In an ideal world, selling online would be an effortless process in which customers search and the travel agency sells without any further effort. Is this a realistic expectation? In this article we are going to find out.
If we look at the online booking process in isolation, this is absolutely possible. To be able to reach this ideal, there are some technical requirements. You will need an effective online booking engine on your website that permits searches for flights, hotels and other services. After a customer initiates a search, they need to filter the results and choose their preferred option. After that, they fill in the required fields, click "Book", the booking reaches your suppliers directly and the travel agency collects the money and/or commission.
To sell online without any effort you will need a booking engine on your website. This is essential. However, looking at the booking process in isolation would be misleading. The booking process is only one part of the entire mechanism that makes booking online a reality. As well as having a good online platform behind your website, there are some other elements that are actually within a travel agency's power.
The most important are content and marketing. If you are making only marketing efforts, without creating and editing content on your website, you will lose a lot of customers. You will move far from the ideal. People will enter the website and search on their own and they may need guidance around the content. People are bombarded by information and the travel agency is the only one who can make this landscape clear. You have to select the best options and the best destinations from different angles. Some tourists prefer luxury, others prefer to stay in the middle of the action and others don't care about location but about quality. All of this should be reflected in the content on your website.
If you are creating content without marketing efforts, you might sell something, but far less than what is possible. You will have a very good website which customers don’t find. Marketing efforts mean putting your website before the eyes of people who want to buy travel services. If you leave it in the hands of fate, you will have some SEO benefits but without any real traction.
So in order to sell online without effort you will need a booking engine platform dedicated to travel agencies, like Travitude. Such a platform will take over all the technical effort from your side so that you can concentrate on what you know best: advising customers and promoting the best places to travel. Besides the platform, you will need to create content and do marketing. These three ingredients will take you very far on this journey.
If you want to see how our platform can help you, please schedule a demo with our team here. If you just want to further explore strategies for selling online and understand the whole landscape, you can read our 25+ articles here on our blog.