Offering online bookings can help to boost the number of reservations you receive by making it more convenient for your potential guests. You can expect to experience the same benefits that other businesses have once they made the move to sell online. These include but are not limited to: access to a global market, 24-hour business, receiving payments more quickly and attracting customers who would not normally have found you. Depending on the solution you choose, it may also help you to manage your inventory, store your contact database, generate reports and even support your marketing efforts.
There are a number of different options available for you to allow the booking of your products online.
The first and perhaps most common approach would be to hire a web design and development company to add the functionality to your website. The main advantage to this approach is that you can build the system to suit your specific needs. The major drawback of a customized application is that it can be quite expensive. You should expect to pay from $10K - $20K for your own web based booking system. Add another $5K if you don't already have a website.
Another option and less costly solution would be to sell your tours or packages through a hosted web application. With this solution, you can spread your costs over time. For instance you may pay a monthly fee, a commission on the items you sell or a combination of both. You might think that the pros and cons of a system like this would be the opposite of those I described for the custom approach. That is, what you save in cost is offset by less functionality. However, you may be surprised to find that a hosted web service, especially one that was made specifically to sell travel inventory, may possibly have all the functionality you need and then some. A good hosted application should offer most of the following features...
- Detailed product management
- Real time inventory
- Support for multiple payment methods
- Bookings are made through a secure server
- Generate revenue and passenger reports
- Address book or contact database
When comparing hosted applications, make sure that you do the math. Figure out how many bookings you typically receive each month. Multiply the number of monthly bookings by the commission rate that one service may charge. Then, compare this projected monthly commission against the services that charge monthly fees. You may want to estimate a higher number of monthly bookings when doing these calculations. After all, the whole point of offering bookings online is to increase the actual number you receive.
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