travel tech insights

5 Stats That Paint A Bright Future for Travel Agents

132,00. That’s how many travel agents were in operation in the United States in 1990, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). By 2014, that number had dwindled by half to about 71,000 and the projections for the next ten years indicate a continued decline by about 12 percent. On the surface, these statistics would seem to spell doom for traditional travel agents who are facing increasingly intense competition from online travel agencies, development of new technologies like mobile apps, and other user-driven sites like AirBnB.

Yet, these stats don’t fully represent the value and potential for growth travel agents pose within today’s global travel industry. With today’s modern traveler placing a greater emphasis on unique travel experiences, individually curated tours and activities, and a person-to-person connection in researching and completing travel bookings, traditional travel agents are actually uniquely positioned to expand their footprint and reach more customers than ever before.

Topics: online travel agency travel agents travel agencies

Why Travel Agencies Should Embrace Mobile Apps

Travel agencies and mobile apps. These two concepts might seem to represent two very different time periods in the travel industry. The old and the new. The traditional and the state-of-the-art. Yet, today’s travel agencies would be well-advised to not only understand the value mobile travel apps can provide, but also embrace and adopt them as part of their operational platform.

Rather than being suspect of mobile apps as an alternative to the traditional travel agent, agencies should view mobile apps as an important tool to reach today’s younger traveler where they spend most of their time - online and connected to their smartphones. As travel agencies have to work harder to remain competitive in a global, connected marketplace, mobile apps provide agencies a direct line to travelers by cutting through much of the noise other travel companies can’t avoid by failing to adopt a mobile app strategy.

Topics: Mobile Technology Mobile Apps Mobile travel apps travel agencies

The Link Between Menus and Vouchers: The Importance of Offer Templates

Imagine a restaurant without a menu where the chef and kitchen staff simply presented diners with a list of available ingredients with the intent of making customers whatever dishes they desired. This means the kitchen staff could, at any given moment, be making a wide variety of dishes from meatloaf and roasted chicken to salads and stews. This might sound great from a diner’s perspective, but from the point of the view chef, it would be chaos. A menu not only help diners dial-in on what meal they’d like prepared, but it also allows a restaurant to limit its number of offerings, which helps drive down cost, increase efficiency, and enhance the overall quality of product it provides to its customers.

Just like menus in the restaurant world, the same is true of voucher and offer templates in today’s travel industry. Because travel agencies and travel management companies work with so many suppliers on the back-end and customers on the front-end, the importance of a streamlined offer and voucher system cannot be overstated in leveraging optimal productivity and efficiency. Utilizing a flexible, agile voucher and offer template platform is increasingly an important value proposition as travel agencies must complete more and more transactions each day to remain competitive and relevant in today’s global travel landscape.

Topics: travel travel agent Templates travel agencies offers vouchers

The Importance of Content Mapping for Travel Agencies

It’s something we’ve all experienced before: You input the wrong address on your GPS and you suddenly find yourself completely lost in an unfamiliar section of town. It’s easy to get frustrated and blame the GPS for this error, however, the GPS didn’t know you entered the wrong address - rather, it simply directed you to the right location based on the information you provided. This equates to lost time, more money spent on gas, and more wear and tear on your car.

Sounds familiar, right? This same concept holds true when it comes to content mapping for travel agencies. The process of content mapping - which helps travel agencies and suppliers coordinate the availability, inventory, and pricing of various accommodations and services - is much like using your GPS to help you get to where you’re going. Enter the right information and the GPS is likely to guide to your destination quickly and efficiently. On the other hand, enter the wrong information, not enough information, or poorly sourced information and you’re likely to lose your way entirely. A content database that is not consistently mapped can result in travel agencies using wrong or outdated information in their supplier and customer relations.

Topics: travel agent Databases Static databases travel agencies Content mapping content matching

5 Processes Travel Agencies Can Automate with a Travel ERP

20 minutes may not sound like a lot of time. It’s a quick lunch or a long shower, but it doesn’t seem like enough time to worry about how efficiently it’s been spent. But multiply that 20 minutes five thousand times and you begin to see the way that best use of 20 minutes compounded over a month or a year can turn into real time and real money. If a small travel agency spends 20 minutes manually processing each of the 5,000 airline tickets it sells in a month, that 20 minute process takes up nearly 2,000 hours worth of work—the work of several employees.

Even in today’s increasingly digitized travel industry, this is still all too common of a scenario, especially for smaller travel agencies or travel companies. Yes, it’s true these tasks are important and a large part of a travel agency’s operations. Of course, tickets need to be processed—just as travel policies need to be enforced, invoices need to be managed, and 3rd party bookings need to be recorded. Just because these tasks are crucial, however, does not mean that they still need to be done by hand. Agencies utilizing a travel ERP solution ought to be able to automate these processes and many others, thereby saving time and money while freeing up employees to focus on providing value and completing more useful tasks.

Topics: erp travel erp travel erp system travel process automation process automation travel agencies