One of the most frequent questions we are asked is, "How many people are required to handle an online travel booking website?"
The correct answer is, "It depends". In this article we are going to show you the factors influencing the number of people needed to run an online travel agency.
Whenever you think about human resources, you have to start from the tasks you need solving. These determine the roles needed in your company. If you want to start selling online, you need people to do the following:
- keep an eye on the overall platform status
- find the best offers in order to advertise them
- create content for the best offers and destinations
- answer questions from customers who book, but don't pay online
- create ads, edit newsletters and compose social media posts for your website
Now, depending on what you want to achieve, these roles might require more or fewer people. Let's take some typical scenarios.
If you want to promote 100 destinations starting today, you will need a lot of resources. If you don't have the budget for that, you can start small and add resources as needed. You can promote only one destination today and add more destinations in the future. Content creation is one of the flexible tasks. What you do today can be reused tomorrow and in the years to come. So if you want to create content for 100 destinations, depending on the required speed, you might do one a week or even 10 a week.
Usually it's easier and more cost effective to maintain a small system. Greater complexity will require bigger budgets and overall the return will be smaller percentage wise, but higher in absolute value because of the diversity.
As long as you start somewhere, it is much more important to be consistent and build something every day. At the end of the first year you will look back and see how far you have come. If you compare your website to those of bigger players, you should compare it to how their websites were when they began. Depending on your budget, you will reach your targets sooner or later.
In this landscape, the online platform you use is essential. The platform should help you and make things easier for the development of your online travel agency. Travitude is built with these tasks in mind. It optimizes all the tasks needed to run a profitable online travel agency. It helps you create and organize content in an efficient way, it helps you integrate it easily with social media, it helps your customers find and book their desired flights, accommodation, transfers etc.
Running an online business is not an automated task where all you need to do is collect the money at the end of the day, but it's not an extremely complicated undertaking either.
If you want to find out more about Travitude, please contact our team to schedule an online meeting.