offers and targeted promotions. You’ll need the flexibility to control your business rules a variety of ways, so here is where you want to make sure the application has the flexibility you’ll need. Price adjustments should have the flexibility to be calculated as a fixed dollar amount ($) -or- a percentage (%) of the fare and apply to certain sales channels or affiliate groups. Business Rules should be easy to enter with the ability to define filters for a specific airline, flight number or class of service. With the way that airline fares and seat availability so frequently it can be nearly impossible for the most experienced travel agent to keep up with where to find the latest deals. A flexible and easy to use Business Rules feature can help you manage.

Finding Flight Booking Software that provides the right content, powerful business rules and flexible distribution capabilities is an important decision for any travel business, so choosing the right technology partner can be just as important.