Helping small tour operators and niche agents with travel ecommerce
Web design and booking engines
Hi, I have set myself a 12 month lead time to open a specialist agency dealing in high end accommodations / tours in a specific region. I am obtaining my agents qualification next year but also want to invest seriously in my website with appropriate design etc to meet my market's expectations. Although I expect that personal service is what will ultimately impact my success (or otherwise) clearly I need to have a site which also caters to the instant / realtime booking sector. I can find designers and SEO consultants with not too much difficulty, but am totally confused about booking engines. Do they have a block of suppliers which you are limited to using? What if as a specialist agent you only have a select list of suppliers that you want to use? How do they charge for the use of the engine eg commission based or licence purchase? There are so many booking technology suppliers out there but it's very difficult to understand what product you are actually getting amongst the rhetoric. Any guidance appreciated!
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Alex Bainbridge on -
Hi Riya
Personally I would start looking at tours, and then do hotels as a secondary aspect. Hotels is highly competitive and really, as a small company, you will struggle to take on the leading online travel agents.
Therefore find a couple of small tour operators who you want to promote and contact them directly.
But you are going to have to think hard why customers should book with you rather than contacting the tour operator directly. Being a specialist travel agent isn't as easy as putting up a website and hoping a bit of marketing will work.
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Permalink Reply by Riya Thanissorn on -
Thanks Alex, appreciated. I think I wasn't clear enough about my intentions, I'm not principally looking at being on online agent but I have to have a facility to cater to people who would rather book online. I am not interested in large hotels or mass market. Many of the properties I have identified are privately owned and often self contained. You haven't really answered my question about booking engines - is the inventory inbuilt into the booking engine, or is the booking engine a structure for you to add your own inventory (in conjunction with chosen properties)? If it's the case that booking engines only deal with inventory and availability for large chains etc, then I'm probably better off developing relationships with the individual properties but that doesn't assist me with real time booking. The point of my question was so that, over the next 12 months I can better appreciate the technology which is available, and this may in turn affect how I structure the business and its focus, so if you have anything to add I'm sure it would be helpful.
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Permalink Reply by Alex Bainbridge on
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If you do a deal with individual properties, you can take your contracts and load them in software such as TourCMS (our software and sponsors of this forum).
However you need to think about the real time transaction - that probably - in reality - ends up with you receiving an online enquiry request - you communicating with the property - then you getting back to the customer. For unbookable properties via other means, that works just fine. You could even take the credit card details off the customer but not charge it until you know the property is actually available.
If you could do real time bookings with the properties you have identified then they wouldn't be unique to you, would they, as they would be bookable all over the web.
I would be delighted to continue this conversation out of these forums if you wish.
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Permalink Reply by Matt Zito on -
Hi, Riya, regarding booking engines, there are many as I am sure you have found. There are a few things I need more details on before I can help you further.
1. Will you contract directly with the "high end accommodations" yourself or do you plan on aggregating your lodging from another provider?
2. Are you selling only "high end accommodations" or are you packaging in other travel components, ie: car, guided tours, tec.
3. Do you want your client to be able to "buy" in real time or will you just have the client fill out a trip quote request?
I have owned both a lodging property and an online travel agency (tour operator). I can help you once I understand better your business model.
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Permalink Reply by fabrice roland pawlak on
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look at our website ww.terra-explora.com.
We develop our own websites, wea re using SPIP, which is a free tool that permits to organize yourself the content of your website.
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Permalink Reply by Andy Parr on -
The answer I think lies in your market place. You can pay via commission or licence dependent on the service you are going for. I guess if you are looking high end a licence may be best to keep your costs down?
We are in the final stages of our inhouse booking system but we focus on villas that are privately owned. The owner loads their property, prices, details etc and selects which currency they wish to use. We then supply them with an iframe to load the calendar and booking system to their own site. Bookings are processed within 24 hours of the request but everything goes through online. We have preauth set on the deposit so the payment only goes through once availability is confirmed. If you want to have your own inhouse system I can help you with a quality developer.
Regards
Andy
VIPvillas.com
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Permalink Reply by Riya Thanissorn on
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Hi all and thanks for your responses. The proposal is to promote a collection of properties which will appeal to a certain sector. Andy your approach would be great but it looks like it is best implemented for private properties. I am looking at a mix of properties including some self contained, some boutique and some brand affiliated - it sounds messy but they will have a common theme. The problem with it is that the hotels are not going to want to load their availability into my site, as Alex has said, they already do that over and over for the big distributors. It may be easiest to just ditch the real time concept and check with all properties once a booking comes through, taking card details and then charging once the booking is confirmed by the end property. I'm still considering it though and will review all the recommended software, Andy any recommendations as to developers will still be helpful too. Thanks again.
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Permalink Reply by Guido J. van den Elshout on
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Riya
The answer to your question is actually quite simple. There are several small service providers who enable small properties to load and maintain their room inventory in one central place for a nominal annual fee. Actually it is the same as the big hotels chains do. They call them channel managers. From where the properties maintain their inventory the service providers couple the available inventory to the so called OTA's (Online Trave Agents) via a two way XML connection. Small properties typically don't have access to GDS because GDS requires a minimal number of rooms (depending on the GDS provider).
So if you set up a website that enables your properties to load to from such a central place, there is no hassle for the properties to maintain yet another allotment...
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Permalink Reply by Ben Colclough on -
Hi Guido,
Can you recommend names of any of these small service providers?
Thanks
Ben
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Permalink Reply by Roin on
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Hi Ben,
Can you explain what are you looking for? Probably our software (Property Manager) can help you: please visit www.ODISSIA.net.
Roin
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http://www.stardekk.be/ seems to do a good job I don't use it myself.
I use http://www.smarthotel.nl/default.aspx
and there are more
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Permalink Reply by Ben Colclough on
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Thanks Guido and Roin
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