Customer Journey on an OTA (Online Travel Agency)

OTA (Online Travel Agency) is one of the retail sales channel for the travel company and caters to large segment of customers if done right. Travel companies needs to invest in a good technology solutions, servers and a marketing road map for at least next 1 years in order to bring the customers on their website.

Marketing is the single most important thing that will decide the fate on any successful or an unsuccessful OTA, irrespective of how good is the technology & inventory if you fail to market your OTA brand online &/or offline you will never succeed as an OTA.

Sharing some highlights of customer journey on an OTA platform:

Landing on the website:

Once the OTA is promoted digitally on the web through various digital marketing techniques like SEO, SEM, SMO, Media buying, etc. Or via affiliates or meta searches or offline through adds on newspapers, magazines, TV, Radio, Billboard, etc. And you are able to bring users on to your brand website.

Perform Search:

Based on his/her need user perform the search on the OTA booking engine, based on his needs.

Search Executions:

As per the user’s requirements booking engine triggers the search on to suppliers connected for that services simultaneously like for flight it will go and hit the GDS’s API – Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport or flight aggregators like travel fusion or Mystify or TBO or direct connected airlines on the OTA platform.

OTA’s who have a very high volume of traffic on their website will be using a caching mechanism where they store the results in their temporary/cache data based to optimize the search speed and also to save look to book ratio on suppliers.

Once the user has selected a specific fare than only it will go and hit the GDS to get the actual fare and availability

Result:

Once the result is received from the suppliers its arranged as per the user’s search query. Information is arranged by default the cheapest on the top and then arranged for a direct flight or 1 stop flight, cabin baggage only or with luggage, arranged as per the time, airline, refundable/non-refundable, etc.

As per the user request the data is arranged and presented to the user.

Select the fare:

Based on the search result user selects the best fare as per his requirement and move to the checkout page

Checkout:

Users can complete the booking as a visitor or he can register himself to create his login ID & password. Post that he needs to enter all the required details to complete the booking like Name, email ID, Phone Number, DOB, Passport information, etc.

Payment Gateway:

Post submitting all the required information and credit card information, the system will check again from the selected supplier if the price and availability are the same if yes it will process the payment and once the payment is through will send the confirmation to OTA website.

Confirmation & Ticketed/Vouchered:

Post payment confirmation system will issue the ticket if auto ticket functionality is available or hold the PNR for schedule carriers.

In case of PNR hold – Travel agency checks if they have any discounts on the sector booked with them or their travel partners and accordingly, they issue the ticket.

Confirmation Email:

A confirmation email with a ticket is emailed to customers’ registered email ID.

Repeat Purchase:

OTA employee’s various technique to enhance customer engagement:

• Discounts:
• Offers
• Loyalty points
• Promotions

Customer Logins:

Once customer is registered, he can login into his dashboard to view his past bookings and upcoming bookings, manage passengers list, send request for changes and modifications.

Access to his loyalty points.

He can also download his tickets and vouchers. .

Post Booking is done the OTA backend/Operations are managed as follows:

Manage Bookings:

Operations team review the booking make sure all the required information is in place before processing the bookings.

Check for internal deals & discounts:

If the operation teams have some additional discounts with them or partner, they issue the tickets against those discounts to make some additional profits.

Customer Engagement

Post sales they try to engage customers through multiple deals, offers, discounts or loyalty points.

Managing rates, markups, commissions, discounts, deals etc.:

As an OTA, rates have to really competitive in order to sell as online customer is not loyal to any one except price. His loyalty is weak to a particular brand.

OTA deploy multiple techniques:

• Pre-Purchase the inventory from suppliers for example they may have pre-purchased inventory from airlines for a given sector which they know sells like a hot cake. As it’s bulk purchased, they get really good rates and higher margins than the rates available in the market.
• Kick Backs – OTA has the volume deals with the suppliers if they hit a predefined target they will qualify for the additional incentives from suppliers
• Multi PCC configurations: As an OTA may not be strong or have the best inventory for multiple geographies or airlines, they work with their partners instead of selling their own inventory, as their partner will have a rate advantage for that region – based on their partner’s PCC they get the rate advantage and make additional profits.
• Low cost of operations: As the cost of operations is low in an OTA model as it’s a technology-driven travel agency – this gives them the additional saving and much wider reach compared to a traditional agent
• Low fulfillment cost: For an OTA they are hardly involved in the fulfillment as its primarily FIT customers and usually the services they sell are very straight forward or their partners do the fulfillment – resulting in low operational cost.
• Have a good mix of low skilled and high skilled employees: As the majority of the job is taken care of by technology so OTA has a very good mix of experienced and less experienced staff
• High volume: OTAs strive for high volume as once they become brand, they have access to a much higher number of customer base compared to a traditional travel agency that has its geography limitations.
• OTA’s have alternate sales channels as well like through b2b agency network, as they are an established and known brand setting up a B2B is not a big challenge for them.

All these methods help OTA to increase repeat purchases and engage the customers, have decent margins, and low cost.

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