Things to consider before automating your business operation with TripCreator
What does automation mean for my travel business operation?
Automation means using systems to handle repetitive day-to-day activities, such as returning data of confirmed itineraries automatically to the correct systems when a booking has been confirmed by your customer. It can also mean to go further; to update your internal operation system, your accounting system, your CRM and / or other systems that need to receive updated client, booking and operation data.
As a result, automation can mean many things. It can mean that you choose to automate the entire sales process from supplier to end-customer, meaning that you create itineraries with products and content information from the different reservation systems, and distribute them on your website. When your customer books an itinerary, your customer makes his payment and he gets his booking confirmation, his invoice and his vouchers, and the customer information is pushed into the relevant reservation and / or operation systems, and even accounting system.
Or you can choose to stick to your normal way of communicating to your customer, but when the customer confirms his itinerary, you rely on systems to push the reservation information to the correct platforms, and to send the relevant travel documents to your customer.
Therefore, automation can replace the normal customer communication, be added to the normal communication or not affect the communication at all.
The goal is still the same; to relief repetitive day-to-day activities from the operation; reduce the chance of human error and to allow employees to focus more on other activities, such as sales.
An example of what automation could mean for your business
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Create itineraries with or without integrated products | Insert and prioritise mandatory and / or optional products | Make your itineraries available on your website with availability calendar or date picker widgets or send them directly to your customer | Automatically confirm bookings to your customer whereas the integrated systems are updated automatically |
Let's talk about the road to automation
Automatic operation requires data; data to build itineraries from, and a place to return the result. This data can either be stored in TripCreator, - and returned to TripCreator, or found in the different third party solutions available, and similarly returned back once a booking transaction has been finalised.
However, third party systems are different, and therefore an assessment of those are required prior deciding and changing your operations' future system structure. The first requirement of a third party system which should be connected to TripCreator is an API. API is the acronym for Application Programming Interface, which is a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other. TripCreator is able to connect to (almost) all third party API systems; whether they are reservation systems, operation systems, inventory systems, CRM systems or accounting systems.
Before going forward; a research is in order:
Research whether TripCreator is sufficient for your inventory and reservation needs and / or what third party systems are strong in your market. By this we mean, in order to create itineraries based on automation, you need to have data or access to reservation systems (such as Bokun, Trekksoft, Rezdy, CityBreak) - and they need to host prices and availability in the market area where you're executing your itineraries. Such as for Reykjavík, Bokun would be a good choice as many tour operators in Reykjavik host their products in Bokun.
In order to being able to integrate your chosen system(s) into your TripCreator account, you need to set up an account in the third party system, and make sure you have access to the products or content items. In some cases, you need to create contracts with the different suppliers you intend to buy services from, and in other cases, you get access to these suppliers instantly by signing up to the thirds party service.
- Systems where you need to contract different suppliers within the system are as an example Bokun and TrekkSoft.
- Systems where you gain an instant access to products with live availability and pricing are platforms such as bed-banks, as an example HotelsPro.
This communication is done by you. You create your account, you negotiate your rates, you pay the fees to these platforms according to their pricing structure. Their pricing structure can be anything from free, per transaction, fixed fee, volume based, commission based and so forth.
When assessing what platforms suit your operation, be sure to take note of who is listed as the Merchant of record for the business relationship. What we mean by that is, it has to be known who communicates and invoices the customer. Most companies using TripCreator with integrations have chosen integration partners where the TripCreator user is allowed to be the Merchant of record, and therefore all communication goes through automatic (or manual) actions through TripCreator. Other third party systems might allow affiliate relationships or alike, whereas they will contact your customer (and sometimes not even on your behalf).
See our feature page or
Premium plan page for more information.
If you would like to receive an introduction of how TripCreator could change your day-to-day working environment in terms of overview, proposals and itineraries, sign up to a free trial account, and contact us to get thoroughly introduced to the benefits of using the system.
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You can now start using the TripCreator Plus plan on the terms that you don't pay for the first three months, in exchange for a 6 month, monthly paid contract.
The runway promotion is optional but intended to relief our new Plus plan users from paying subscription fees while settling in, building their inventory and/or migrating content/products, part-taking in demo sessions and so forth.
