A simple and easy booking flow will give better user experience and will create a positive impact among users. And features like social media login, search history, option to save passenger information, saving of payment card details etc., will greatly enhance customer retention.
It is always better to give multiple options to customer to make the payment. An integration of local payment gateway and display of such payment options based on location will help to cater such category of customers.
EMI Facility and Price Lock option with minimal advance payment are features which will help customers greatly and will aid in good number of purchases.
Customer should be prompted to make purchases instantly, the more time provided to customer, the likelihood of a successful purchase decreases. To encourage customer to make purchases, the system can show certain information about the property like the popularity, exclusive price/deal count down time or the available stock. Such information will greatly influence the customer on decision making and could increase the purchases significantly.
A well-defined reminder system will greatly help the customer in many ways. The reminders could be through SMS or e mail. The reminders on we check-in, flight timings, or hotel check-in will ensure customer are kept well informed. The reminders could also act as a medium for cross selling and up selling. A reminder about flight time along with hotel options in the travel destination will increase the possibility of a hotel booking from the same customer.
Customers always love to hear the experience of others on specific service or property. A better review system with accurate user experience on properties will greatly help the customer to make the decision easily. This will greatly enhance the purchases of better rated properties, moreover it will help to increase the reputation and win customer trust on the online system if authentic information/reviews are posted about the property/service.
It is very important to give good support to customers on time to get better reputation and customer feedback about the system. For immediate assistance, online chat system /chat bot could be great help. To manage every customer effectively for their future needs the system could be integrated with industry best Customer Relationship Management Software.
CRM Integration
Chat Bots
Notifications plays vital role retaining the customers. Multiple channels could be used for notification purpose like web push notifications, app notifications, SMS and e mail notifications. Onsite notifications like touch point pop ups, exist pop ups and timer-based pop ups too plays an important role successful booking conversion. Effective utilization of these notifications with proper promotional and marketing strategy could drastically improve the success full purchases and there are good tools for upselling and cross selling.
Apart form the organic traffic or direct website or application visitors, to be a successful online travel portal, it is extremely important to cater traffic from other sources too which includes meta search engines like wego, skyscanner, trivago etc. and from third party websites or blogs through affiliate partnership program. Social media ads and google ads are too can be utilized very effectively to attract more traffic and sales.
For effective sales and customer retention, customer should be provided with extra benefits for the purchases they make. Promo coupons, Loyalty Points, Referral Points etc., are excellent tools to offer special benefits to customers. To make these options more effective, it is best to have a system with multiple business rule option to configure.
Content plays a major role in customer decision making. A proper content on services and properties offered through the portal will gain customer trust and helps in increasing the purchases. A well-crafted content is very essential for search engine ranking. To achieve this the online travel portal could utilize features like blogs, content pages, customer reviews etc.,
Website or application speed is one of the key elements which decides the success of the online portal. It is extremely important to load the website page within seconds and provide the required results to customer in minimal time. Moreover, the system should be capable to handle traffic from multiple channels without any hindrance or slowness. To achieve this the web pages should be optimized enough for faster loading and technologies like elastic search, asynchronous search, proper caching of the API results etc., are indeed necessary.
Vast majority of the customers takes their decision based on price. To become a successful online travel portal, it is crucial to have options to set pricing based on multiple rules like sales and travel validity, destination, property, cabin type, hotel, airline, price range, number of customers, marketing channel, customers, supplier etc., Moreover, the system should be capable enough to add new pricing models based on the business requirements.
Airlines are one of the most important and highly valued property in the travel segment in terms of business hence it is essential to have highly advanced and effective features to handle any kind of business challenges. Features like multiple PCC configuration based on source or IP, auto ticketing (QCC/QCT), offline ticketing based on airlines/destinations, airline special fare/deal configuration, ancillary services will greatly enhance the system to generate maximum profit from each sale.
The online travel portal should provide as much choice possible to their customers. To provide wide verity of choice of each property, the system should be flexible enough to integrate with multiple suppliers and should be able to accommodate all the features and facilities provided by the supplier. It is also very important to ensure that with any integration with new supplier, the system performance should be stable to give a better user experience to customers.
