Forum OpenACS Q&A: travelbooking module concept, who's interested?
I know Jerry has an interesting travel booking concept, and once connected to the updates on Bart's e-commere initiative we have a paymnet interface also. Combine it with Rochael's chat/crm ideas into a TRAVEL TRADE MODULE we could have a real marketable solution... Build it into a subscribtion format, that pays for the the hours (and more) the hackers that put it all together, and you end up with a concept that makes money for you guys aswell. The study results below are only based on US experiecnes. I am pretty sure this is a global problem. I have been asked to become European news editor for tad, a network of 1700 potential users. Their foum is based on opensource php but as I am concentrating on creating a connection to Europe that shouldn't be a problem.
SAN FRANCISCO -- A new survey revealed the extent to which technology fails to meet the needs of tour operators and hence the extent to which operators have not benefitted from technology the way other travel segments have. The operators' greatest need, the report said, is "extreme flexibility" in their reservations systems. Fifty-nine operators were interviewed in depth as part of a project undertaken by Atinera, a 2-year-old software developer, created by Amadeus and Fourth Dimension Software and based here. Atinera, which creates products for tour operators and other travel suppliers, wanted to get a better idea of the needs of the marketplace.
On the distribution side, 89% of tour operators that sell through agents said they get at least 85% of those sales by telephone; further, more than half (53%) of all operators surveyed get all their agent bookings by phone. Seventy-three percent of operators that take direct bookings also said they get at least 85% of those sales by phone.
Fifty-nine percent of the operators said they take reservations over the Internet, but most of that booking activity is via e-mail request forms, not real-time booking engines; in addition, among survey participants, there is no selling through the agent res systems for operators with less than 100,000 passengers a year.
Also, tour firms that place greater emphasis on selling direct to the public are somewhat more likely to take bookings over the Internet, as indicated by these numbers: Forty-seven percent of operators said they take consumer bookings on line while 36% said they take agent bookings on line.
Consumers respond by making a slightly higher portion of their bookings over the Web, as revealed by these findings: Nineteen percent of operators take more than 5% of their total consumer bookings from the Web while the comparable figure for travel agents is 16%.
However, the overwhelming bulk of operator sales come through travel agents, whether electronic or not. Sixty-two percent of operators said they receive at least half of their sales through agents; 32% rely on agents for 90% to 100% of sales.
On the other hand, only 24% do more than 50% of their sales direct to the public while 16% do less than 5% and 21% do no sales direct.
As for internal systems, more than half of respondents said they were dissatisfied with their reservations setup, and 80% are using outdated res systems. Nine percent (the smallest) have no system at all.
Sixty-four percent said they had some, generally limited ability for dynamic packaging, meaning the ability to assemble tour packages at the point of sale, drawing from multiple inventories and assigning prices according to predefined rules. Also, few have interfaces with airline res systems for integrating air bookings into itineraries.
Less than half (47%) of operators knew the average time devoted to each reservation, and still fewer (only 16%) knew their average cost per transaction.
The operators said that a capability for customer relationship management would be very important going forward, but few have much technical capability now.
The operators also said travel agents as the conduit and call centers as the method for getting bookings were of top importance currently, but they assigned a high-importance rating to customer-direct sales and the Internet for future distribution.
Toward, a trade group focused on technology for tour operations, said it will adopt the study as a resource paper for its working committees.
