Do you want more tour bookings and more revenue for your travel business? Look no further. It’s time to streamline your travel booking process.
Unlike other industries, customers looking to travel spend more time researching their options and carefully planning their purchases. So, when you get a lead to the booking stage of this journey, your travel booking process must be optimized for success.
Otherwise, all the hard work in nurturing and engaging with your prospects will result in them bouncing off the page.
This guide explores why you need to streamline your booking process and will give you a few useful tips to help you effectively pull this off.
Why You Need To Streamline Your Travel Booking Process
Here are some of the main reasons why streamlining your travel booking process is so valuable.
Makes Your Customers Happy (& Brings In More Customers)
You want your customers to start their journey with your brand on a positive note.
Making the booking process easy involves minimizing steps required to complete the booking, and eliminating any unnecessary areas of friction. When it’s easier for customers to book travel experiences, this results in increased customer satisfaction.
Offering an excellent customer experience will give your existing customers more reasons to make a repeat booking - which will help you prolong the lifetime value of each customer.
72% of satisfied customers will share their experiences which will help you generate word-of-mouth buzz around your brand. Imagine spreading this level of brand awareness before customers even go on your tours. It’s all possible when you create a seamless, positive travel booking process.
Improves Operations Across Your Entire Business
The travel booking process may be the final stage of your sales funnel, but it’s also the stage that often takes up a lot of time.
When customers are looking to make a booking, this is when they may have a fair amount of questions and require the most attention. If you don’t have an efficient booking system in place, you could spend far too much time dealing with customers during the booking stage. This could cut into the time you need to spend on other areas of your business.
By automating repetitive tasks, you can manage the booking process with far less effort. This can help to boost your business’s productivity levels as a whole.
For example, with the right software, your tour booking software will automatically monitor your tour availability and mark your tours as sold out when they reach booking capacity. Without this feature, you’ll be required to take on a lot of the administrative work.
Beyond enhanced efficiency, using a booking software solution will also help you reduce the risk of manual errors. Plus, your booking system can help you provide detailed insights and information to customers without you needing to do this manually.
By saving time and effort during the booking process, you’ll have more time to improve the operations across your entire travel business.
More Customers Will Choose Your Business Over The Competition
As mentioned earlier, customers looking to travel put in more research before making a booking.
According to a study, this is because:
- It helps them get more excited about the event
- It boosts confidence
- It helps consumers create and book the best possible experience
Having an easy and optimized booking system can also make it more enticing for these customers to follow through with a booking while they’re researching your travel experiences.
A solid booking system can help you build trust with customers, and give them more reason to choose your business over the competition.
Secures More Bookings For Your Business
An efficient travel booking process involves a lot more than simply publishing a booking form. You need to consider how you’ll build trust with potential customers, how you’ll make your tours as appealing as possible, and how you’ll combat cart abandonment.
By using a booking system that offers the right features, you’ll be able to do things like:
- Send automated cart abandonment emails with enticing offers
- Provide multiple payment options to make it easier for customers to secure their bookings
- Offer discounts, coupon codes, or special offers
- Publish beautiful, insightful booking pages that customers can’t say no to
This doesn’t only streamline your booking process, but it also helps you combat possible reasons why customers would drop out of making a booking.
Adopt this rationale, and your travel business can turn more website visitors into paying customers.
Increases Business Profits
Streamlining the booking process with an easy online booking platform helps you secure more bookings.
This is because customers can complete their booking process whenever they want online. There’s no need to work with a salesperson or third-party booking platform.
Reducing the extra administration around your travel booking process also reduces the costs involved in securing and managing bookings. So not only do you maximize revenue with an efficient booking system in place, but each booking made is also more profitable.
How To Improve Your Travel Booking Process
As a tour operator, one of your main goals should be to make the travel booking process as smooth and simple as possible, ensuring that customers looking to book a travel experience land on your booking page and follow through to the end of the process, resulting in a conversion.
Here are some of the main steps involved in pulling this off.
Use The Right Booking Software For Tour Operators
In case you haven't picked it up already - the most important step in optimizing your booking process is using the right booking and payment platform, especially one that is designed for the travel industry.
The main reason is that these booking systems are specifically designed to match travel customers’ buying journeys, and so they are set up to offer the most streamlined booking approach possible.
You can also access a wide range of features from the right platform, which will help you enhance the booking experience. An example of such a feature is customer data and insights - this will help you streamline the booking journey for each individual.
Accept Direct Online Bookings
One of the most critical steps in improving your travel booking process is accepting online bookings through your website and not from a third-party booking platform.
Offering bookings directly from your website simplifies the customer journey and means they don't have to leave your site to complete a booking. It also means you can add strategic “book now” buttons on the right pages of your website.
As online shopping has increased so much in popularity (it is estimated by 2024, that on a global scale, e-commerce sales will grow to $6.4 trillion). If travelers today expect seamless online booking experiences, using the right booking platform to do this will make it easier to manage the booking process while enhancing customers’ online booking experiences.
Accepting bookings directly also means you don’t have to worry about expensive booking fees or annoying terms and conditions from third-party booking sites. Using your own online booking platform gives you more control and means you can manage your bookings your way.
Minimize Steps And Friction
If you want a first-class booking process, then cut out any unnecessary steps involved in completing a booking. This could include unnecessary fields in booking forms, creating a profile to complete a booking, or anything else that could cause a prospect to get frustrated and leave the page.
Your goal should be to make bookings as fast and efficient as possible. This makes it quicker for customers to complete bookings, which can help you reduce cart abandonment.
Ensure Bookings Are Mobile-Friendly
Needless to say, your online booking process needs to be mobile-friendly. More than half of consumers make purchases through their mobile devices, and travel bookings are no exception.
Make sure that your booking pages and forms load easily across all devices, and offer an optimal mobile experience.
Implement Personalization
Personalizing the booking process is one of the most effective ways of increasing your tour bookings.
To achieve this, you’ll need to understand your customers and gather data from them. Using a good CRM solution for your booking process is necessary here.
Personalization can involve offering relevant content and offers to customers based on their interactions with your brand. This could include personalized offers to existing customers, or personalized communications and offers to new prospects.
By personalizing the customer journey, you can increase engagement from each customer and move them down your funnel more effectively. This will help you secure more bookings.
Offer Support
Providing readily-available support throughout the booking process is key. This will help you answer any last-minute questions or clear up any doubts potential customers might have.
If you don't have a support team, you can implement an AI-powered chatbot on your website. This is a useful way to help customers during their booking journey.
Provide Convenient Payment Solutions
The final step in the booking process is making the payment. You need to make this as convenient for your customers as possible.
Provide plenty of different payment options, and offer payments in different currencies. This is especially important for you as a travel business, as you are likely to deal with customers based all around the world.
By offering various payment options and schemes, like payment plans, you make it easier for everyone to complete a booking. This can help you move past potential roadblocks in the booking process.
Conclusion
A streamlined travel booking process can provide many benefits to any tour company. Ultimately, this means more bookings (and more revenue) for your business. It can also help you reduce admin, making it a lot easier to manage your operations.
To improve your booking journey, you’ll need to use the right booking and payment solution, specifically one that has been purposefully designed for the travel industry. Don’t take our word for it, book a free demo to see how a powerful platform can help you secure more bookings and take your business to the next level.
