Why SME’s need Travel Technology Solutions:

As you all understand Travel Technology is a must for every travel company to automate the operations, deliver quality services, optimize response time, increase output, focused on specialized service, enhancing customer experience, cut cost, human error, increase efficiency, etc.

So, these are a few of the benefits which travel companies get post investing into the travel tech platform there is an assumption that travel technology is needed mostly for mid to large size travel companies as they have decent volumes of booking and customers.

But the Travel Technology Platform is also needed & must for small travel companies as well, the only difference it maybe what kind of investments they have to make as their budgets are limited and usually on the lower side.

So, an SME Travel company can choose SAAS (Software as a Service) based technology platform to upgrade themselves. As there is no upfront cost for the technology, they have to pay small Monthly support fees & Transaction fees or they just have to pay the transaction and continue using the application.  

As a Small travel company assuming they may be booking 20- 50 bookings a month, and in a traditional/offline work they are managing everything offline in the excel sheets or word file, customer information, inquiries, booking details, customer documents, etc. or they may be just updating the customer details on the supplier’s system and generating the confirmation tickets/vouchers and sharing it with the client.

They don’t have any information about their customers, their historic bookings, family members, documents, preferences, etc.

The benefit which SME travel companies gets post investing into the technology platform are as follows:

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Module: Through CRM, travel companies will be able to store the information about all their customers (Booked customers & Prospects) information, store documents – Passport, ID, VISA, etc., manage their preferences, family members, you can also see what all inquiries are created against the customer, which are won/lost along with the reason, etc.

Bookings Management: SME travel companies can also use booking management to manually manage their offline bookings, which they have directly booked with the suppliers to create the booking records, generate the documents, update the payments, modify booking information into the system.

They don’t need to have the XML/API connection with the suppliers, they can manually enter the offline bookings done with the suppliers.

In case they have access to supplier’s API, they can integrate it with the platform, search and book through the booking engine solutions.

Software will also help them to crease professional documents – Tickets, Vouchers, Invoices, Receipts etc.

Suppliers Management: They will create the profile of the suppliers with whom they are buying offline to manage the payments and reconciliation with the suppliers. They can define the invoice received from the suppliers manually in the system and can reconcile it against the client’s invoices. They can also see the bookings done against the given supplier in order to negotiate the preferred rates.

Operational Accounting Management: Through this module will help travel companies to manage their financial documents – Invoices, Payment Receipt, Supplier Invoices and reconciliation between client and supplier invoices, also to update the status of the payment from clients and payments are done to the suppliers, manage payables and receivables.

Reports: The technology platform will enable travel companies to generate various kinds of business reports like Booking Reports – Highest sold service, highest sold supplier, Destination, customer, etc. Generate reports for the commission to be collected from suppliers, payment reports, forecast related reports – Sales, Inventory, Services sold, Profit made, etc.

So, these are the benefits that will help SME clients to be more professional, have more insight about their customers, plan their marketing campaigns, invest in the services as per the customer demand, negotiate rates, etc.

All in all travel technology will help them grow as well.

Please let me know if your comments and feedback about this article, if you have any question or query which you want to share.