Travel Portal: Serve a 360-degree Travel Team and Your Customers

The travel industry is widespread and ever-evolving. A few years ago, it included transportation, accommodation, local travel, homestays, and hotels. Now it has also added experiences as a part of the destination offerings rather than just your average sightseeing.

With this growing and expanding definition of travel comes the need to take advantage of all of it fully by travelers as well as travel companies, transportation providers, and accommodation providers.

Traditionally, a travel company would book your transportation and accommodation for you. If it were a special group kind of package for tourist locations, they would have daily, planned itineraries for sightseeing.

As a travel company, this was hard enough to put together. Tours had to be divided into categories based on the type and age of the travelers. You cannot have anything that is not child friendly for a family holiday group. At the same time, you cannot plan a slow day for younger travelers.

Putting together such a trip used to take a lot of research and investment in terms of ensuring bookings, security of the places of interest, accommodation, etc. And profits were not always ensured because there are too many things that you cannot account for in a one-size fits all kind of trip.

Apart from this, traveling anywhere is not always for pleasure. There are necessary trips you have to take, business trips, emergency trips, and so on. Booking a trip in any of these cases should be simple.

As a travel company, your goal has evolved from getting people to places to ensuring they have everything they need at said places. This goal puts a lot of responsibility on you and your staff.

To fulfill such a goal day in, day out, you need the right tools, and one such tool is a Dynamics 365 portal for travel. Such a travel portal can handle your entire business seamlessly, and will open up your business to more audiences as well as partners. Let’s take a look the different sides of it so you know exactly what way it works for you, your staff, your partners and your customers:

For you, the admin:

The Dynamics 365 portal for travel takes the hassle out of maintaining a business. Getting a business like this up and running is not too hard, because there are way too many success stories to follow. However, maintaining it consistently and growing in such a saturated market is harder. Here’s what the admin can do with a travel portal:

• Data (lots and lots of it)

The insights you can get with a travel portal will change the way you conduct your business. You will be able to see destinations that are popular and what factors affect it, see popular modes of transport that work for each destination, etc. With this information, you can offer discounts to capture leads.

• Offers and discounts

With the travel portal, you can update offers and run marketing campaigns that help capture leads and turn them into customers. You can easily see what offer or campaign a customer interacted with, so it helps you build your marketing strategy accordingly.

• Partner/customer onboarding: 

Easily onboard partners and customers by creating credentials for them. Automatically give them access to the modules they need. Partners get edit rights to data regarding them, and each customer also gets rights to their own data. Let both parties update and maintain their personal/contact details.

For the Partner

• Dashboard:

Partners can configure a dashboard that shows them their trending properties, or transportation tickets. For experience partners, they can have glanceable sales numbers per week so they can plan and curate the experience they offer.

• Reports:

Partners can log into their account on your travel portal and can make detailed reports about their sales numbers, demographic details of their customers, what is selling better and when, etc. Each partner only has access to their own reports, so there is never any compromise in security.

• Profile management: 

For a travel portal, the partners’ profile includes their information, required paperwork, and their offerings. If a partner is a candle making workshop in multiple locations in a country, and they want to add a ceramic workshop to it, specific to making candle holders, they can easily do so themselves. It will be offered to the customers if they come looking for something of the kind.

For your staff:

• Task management:

Your staff can see the territories and customers assigned to them. They can answer queries for them, where required, and ensure there are no changes in their bookings. The staff can even intervene into some interactions on behalf of the client, where required.

• Dashboard: 

Staff members also get a dashboard that can show them relevant information, like how many clients are under their allocation or if new partners have signed up, what their offerings are, etc.

For your customer:

• All-in-one booking experience: 

Customers can take advantage of booking their transport, accommodation, as well as relevant experiences right from one place! Based on this, they can build a custom itinerary that works for the way they want to travel.

• Change or cancel bookings:

With a self service Dynamics 365 portal for travel, customers have a clear path to change or cancel their booking as they need. They can check their available options, fees they will incur and then update it smoothly.

• Reminders and documentation 

Customers will get reminders about upcoming trips, web check in, consent requests for experiences and so on within the portal. They will be able to access relevant rules and regulations about their entire trip from within the portal, so it also serves as a comprehensive knowledgebase of sorts.

These are only some of the ways that a travel portal takes care of your travel business in the 360-degree way. Leave even one part out, you will just be another average travel consultant. As a travel business owner, you are in charge of ensuring your customer has the trip they need – from a fun vacation to a helpful emergency journey.

This is how you can ensure it. Consult a portal development company who has gone around the block a few times to know they will never recommend something without their full heart in it. Take your requirements to them, and they will have something that meets your needs.

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