Ultimate Top 10 Checklist For Choosing Travel Booking Systems

If you are on the lookout for travel booking systems for travel companies, you will know it is a hard task to ensure that each potential system fits into your needs. There are many features some offer, while others do not. Making the right choice is an important one, especially with some travel technology systems asking for such huge upfront investment (We don’t).

Below is an ultimate checklist of things, you may or may not have considered when looking for travel booking systems.

1. SEO Friendly Setup
   If you have an amazing website, but nobody can find it, it can be frustrating and costly for your business. Using an SEO friendly system ensures that the website is more likely to be found by the search engines. SEO friendly can mean many things, but look out for image file name labelling, image optimisation, header tag automation, title tag automation, internal linking and more. Using systems that consider this will just mean that it makes it easier for search engines to handle your website, making it more likely to be found online.

   

2. Responsive Design
   Websites are accessed through a multitude of browsers. With technology changing rapidly, so are browser sizes. From desktop to mobile, to laptop and notebooks. The best way to ensure everyone can access your website, and enjoy the experience is by having responsive design functionality. The functionality changes the size of the website according to the browser size, giving a usable website every time.

   

3. Stock Management System
   It’s all good and well selling, but the last thing you need is over selling. This creates upset clients, and a stressed operations department. With stock management you can ensure hotels are not over sold, tours are not over sold. Clients are happy, sales are maximised knowing you can let bookings come in with confidence.

   

4. Complex Rules Functions
   The travel industry is very competitive. That could be the understatement of the year! To get ahead of competitors and ensure you maximise your gross profit potential it is essential you utilise a complex rules engine. The ability to change margins according to value, dates, and passengers is a great tool. Special offers according to departure dates, passenger numbers, number of days from travelling, order value and more is always handy to get you more income, while remaining competitive.

   

5. Automated Marketing
   Free up the time of your expensive but well deserving marketing team. Automated marketing such as offers scheduling, banners scheduling means that campaigns can be setup at convenient times, maximising the output of your marketing team, or for many small businesses the time of the managing director.

   

6. Automatic Offers Creator
   Do you ever visit large websites and think, how are they finding the time to maintain this? Well automatic offer creating is the answer. Having special offers being stored in your database for browsers to see is an essential part of keeping an up-to-date site. When browsers search for holidays, the data they receive is stored in your database for other browsers to see as offers. Genius!

   

7. Full Offline Back-end Booking Management
   Great, so you are taking bookings online. But what happens when people all in to the call centre? What happens when they need to make changes to their reservation? Many systems just do not have this functionality and are geared solely for online ‘model bookings’. In reality, travel reservations are complex and require updating because of customers or your suppliers. Having a system that allows changes is essential. Having a system that can also be filled in manually and not just through the data feeds of your website is equally essential.

   

8. Automated Administration
   The admin department is the backbone of any travel company. The e-tickets, the emails, the sending of confirmations, ATOL certificates, vouchers. The processing of changes, processing of final payments and much more. Well what would be handy is for some of these tasks to be automated. The sending of vouchers, confirmations at a click of a button. The automatic reminder emails for final payments, customer API information requests, even for squeezing a last bit of income from holiday extras.

   

9. Dynamic Packaging
   A powerful feature for many travel companies. This gives the control for travellers to choose their hotel and combine it with their flight as they wish. They tailor-make their packages on your website, choosing the hotels, flight times and pries according to their needs. Such power means that the travel consultants are freed of their time.

   

10. Stock Integration
    Your stock is your product. If you have no stock you have no product. If you have unique stock, you have a unique product. It is important to ensure that there is a wide range of flights integrated and also a wide range or at least a good depth of niche stock on your website. Don’t let system limitations be a reason to have a weak product; your competitors will take advantage.

    

The Tekcabin travel booking system for travel companies has all of these features and more, with no upfront investment. Comment below with any questions, or contact us to show you our travel technology system.