Whether you are a travel agency that wants to start selling online, or you are already doing so, you might be considering a feature that cuts a lot of offline operational costs: the standardisation of offers. What do we mean by "standardisation of offers"? Any modern online platform that you could implement on your website should help you generate PDFs with offers in a standard format.
Why is this important?
Let's take two typical scenarios: offline selling and online selling.
When a tourist contacts you by phone or enters your travel agency, we call this offline selling. It consumes your or your agents’ time, which is a cost.
If you have a system in place, you can cut these costs by getting your platform to do the heavy work for you. Let's say in your discussion with the customer it becomes clear that they have three possible accommodation options. If the customer wants to think about it, wouldn't it be great to hand them a document in which all the three options are detailed for later reference?
If you don't have a platform, you could create Word documents and edit them manually with those options. Or, if that’s too complicated, you might not give the customer anything at all; you would just tell them some prices and that's it.
With an online platform like Travitude, the whole experience is changed. Travitude helps you save results that the customer is interested in and then generate a customised PDF. In this way, with just a few clicks the offer is printed, or emailed automatically to the customer. You are already continuing the conversation by handing the customer something physical. The offers would look beautiful and well formatted.
Can you imagine how easy some of your transactions would become?
Now let's move to the second scenario.
A customer searches on your website but is not yet decided. With a modern platform like Travitude they can add some of the options to Favourites. Then, from the Favourites screen, they can generate a PDF or email it to others for discussion. This way yields multiple benefits. First, you get the customer's email address so you can follow up with them later. Without this option on your website, they just search and leave.
How many customers are lost this way?
The second benefit is psychological. When they receive something from you, they already show some commitment towards your solutions.
If you think they don't know how to generate these offers, you can start educating your customers in your newsletters. In this way they will learn how to do it and then do it.
To wrap up this article, generating a standard PDF offer is a must-have feature of any serious online booking platform.
If you want to see for yourself how we do this at Travitude, you can schedule a meeting with our team. Otherwise, read our 25+ articles containing the best strategies and ideas for selling travel services online on our blog.