Must-Have Features in the Travel Business Portal

Gone are the days, when one used to invest days and months to design a perfect traveling plan. Today neither you need to go and stand in queue for transportation tickets nor roam here and there to find the best hotels for the stay. The travel industry has already shifted from offline to online mode, a few years back. Now travellers are ready with their list of traveling wishes, and it’s the responsibility of travel agency business to make their wishes come true.To run a successful travel agency business, one must need travel booking software. Your software must be smart and advanced to ease the process of booking transportation tickets, hotels, restaurants, etc. However, who would like to travel somewhere with the responsibility of looking after other activities?If you are planning to start your traveling agency, here are the must-have features for your travel agency software:
Profile Creation and booking process

The profile creation process on the travel portal should be easy. Allow the multiple profile creation options like creating using email id, through social media, or from mobile number. The profile creation will be the first action taken by the user on your society to book tickets.The booking process should be easy and short. Make sure you are not asking for too much detail in the ticket booking form, as it can divert the user to other travel agency portals to save their time.If your booking process is smooth, the customer will come again and again to book their tickets.
Customization packaging option

For traveling, tour packaging is one of the important features. Today people are very particular about their travel accommodations, activities, food, etc. Offering an option to add and subtract few activities from the travel package, will help the customer to buy the best travel package as per their requirement.Providing limited tour packages will not give your customer the vacation of their dreams. Gone are the days, when people used to make travel plans as per the availability of travel packages in travel agencies. The personalized experience will drag them to visit your travel agency software again for the best traveling experience.Also, offer them multiple packages of a particular destination by making changes like a number of days, stay in the hotel, participation in any local and cultural activities, etc. While buying travel agency software, make sure you are hiring an experienced company.
Payment method

Keep in mind the payment process is the last step of buying your product and services. Provide your customer’s payment flexibility. Offer multiple payment options like third-party payment applications, payment apps, usage of credit or debit cards.As everything is digital and fast now, make sure your payment process is fast and secure. The customer will be adding her personal and bank information, the transaction should be safe for you and the customer both. Keeping multiple payment options will even help international travellers to book tickets or hotels without facing any issues.The more options you will give, the more area of the audience you can attract. Either you can hire software development services to build your Travel agency software from scratch, or buy a white label travel solution like MakeMyTrip from them.
Multi-lingual and currency

How frustrating will it be to convert each word into a local language? While running a travel agency, you will have a wider audience. Your travel agency must be for people from different corners of the world. It is your responsibility to provide a personalized and rich experience to all the visitors.To attract an international audience, your travel agency software must have multiple languages and currencies supporter features. These features will help you to serve customers of different countries and your revenue will be more.There are many countries where people speak their local language. While booking any travel package or ticket, for sure they will check the prices. What if you cut the step of transferring the mentioned currency into local currency? It will be a huge deal for them. Reading content on your software will help them to understand your services and they will visit your software over again.
Search Option

Today, we are just one search away from the required information. The customer will not have enough time to go through your software, in brief, to find what she is looking for. Make sure your travel agency should have the search option feature. It will give the liberty to all the customers to directly find the information they are looking for.Also, you can make it a predictive search. When the customer types the keywords to find the information or services, a drop-down list will be automatically popped up below the search option. This is a great way of eliminating the long list of search results and help the customer to find the relevant information instantly.
Gallery

Will you blindly buy the product without seeing any picture? No, right! For the Travel agency business, the gallery plays an important role. Visuals are the best way to communicate with your audience. Your customers must be looking for breath-taking pictures of their vacation destination. Moreover, it will assist them while choosing hotels, vacation destinations, restaurants, etc.Make sure the gallery has the best pictures. Try to provide multiple pictures for a single destination or service. Also, you can ask your customers to provide their vacation pictures for the credibility of a customer’s travel agency.Conclusion
Traveling is not merely a way of taking a break from regular life, now it has become a profession. People look for the best and affordable packages to travel. These features will help you to build a safe and secure platform for all travellers. Prefer buying the pre-build travel software to avoid the huge investment and last-minute rush. White label travel solutions like MakeMyTrip are the best for people who are new in this business.

Should Web Services Come Out of the “Marketing/Advertising Budget” for a Business?

The aspect of web services is fairly new to business, so the question of where it should be placed within a company’s budget can be confusing. To begin with, web services can mean different things depending on the person. One manager may consider their web design as part of web services, while another executive does not. For most companies, web services will include the design, development, content, applications, and any other items associated with Internet marketing, such as social media.

Therefore, when you are considering where to put web services in your budget, you should consider everything associated with the Internet as included in the definition. Most people would assume that these costs should be included with all other information technology expenses. Although this isn’t wrong, it automatically places web services in an area that is not considered a critical part of the business by most companies. Replacing a computer is rarely as high a priority as promoting a new product. However, lumping web services into the information technology side of a budget is a huge mistake.

Smart companies realize that web services are a great marketing tool that can be used to advertise your business, services, and products to a variety of potential customers. A custom website design is only the beginning. Businesses should understand that web development must go beyond the corporate website. Of course, you want a great web design that will target customers in your area, but to truly achieve growth you must incorporate all aspects of the Internet. Your custom website design should be used as a hub for all other Internet ventures. For instance, blogs and the use of social media are great ways to advertise new products or services. These tools can also be used to grow a loyal customer base. All of these techniques will deliberately draw people to your website.

Businesses are learning that advertising dollars are more effective when they are applied to online marketing. Television and radio ads are no longer generating the revenue they once did. This isn’t surprising, since must consumers now use DVR’s so they can fast forward past commercials or listen to their iPod rather than the car radio. Smart executives know that if you want to increase revenues, you must go where the consumer is. Today, the consumer is on social media sites, like YouTube and Facebook. He or she is using search engines on a daily basis and accessing data on smartphones. In order to gain customers, you must utilize the technologies available that are capturing the consumer’s attention.

So should web services be included as part of your marketing/advertising budget? Absolutely; there is no other place that it should be. In fact, if you are not using web services to market your business, no matter what your website looks like, you are not making the most of it. Web development is more than just creating a web design for the boutique up the street. It must include the use of social media and everything else the Internet has to offer.