How to succeed as an OTA?

How to succeed as an OTA? This is the question most of the travel companies struggle to answer even though they have invested good money and chosen the best of the travel technology solution powering their OTA (Online Travel Agency) or B2C brand website.

There are multiple factors for the success of an OTA, a good travel technology solution is just one of them. I will try to highlight the multiple factors if done right will slowly and steadily result in the success of an OTA. 

Identify your strength:

Focus only on specialized products be it Flights, Hotels, Holiday Packages, Visa, etc. just focus on your core strength to make sure you succeed as an OTA. To define strength – the product/services you have a good inventory, best rates and you are very good at fulfilling those services.

If you look at typical success stories like Booking.com Expedia, Lastminute.com, Make My Trip, Yatra, Tajawal, cleartrip, Musafir, Flyin, Kiwi.com, etc. Most of these companies focus on selling one or multiple products but they concentrate on their strength areas.

This will give you a price advantage among the competition as an online customer is not loyal to any particular brand. He is online because he is looking for the best price.

And once you are able to bring the customer on to your website, this will make sure he doesn’t buy from anywhere else.

Start small – Target specific market:

You should identify your market or geography which you will be targeting when you launch your OTA. The biggest misconception is once I have launched OTA – I need to sell to Global Customers, as a result, you end up competing with big global brands losing your competitive edge and end up investing huge amounts of money and resources to acquire global customers. As a result, the cost of customer acquisition is very high, you will fail to build brand loyalty for the customer and end up losing more money than making profits.

So, choose the target market – Maybe I would like to focus only on the South African market – will be selling them my products from UAE – as I am a DMC in UAE – So I would be selling them Visa and Flight only.

So, your marketing budget will be focused only on the South African Market. Less competition – only from the Local OTA’s but as you have price advantage your chances of WIN will be high.

Enhance User Experience:  

In one line – deliver what the user is expecting in as much user-friendly way as possible. Example A customer is looking for a package in Dubai between 1^st November till 10^th of November through search engines like Google – Always land the customer on the package page highlighting the specific need only don’t land him on just the package search engine and he has to search for the packages for the specific date.

Or in case you are working with Meta Searches: Customer search for Dubai-London flight, you are. Offering the cheapest fare but once he is been redirected to your website, he sees the deferent price.

All such user experience will put him off and you will not only lose the opportunity to sell but maybe you will lose the prospect forever.

Try and understand the customer psyche – don’t offer him a user experience on your website wherein he has to put his brain or extra efforts to get the job done.

Speed of performance:

In the world of OTA customer expects things to be done fast, as customer attention window is very shot because of the availability of the multiple OTA’s. So, he expects results search results to be displayed fast and accurate. In case any OTA takes more than 10-15 seconds to shows the result he may have already lost the customer irrespective he may be offering a better price.

So, travel technology companies offering B2C or OTA solutions should have a very strong cache module to show the result in a few seconds from the cached inventory.

It also helps to control the cost of look to book if an OTA brand has high volumes of traffic because not every customer will be buying on their website – the majority of them will be there for price shopping only.

Hosting plays an important role in the success and failure of an OTA brand, once you gain a decent volume of traffic make sure you have good quality hosting, supporting dynamic bandwidth in case of high concurrent users, done server farming to increase the response time, support server mirroring to have the data backed up in the most secure manner, minimize the risk of losing customer data.  

Security:

Trust is very important for an OTA brand to succeed, which come with time but also how secure is an OTA and gives the peace of mind to the customer to use their credit cards or bank transfers on their website.

B2C brands need to take care of all the security measures, encryption, Decryption of data, SSL installation on the website, PCI compliant, etc. accreditation of multiple payment gateways and online fraud and security authorities to give the comfort zone and peace of mind to online customers before sharing their bank information and personal information on the website.

Mobile Friendly:  

As per current statistics, there are about 4.5 billion (Source: https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm ) internet users globally and rising mobile internet penetration is very high. OTA’s needs to make sure their website is mobile-friendly – they should always design website layouts: Lighter versions for Mobile, Tablet devises. Now a day’s customer consumes a lot of information through Mobile Internet. He invests a good amount of time researching mobile or tablet devices.

As there is a huge customer base on mobile devices you need to be there as well. There is a bigger misconception that you need to have Mobile App on Day 1 itself which is totally wrong unless you are already a big travel brand.

There is no need to invest in Mobile App and have an additional cost head until and unless you have a decent customer base. All you need a Fast & Secure Mobile website.    

Meta Searches Ready:

OTA’s should have a technology solution that is meta-search ready like compatible with Wego, Skyscanner, Kayak, Trivago, etc. The reason being if you have a price advantage you will be able to sell on these meta searches without investing huge money on digital marketing.

The important thing that you need to consider while finalizing the technology is how ready is the travel technology solutions with the Meta Searches.

There are multiple factors to be considered to be metasearch ready, not just integrating with Meta Searches, you need to have a good server with dynamic bandwidth and very strong caching mechanism.

As on B2C/OTA time is an essence to close the client as he has got options in abundance in the online world. So, you should have a very strong cashing mechanism and also you can define the frequency of refreshing the cached inventory as per the users experience on your website

Rewarding Loyal Customers:

The success of any OTS depends on the customer life cycle on their website i.e. how many times a given customer has made a purchase on their website.

To increase repeat purchases from their customers they should offer them the motivation and reward for their loyalty with an OTA brand in the form of discounts.

Discounts can be offered in multiple forms like coupons, offers, loyalty points, etc. which will increase the repeat purchase on their website resulting in profitable customers for the OTA.

‘A repeat customer has a 60 to 70% chance of converting.”
Paul Farris (Marketing Metrics)’

Once you have risen in the customer base you will notice that the bookings coming from repeat customers contributes to 40% of the total bookings and the chances of making 2^nd purchase from repeat customer is 45% and 3^rd purchase is 54% as compared to a 1st-time customer which is only 27%.

(Source: https://blog.smile.io/repeat-customers-profitable/)

For loyalty programs – you can work with Vernost Solutions – they offer their Loyalty product by the name of Club Class.

Enhance customer Engagement:

Most of the OTA’s focus on automation which is needed to optimize the revenue but sometimes they fail to address the HUMAN factor in the process.

So, to make an OTA success full strategy in order to enhance customer engagement with the OTA brand. Mixing the advantages of an offline travel agency with the advantages of an OTA.

B2C travel agencies should talk to a customer at every possible opportunity as this will enhance the customer experience and also increase the loyalty toward the brand.

Multiple Touchpoints could be:

• Successful Booking is done: Calling the customer for Thank You and asking them if he needs any clarifications or further information. Also helping them with the VISA or Hotel or Sightseeing activities etc. Will give the opportunity to OTA to cross-sell or up-sell
• Booking Modifications: Instead of automating the entire process and no human intervention, OTA should call the customer to clarify everything, A – This increases the quality B- Give the sense of relief and importance to the customer. Also, give the opportunity to sell and enhance customer experience and loyalty.

• Feedback: OTAs should always call the customer who has given the negative feedback, try and resolve their issue or offer them something which will ease out their pain. Moreover, they should try and call happy customers or even the customer who is neutral.   

Online Marketing:

Last but for sure not the least, online marketing strategy should be in place and possibly to be planned for 1 year in advance at the Macro level.

Online Marketing Strategy should include:  

• SEO – Search Engine Optimization – It’s a Long-Term Strategy
• SMO – Social Media Optimization – Promoting your brand of Facebook, Instagram Youtube, etc.
• Paid Marketing
  • PPC – Pay Per Click for search engines
  • Paid Social Media Marketing
    • FaceBook
    • Instagram
    • You Tube
    • Twitter
• Blogs
• Email Marketing
  • Abandoned cart
  • Promotional emails
  • Informational Email
  • Transactional Email
• Media Buying & Planning: Buying the advertisement space on various brand websites who have a huge amount of traffic and target audience.

What to discuss about your requirements, please fill the following form: