What is the best back office software for a travel agency website?
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What is the best back office software for a travel agency website?
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Jeff Tripper
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Answer ( 1 )
The Online Travel Agencies Threat to travel planning as we used to know. The Online Travel Agencies have a large chuck of sales being cut-off which makes it clear that in today’s world tourist are eager to be on technology that is easy to use and fast.
The OTA platform is based on # blocks that are front end be it website or the App for the OTA platform. The back end is the booking engine that is that is the key to the OTA which provides the integrations to GDSs, CRSs, Wholesalers and etc.
The Important features for back office System are
Inventory management: –
The system Must Allow you to add inventory manually, Hotels connections via Hotel Extranet, hotel connections via CRS, the system should also allow Channel manager connection and Wholesaler connection as well.
The Inventory management Provide GDSs Integration Via Fully automated API and manual connections as well to GDSs. It should Provide a NDC (New Distribution Capability) Connection as well to travel agents or OTS’s without GDS but via a XML API integrations.
Booking desk: –
The System Should be capable of booking directly from the back office with a help of travel agent, there should be a centralised booking system as well which has all the updates from calls, Chats, and other online system that are provided. The System should be capable of providing Packages and Tours generation the agent can customise the Package and tour as per Clients requirement.
Business rules: –
The internal Logic on basis of which the OTA’s run the business and provide the best deals and packages for the travel to client or agent. A Business Rule Management System is software that stores and monitors business decision logic (business rules) using a business rules engine.
Reports and analytics: –
The first analytics you want to see for your business should answer the question – how are we doing. For which the System must provide Sales reports, Customer reports, Marketing reports, KPI Metric, Agent productivity, Business Intelligence also be provided.
Customer service: –
The System Should provide a seamless communication with clients Messaging via Voice, SMS and text messages via APIs, Messaging platforms APIs, Email to CRM integration. The System Should provide Live Chat, Outsourced call centres, Unified communication software.
User management: –
The Tool should be able to manage and modifying the role for the user and also should have a password management, Edit and create user profile, Control and monitoring.
Accounting and payment processing: –
The processes behind accepting customer payments at an OTA are different for hotels and flights. Let’s sum them both up.
When working with hotels, OTAs use two business models: merchant and agency.
Flight payments
The relationship between OTAs and airlines is somewhat different, mostly due to the addition of another side to the transaction pipeline – IATA BSP and ARC. A Billing and Settlement Plan (BSP) is data processing software that handles billing, sales reporting, and monitoring of the whole booking process.
Accounting software
Following the discussed payment workflows, OTA’s back office usually has the following features for payment recording and monitoring.
v Handling exchange rates
v Accounts receivable/accounts payable
v Payment rules
v Creating customer invoices
v General ledger
Customer relationship management: – You leave your customers to roam around the product, you rarely interact with them personally, and probably all of your processes – inventory updates, invoicing, sending confirmations, often, even customer service – are automated. Typically, OTAs use CRM systems to store and use data about customers for marketing activities. Here are the specific marketing tasks that CRMs perform.
v Identifying customers
v Differentiating and segmenting
v Interaction
v Conversation automation
v Social media integration
v Notifications and alerts
OTRAMS is one of the best Software that Provides all the Above featured in back office software for travel agency with all the Important Integrations required.
For more insights, please visit http://www.otrams.com