Flight Booking Search Engines

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Permalink Reply by Ralph Foulds on March 7, 2008 at 4:48pm

If you find one, please let us all know!
I think however, that you won't find a cheap option where your customers can book & pay for their flights online through your consolidator account - you will need to log in yourself first and get the flight quotes for them separately. So, you're going to have to communicate with your clients I'm afraid ;)
Alternatively, you can put a white label flight sales box on your website, but you will probably have to have 2 separate payment streams - for the tour, and the flights - as ATOL rules state you can't collect money from clients for flights if you aren't issuing the tickets yourselves (or through a consolidator).
I think Unijet were going to make a white label version of their consolidator site which would solve this, but I don't think it happened - if you find someone who does do this, please let us know.
good luck, Ralph

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Permalink Reply by Alex Bainbridge on March 7, 2008 at 9:21pm

Hi Tom,
Thanks for asking your question here (and for the chat earlier on the phone).
The real question here is one of budget - not one of whether it is possible or not. Many systems do what you say - but they tend to start at 10,000 GBP (20,000 USD) or even more - which is out of the budget of many smaller travel companies (as you pointed out)

However I question the concept that you are looking to operate under. Many larger travel companies run in "supermarket mode" - i.e. they don't want to touch bookings once they are received - and just want to provide an IT system between consumer and supplier.

But if you are a smaller company, you should focus on where you can really help your customers (which requires manual intervention) as this is what your customer comes to you for.

For example you could advertise "land only" prices (which opens up your product to a global market) and suggest "average flight prices" on your website. This would let you search, and find, flights appropriate for your customer subsequent to receiving a "booking" from a customer and prior to confirming that booking. In many situations customers believe they can find the best flight price themselves.... via big online travel agencies etc - so selling "land only" can put you at an interesting physiological advantage over competitors who sell packages.

Best wishes. Alex

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Permalink Reply by Tom Cree on March 8, 2008 at 7:28am

Thanks guys
Yes I agree that I am seeking the impossible. Ralph I will let you know if I stumble across such a system.
Alex gives me much food for thought regarding the "personal touch" I guess I spent too many years running cargo airlines!!! So I will make an effort and talk to the customers.
Alex we are looking at setting up a second (and possibly 3rd and 4th) sites for different South American countries so we could test the "land only" concept with one of those. I let you know when we launch one. (Similar to your system Ralph with a different site for each destination although I see you have a sort of central site as well.)
All advice is very welcome and thanks again.
Tom Cree

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Permalink Reply by Guido J. van den Elshout on March 28, 2008 at 2:07pm

Tom

If you look at Rezgo could they be of any help for the non flight issues?

Further, if you can aggregate the flights from big OTA's and indies like easy jet (only using GDS for business segment) you are always in a winning position...

You have to be a geek, but 15 years ago I used a one man show travel agent / tour operater who then already had tweeked a pc to get into the then mainframe GDS systems for flights....

So my 2 cents: It is already there, but how to find it....

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Permalink Reply by Alex Bainbridge on March 28, 2008 at 2:31pm

Hi Guido,
Thanks for your posts and input so far. Just for your information - Happy for you to mention Rezgo on this forum - however you ought to be aware that this website is managed by Travel UCD (my company) and we have a system, TourCMS, (www.tourcms.com) that is a competitor to Rezgo.

The independance of this forum is more important than promoting our product.... however it did put me in a rather interesting position and scratching my head as to how I should respond!

Alex

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Permalink Reply by Guido J. van den Elshout on March 28, 2008 at 3:14pm

Alex,

I am very glad you could win from yourself.

I was aware of it, or better said: "I was aware of it, but actually didn't think about it when I posted. You could distill my awareness from my teasing chocolate comment on your Blog.

I know your feeling. I have the same problem when writing about hotels in The Netherlands on my Blog Happy Hotelier, but have decided for myself to write about competitors nevertheless. Even about a competitor who blatantly stole the look and feel of the Haagsche Suites website some time ago: I like to let independence and truth prevail and so am always able to say what I believe or think is correct.

Cheers

p.s. in another topic we could discuss the Tips of the T-List or maybe in the WiWiH Hospitality and Travel Bloggers Community?

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Permalink Reply by Alex Bainbridge on March 28, 2008 at 8:52pm

Hi Guido,

Nah - its all fine!

I have written a blog post about my reaction to this thread...
http://www.tourcms.com/blog/2008/03/28/can-you-really-run-an-open-b...

Happy to discuss blogging here - although this forum is really focussed on small travel business community rather than travel bloggers - although I appreciate there is a cross-over

best wishes. Alex

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Permalink Reply by Nicola Grimshaw on April 1, 2008 at 9:04pm

Hi Tom,

You might be interested in www.farebase.co.uk which I have tried and thought was pretty good. I can't remember exactly why I decided not to use it - it might have been something to do with payment processing and/or ATOL. I also came across www.farepoint.co.uk/enterprise.htm whilst I was looking for farebase (I couldn't remember the exact name) which also looks interesting - I have signed up for a free trial earlier but not had a response as yet. Not that I'm likely to use it but I like to see what's available and the price isn't bad at £100 per month.

When I originally started out I was looking for an automated solution, but have come to realise that in my niche (luxury) that it will not happen for a long time, if ever. In my opinion the best bookable system, with the best range, has to be Kuoni but I guess most of us don't have that kind of budget. Even so, it's not perfect and there is a lot which cannot be booked online. I now pitch myself as an internet based business with personal service; the majority of my customers contact me by email and sometimes I have extensive discussin over days or even weeks and don't physically speak to them until it's time to take the payment and run through legalities.

Personally, having looked at your product offering I would have thought it may even be quite 'negative' having online booking for flights, for a number of reasons. I couldn;t agree more with Alex about 'adding value' but other thoughts are:

1) Customers are likely to book the wrong thing then expect you to sort it out which could end up costing more time than it would to book a dozen flights (and if you book with the likes of BA it could end up costing you a fortune on their 'rapport' 0906 number which is ridiculously expensive - although I guess you will mainly use Iberia).

2) If your tours/hotels are not on absolute guaranteed freesale this could also cause problems, if flights are already booked, and prove very costly.

3) Your customers may not be covered by ATOL, dependent on the method of payment.

4) I'm not sure Costa Rica is a destination which many people would feel comfortable booking online, as it is relatively complex. In my expeeince people are happy to book shorthaul city breaks online, but anything more complex, they prefer to speak to someone.

5) If the airfares are shown separately they may not seem competetive to the likes of Opodo/Expedia whereas if you book the whole lot as a package you can set whatever margin you think is profitable and the customer will pay. In my experience I find it difficult to complete on scheduled flight only, I only manage to make a living from packages or ground arrangements.

I would have thought that you would be as well to use something like TourCMS and load in flights at the lowest classes (I'm assuming this is possible, it seems to be from my limited knoweledge). As you are only operating in one area, when you find out the lowest class has sold for peak dates you can amend them? I've not used TourCMS yet, but since I have signed up for the demo I'm very impressed - I only wish I'd have found it ages ago, before I started looking into developing myself! I think it's great that you can effectively test the system and not have to pay. In the past I have made very costly mistakes by getting into lengthy contracts without being able to 'test the waters'.

Having said that, I'll still be keeping my options open and would definately like to hear of any great new systems out there!

Nicola

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Permalink Reply by Tom Cree on April 1, 2008 at 10:48pm

Thanks Nicola
I think some of the points you make are very valid. We are going to tear down our web site some time this month and re-vamp it including some goodies about SEO I have learnt from contributors on here. You are also right about flights varying in cost. At the moment we do the physical booking- Continental- Delta-(in extremis) American or Iberia. Certainly never BA (too expensive so we are terminal 5 exempt!) However I just thought (and still do) that a nice assist for a client booking his/her holiday would be to say "you can also book yr flight with us!" We didn't really want to make much on the flight element but wanted to simply offer it as a service.
You identified the problem I saw which is that the flight search engine has to be already loaded with his holiday dates so that he/she cannot make a mistake. Im also becoming persuaded that booking a holiday like that online is too scary for many people. So we are re-thinking our whole strategy. Regarding the ATOL or TTA coverage that is why we cannot use a nice simple seach engine such as the one offered by WWTE since it searches airlines direct and we are restricted to searching consolidators so we have to load the individual consolidator info into the Search Engine as well as any other goodies we want (Hotels, Car hire etc)
Oh! I have been offered one that does the job for a mere £70,000 for the base product. Of course it can also do things we don't need (Launching space shuttles whilst cooking the lunch etc)
I may have tracked down a system and I will soon know a) whether it does what is needed and b) if it is this side of £5000. I'll keep you posted!!!
I must confess I have not thoroughly looked at Tour CMS and have waited for Alex to leap in and suggest it?? (Alex are you there???)
Cheers
Tom

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Permalink Reply by Alex Bainbridge on April 2, 2008 at 1:34am

Hi Tom,
Yes am here (even at 1.30 am.... just been working on testing a code release).

I haven't suggested TourCMS (yet) as I really don't want to promote TourCMS at every opportunity.... as I want this community to be able to reach their own conclusions. (Thanks Nicola for your positive review!)

My advice Tom is that you start trading with what you have (and doing flights manually via TTA). You may find you are trying to solve a problem that isn't as much of a problem as you think it is - and other aspects of your business processes may be more pressing.

My view is that, as a small tour operator, money is best spent on marketing and product development than travel technology.... so go with a less expensive system and keep your tinder dry. You could always manually load a few "stub" flights into a res system (unconnected) and see what the takeup is by your customers.... if they go for it .... then you may want to invest in it later...

If you are redoing your website - are you going to ask on this forum for a review!? Go on, be brave!

Only a thought. Alex

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Permalink Reply by Tom Cree on April 2, 2008 at 8:34am

Hi Alex
Yes I agree. Regarding the site we will "hang it " or host it or wahtever the jargon is, on a private address (dont ask me. Its our techie that does all that) and then ask this forum for a full on review. Now Nicola mentioned something that we are working towards and that is a site that sell short-long-citybreak-hotels-cars etc in other words a general site but that will take us a bit of time cos we are waiting for a general search engine offered by TTA (or it will be and the say mid June)
But Nicola, we are also looking at a site for New Zealand. Partly cos I have chums there and know it myself. However, we are working out travel methods. One way is via LAX and if you do it in one great belt it is crippling (13 hrs to Lax and 13 hrs to Auckland)
So we need to offer something interesting for a one or two days stopover. Going that way I suppose Disneyland. The other way offers HKG or Singapore.
(Trying to avoid Aus)
Your views???
Cheers
Tom

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Permalink Reply by Nicola Grimshaw on April 2, 2008 at 10:49am

Hi Tom,

Only just seen your last post... I would suggest carefully looking at the schedules of all airlines that fly into NZ. You might find something a bit more unusual that you wouldn't necesaritly think of straight away and you clients won;t get offered everywhere they look! I had a client recently going to Melbourne who wanted to also do a beach (preferably Bali) and a city. I began looking at BA, Malaysian & Singapore but eventually found a fantastic deal with Emirates with stopovers in KL and Dubai and flights with Air Asia from KL to DPS (leaving a couple of days in KL at each side as I'm v cautious about low cost airlines).

I'm afraid I'm not really an expert in Australasia or flights so I probably can't offer more help. Whilst I understand you are setting up a tour operation rather than a travel agency, in the first instance, as a member of TTA I would perhaps suggest acting as an agent and using the knowledge of a tour op who specialises in the area? Or if that thought really horrifies, using a consolidator like Trave 2/4 or Goldmedal who have specialist departments. As your knowledge and confidence grows you can easily 'become' a tour operator in your own right.

Just my thoughts anyway.

Nicola

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