Tech, Travel

The ultimate guide for selecting the best software suited for your online travel agency.

Written by Qasim Hussain · 3 min read >

In the past few decades, a lot of change has been experienced and observed in the world of travel agencies. In the previous decades, people used to do all the effort themselves whenever they wanted to go for a trip. That required days and days of endless research about different hotels, airlines, routes, etc. Not only did all of that research take up a lot of time but it also resulted in a lot of money being spent on unnecessary things. With a wide variety of travel agencies evolving over the decades, a lot of time and money of the people has been saved. The best part was that the travel agencies started taking care of all the worries of their clients and all that was left for them to worry about was to have a great vacation. A research that was conducted showed that by hiring a good travel agency that can efficiently cater to their needs, a person can save up to 452 dollars per trip, which is a lot of money for an average person who belongs to an upper middle class. Another study showed that 65 percent of people choose to make their bookings through a travel agency even if they believe online bookings to be cheaper as compared to the services provided by travel agencies.

Along with the large variety of travel agencies available for us to pick from, there is also a very wide variety of software in the market with different price tags on them. These software help travel agencies by providing their services more effectively and efficiently. However, because of the large variety, it gets really difficult for travel agencies to analyze their requirements and select the correct software for themselves. The basic idea of having software within your travel agency should be that the software should be able to manage multiple different agreements at one time and it should provide the best possible solutions to the problems that may arise within a travel agency.

Choosing the correct software for your travel agency is a massive responsibility. That is because many different factors need to be taken under consideration such as where your travel agency is currently standing in the market, its long term and short term goals and objectives and most importantly, the budget that your travel agency wants to allocate towards the desired software. When we talk about the goals of your travel agency, it should be kept in mind all the possibilities of investment that might be offered to it in the future and the level of business growth that it might experience. We should also consider the type of market that they may want to cater to. For example, if a travel agency only caters to the needs of people who want to get their flights booked then they might be missing out on the large demand of clients who are looking for hotel reservations. The best thing, in that case, would be to get a software that caters to all the basic needs of a travel agency – that includes hotel reservations – but mainly focuses on flight bookings.

People generally have the perception that the price tag on something is directly proportional to the quality that it may deliver, however, that is not always the case. If we talk about software, the most important thing that should be taken into consideration is the needs and requirements of the travel agency that software may or may not be able to fulfill. On the other hand, the best-suited software for your travel agency will also not come for free so thinking that getting software with a really low price tag would serve the purpose would not be necessarily correct as it may end up creating even more problems for your travel agency.

There is a wide variety of software out there that are specifically designed for travel agencies. If a travel agency is looking for a software that specifically revolves around booking and reservations, some of the good examples may include

  1. Lemax
  2. Dolphin
  3. Bookinglayer
  4. PHPTRAVELS

These softwares provide some really interesting features like an automatic billing system, GDS connectivity, adding custom discounts and offers, online booking confirmations and much more. This software also supports multiple currencies that can help create new customers in different parts of the world and each client has its portal. They are also good at keeping all the information updated for the convenience of the client.

For a travel agency that needs software to fulfill their accounting needs, they may want to consider Xero, TravelWorks, and OnlineInvoices as their options. This software is great with generating online invoices, managing and keeping track of the inventory, connecting to different banks and reconciling with them. They also help to keep all the data secure within an organization and help analyze the sales. Some other features of this software can include keeping track of the sales commission of each of the travel agents and the levels of employee performance.

For tour building, Tripcreator, Tourwriter, and Orioly are really good options as they keep all the confirmations and keep all the insights and reports updated. Lastly, managing the customer relationships within an organization is also very important and some softwares are specifically designed for serving that purpose as well.

These software include

  1. Zoho Travels Agency CRM
  2. LeadSquared Travel CRM
  3. Kapture Travel CRM

This software provides features like customization of dashboards, creating travel-specific categories for the customers, supporting different marketing channels and creating an integrated set of marketing tools.

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