Why Travel Agents Should Use Technology to Automate Their Back Office

When it comes to execution, back office operations are a crucial part of any organization. worldstravelonline agents are often seen balancing and memorizing the clients and the revenues over the month. For travel agents and agencies, identifying and extracting manual activities are a challenging task due to the nature of well integrated processes at the back end. Hence, this requires identification of these manual activities at the very beginning.

Below are a few manual activities that agents come across as a part of their work routine that can be replaced by automation at back end offices:

1) Accounting and Reporting

Since allocating revenues via account is a comparatively easier, it still stands apart from costs. Why costs? Because it is difficult to calculate the cost of sales for various accounts depending upon the efforts. Consider finding out the number of hours invested in the account every month and then capturing it in spreadsheets. How about reporting exact cost and analyzing the profitability of individual accounts? Manually tracking payments, commissions and booking revenue is a complex and time consuming task that is prone to errors. Hence, using an effective Travel Agency Software for on-time reporting and calculating costs without much manpower/manual work can be a good decision. Here, making use of technology will reduce the manpower required and also the manual errors.

2) Business Intelligence related Travel Account Services

Providing progressive travel pattern reports, travel policy compliances, etc., can add to the travel agents’ business value but, it surely involves a lot of manual work. This further increases the labour expense and results in the insignificant stage of poor competitiveness, thereby leading to loss of revenue. Hence, automation of the back end office is a must to reduce down the labour cost and enhancing productivity, reducing time consumption through its integrated applications.

3) Business Rules and Revenue Management

Travel Agencies work with a wide range of customers, agents and suppliers. They vary in terms of type, location, size, booking etc and require separate business rules, such as markups and margins based on predefined criteria for effective revenue management. Traditional processes demand the manual application of these business rules for each transaction and on multiple entities.

Let’s say you have different markups for flights and hotels and you also have a commission structure for sub-agents based on the number of bookings they make. Every time you or your sub-agent makes a booking, you need to manually apply the relevant markup depending on whether it’s a flight booking, a hotel booking or a car booking. You’ll also need to calculate the commissions you need to pay your sub-agent, based on their class. If you do b2c then you may even have to apply an additional markup based on the customer class.

If you do 5-10 bookings a month, it may not be such a big problem but if you do hundred odd bookings a month or more, doing all of this manually for each booking can become extremely time-consuming and prone to errors. A Travel Agency System can automate this process and save you a lot of time and manpower cost. You just have to configure the policies once and the system will automatically apply them on every booking.