8 Reasons You Need a Booking System as a Tour Operator
An online booking system elevates customer experiences, processes bookings 24/ 7, reduces your workload, allows you to offer add-ons, helps you reduce no-shows, provides you with important analytics, and helps you look more professional.
Technological advances are changing the face of the travel industry, and online booking systems are one such technology. The aviation and lodging sectors of the travel industry were the first to embrace online booking systems fully, as more and more people book flights and accommodation online.
Given the gains recorded by these sectors, tour operators are now beginning to look at implementing online booking systems. But why would you need a booking system as a tour operator?
This article outlines eight reasons you need a booking system for your tour business. It also reveals one of the best tour booking systems in the market and highlights why you should go for it if you are a tour operator.
Some of the reasons you need a booking system as a tour operator are:
- It allows clients to book your service conveniently
- It allows you to process bookings 24/ 7
- It reduces your workload
- It allows you to offer add-ons and extras to your standard package
- It helps you reduce no-shows
- It provides crucial analytics and insights for growing your business
- It enables you to save on commissions
- It helps you look professional
1. Clients want the convenience of booking directly on your website
An online booking system helps your clients to book your tour tickets and conveniently pay for them.
Know that 80% of customers feel that the experience a company offers is as important as its products/services. Thus, offering customers a better experience is one reason for adopting technology in any sector, including tourism.
These days, people book more and more of their day-to-day life online. For example, virtually all vacationers now book their flights and accommodation online. So, they also search for tours and vacation activities that they can book online, and they become frustrated if they do not find such.
2. Allows you to process bookings 24/ 7
An online booking system allows your customer to book tours round the clock during and outside your business hours.
Tour businesses are hardly open 24/ 7. Sadly, your potential customers may be at work and too busy during your 8 - 5 business hours. Also, your uptime is the downtime of people at the other end of the world.
For this reason, your booking service needs to be open outside your business hours. An online booking system is a solution. The system allows customers everywhere to book for your tours at any time.
One important industry stat is that 40% of online bookings happen after business hours. Thus, an online booking system ensures you are open to customers 24/ 7, so you do not miss out on potential sales.
3. Reduces your workload
An online booking service helps you automate your booking service, giving you more time to focus on providing and improving core tour activities.
An online booking system helps potential clients check tour hours/dates, book a tour, pay online, etc. As more and more of your potential customers use the service, you will spend less time fielding lengthy phone conversations about tour services and availability, cross referencing calendars, and handling credit card transactions.
You can then invest the time gained on promoting your existing tour services or improving them for a better customer experience.
4. Allows you to offer add-ons and extra packages
An online booking system allows you to offer your customers additional services and extras for an extra fee, increasing your revenue.
A mandatory feature of online booking systems is the ability to offer customers extra services during the booking process. Customers booking a service are more likely to include a related service for an extra fee. For example, you may add a short tour to your standard tour package. You may also include fun extras like tour memorabilia or photo packages.
The best service will make these perks visible on the tour landing page and at the actual time of booking. It will also show your customers the benefits and cost savings of adding an extra service to the main tour they come for.
5. Reduces no-shows
An online booking system helps streamline your workload and automate communication with customers to reduce the number of no-shows.
An online booking software allows you to streamline your workload via email automation. This helps you send the right emails to the right people at the right time to ensure that they pay after booking and come for the tours, transforming from potential customers to actual customers.
You can organize your emails based on different triggers as follows:
- Automatically send a welcome email when a customer signs up
- Automatically send a confirmation email when a customer books or pays for a tour
- Automatically send an abandon cart email if the customer does not complete the purchase
- Automatically send reminder emails three (3) days, one (1) day, etc., before the tour date.
6. Provide analytics and insights
An online booking system can provide crucial insights and analytics that help you better understand your tour business.
Data is invaluable to businesses, and online booking systems provide important data that tour businesses can leverage for growth. Tour booking systems can provide you with insights like:
- The time of the day or day of the week when customers book your tour services the most.
- The profile (sex, age, occupation, etc.) of your customers
- Your most popular tour services
- The partnerships that drive the most leads to your tour business.
Such data help you determine what works and what doesn’t for your business, and you’ll know what you can do to grow your business.
For example, knowing what partnerships drive leads shows you where to continue spending money in promoting your tour business. Also, knowing your most popular tours and the profile of your best customers tells you what services to promote and who to target.
7. Allows you to save on commission
An online booking system cuts out middlemen (like third-party booking services), meaning you save money on commissions.
Some tour operators sell tickets via third-party booking portals like Expedia and Booking.com. However, these portals have high commissions, often as high as 30% of every ticket sold.
On the other hand, when using a tour booking software like Roverd, you pay for just the license and nothing more. There’re no middlemen to pay commissions, so you’ll get 100% of your ticket sales.
8. Helps you look professional
You look more professional if your marketing activities lead back to your booking system.
In the digital world of today, your tour business may look archaic if you still process bookings manually. Even when you offer online bookings, you’ll look more professional if customers feel like they never left your site, as opposed to when the booking is processed on third-party sites.
It’s the same reason a custom email address makes you look more professional than a generic email address.
An online booking system's many advantages also confer credibility on a tour business. For example, customers will rate you better if you offer an online booking system that allows them to conveniently check tour availability, book, pay, or cancel.
Final thoughts
Having an online booking system comes with many advantages. As highlighted above, these include elevating customer experiences, processing bookings 24/ 7, reducing your workload, allowing you to offer add-ons, helping you reduce no-shows, providing you important analytics, and helping you look more professional.
Roverd is one tour reservation software that offers these advantages and more.
- Roverd is a simple online booking widget. All you need to do is install a plugin to start booking clients for your tours and travel.
- Roverd has advanced marketing tools. It allows you to create discount codes to help you convert visitors to customers.
- Roverd allows email automation that helps you get your customers back. You can automatically send reminders encouraging customers who abandon their booking to complete it.
- You can make the widget your own by using your own logo and colors in keeping with your company branding. Your customers will feel like they never left your website.
- Roverd has advanced pricing features. You can set detailed prices for different tour services, tour sizes, etc.
- Roverd accepts payments quickly and easily. You can offer your customers the choice of making payments via PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, iDEAL, and Stripe.
Using Roverd's tour reservation software means you can save time and resources and focus on your tour business. Interestingly, Roverd may be the only booking platform offering 24/ 7 live customer service from an actual human, so you’re always guaranteed the best support.
