How Do Travel Management Services Work?
The term travel management service refers to the strategic management of various aspects of travel that may include organizing trips, tracking travel expenses, arranging transportation, and more. A travel management system is essentially a platform that may be operated by an individual, a business, travel agency or an organization to make necessary travel arrangements on behalf of a client. It encompasses a wide variety of services such as booking flights, finding accommodations, managing travel inventories, reporting, offering add-on services, providing visa assistance, insurance assistance, and more.
What Do Travel Management Services Include?
Travel management service companies have dedicated specialists who have a lot of experience and expertise in their fields. Along with a range of services, they provide excellent customer assistance to their clients to make their travel experience hassle-free. Here is a list of services typically provided by travel management companies.
Personalized Offerings
Travel management services can tailor their services to match client expectations and fulfill their needs. They can modify or create travel policies specific to the types of travelers such as corporate, business, or leisure travelers. Using the data and knowledge about the client preference, they can offer personalized recommendations to appeal to a wide demographic. However, the level of personalization varies with different travel management companies.
Competitive Fares
The extensive travel inventory of a travel management company offers cost-saving opportunities to their clients and agents alike. With access to a wide range of travel vendors, they hold expertise in negotiations to provide their clients with budget options and special member-only rates.
Exclusive Discounts
The services of travel management companies are not limited to simply fulfilling the basic travel requirements of their clients. To retain their customers, add value and inculcate loyalty, they also offer member-exclusive discounts. This helps their customers secure the best rates on airfare, hotel accommodations, cruise booking, car rentals, and more. Frequent discounts and deals help businesses maintain a competitive edge and lead to increased customer retention.
Emergency Medical Services
In the current unprecedented times, COVID-19 has brought new challenges for businesses and customers alike. Providing access to emergency medical services to the customers during their travel ensure that they feel safe throughout their journey. Instant access to experienced doctors and medical services via SMS, video, or phone call at no extra cost to customers guarantees their peace of mind in case of any medical emergency.
Cashback Rewards
One of the most attractive services of a travel management company includes unique rewards and deals that help their customers with extra savings on already discounted shopping products or services. Providing cashback rewards adds an element of surprise and elevates customer experience so that they don’t have to go anywhere else.
Value-Added Extras
Value-added services aim at providing exclusive services to the customers post-consumption to promote loyalty and encourage repeat shopping. As a travel management company, you can provide a range of value-added extras apart from the basic travel arrangements. These services may include visa assistance, planning tailored itineraries, advice on travel destinations, flight seat upgrades, complimentary breakfast with hotel booking, and more.
Roadside and Insurance Assistance
To provide your customers with extra peace of mind, travel insurance at no additional cost is one of the best services. Complimentary travel insurance is a great way to show your customers that you have their back and they can simply focus on trip planning without worry. Integrating 24X7 roadside assistance with travel packages helps customers in event of any crisis on the road such as a flat tire, towing, or gas delivery. Corporate clients can derive benefit from these services as it will help prevent unwanted delays and reduce the impact of missed shifts.
Group Travel Services
Travel management companies hold expertise in planning group travel itineraries for corporate, leisure, and other travelers that help save time and extra effort. Apart from planning and managing flights, accommodation, and other bookings, they also take care of travel activities for a memorable trip experience. Customers can choose from an extensive catalog of activities such as event tickets, guided tours, food tours, excursions, art classes, and more.
Multiple Currency and Payment Options
To ensure a smooth booking experience, travel management companies offer multiple currencies and payment options for both customers and agents. If you plan to book online, you are in charge of selecting the payment or currency option of your choice. This empowers customers while driving engagement and retention for businesses. It also helps travel agents to secure more customers and facilitate seamless booking in any part of the world.
Advanced Reports
Travel management is more than simply organizing the trip. They aim to deliver what they promise and in a bid to do that, they utilize advanced reports concerning customer preferences and feedback. This information is utilized to personalize trips, offer tailored recommendations and create useful marketing campaigns. The best travel management companies draw conclusions from customers’ previous experiences to provide more reliable and high-quality experiences in the future.
Multi-Lingual Support
As a business, you may cater to a wide geographical area and expand your outreach for higher visibility and engagement. Therefore, providing multi-language support creates an impactful experience and enhances brand value. Customers can interact in their language of choice and make purchases with ease. This customer-centric approach helps businesses to remain profitable.
Exceptional Customer Assistance
The success of a great travel management company lies in the way they assist and interact with their customers. To cultivate loyalty and keep customers engaged, it is crucial to offer unmatched customer assistance. Providing 24X7 assistance throughout the entire customer lifecycle helps build a loyal following and strengthen your brand. As a travel management company, you can offer personal assistance to your VIP or most loyal customers and solve their problems anytime they need. Customer assistance can also be offered via chat bots, email, phone calls, or text. Personal concierge services assist customers in making quick dinner arrangements, booking salon or spa appointments, assistance in traffic, emergency assistance, and more.
How To Start A Travel Management Company
Here are the steps you can take to start your own travel management company with extensive offerings:
Find Your Niche
The first step in starting a travel management company is understanding your goals and interests. Once you identify your passion, you can decide whether you want to start a dedicated travel portal or outsource your services to a travel agent or start an independent business. This will allow you to evaluate your options and plan strategically for the next steps.
Conduct Market Research
Market research helps you understand thoroughly about your customers. If you are planning to operate in a particular geographic area, you can fetch information about potential customers to build better products or services for them. You can obtain information on your competitors and reach potential customers through online surveys to understand the current industry trends and how to leverage them.
Legal Aspects
Your travel management company should fulfill legal requirements to become functional. This is an important prerequisite in starting your firm. Fill out forms to register your company and make sure that you abide by the state laws during the registration and licensing process. Once you have completed the legal formalities, you are good to go.
Determine Your Funding
It is important to remember that starting a travel management company is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Depending on your location, size and type of the company and its offerings, the financial requirements may differ. The funding requirements of online and offline businesses are different as well. You can look for angel investments, take a loan from financial institutions, or work with your savings to set up the company and meet initial expenses.
Choose A Travel Fulfillment Service
The next step involves choosing a travel fulfillment service or travel club platform. Having an efficient and engaging travel booking platform in place helps delight your customers and ensure a smooth booking experience. Travel club also lets you customize your offerings and services as per your customers and business requirements. You can choose from different types of booking engine APIs allowing your customers to search and book airline tickets, hotel, cruise, car rentals, and other travel-related services. You can choose to market those services under your own brand name and logo. After you build your reservation system, you should start to put more work into planning and setting up business goals.
Hire Employees
Both online and offline businesses need a team of professionals to manage their varied aspects such as booking, billing, subscriptions, and more. For an online travel management company, you will need to hire software experts to ensure that there are no glitches on the booking website or app. Travel club also lets you outsource professionals on a temporary basis to get your business started and handle travel portal services. They can also educate you on developing and optimizing relevant travel solutions to cater to a wider audience and derive a consistent stream of revenue from your brand.
Devise A Robust Marketing Strategy
After you have your travel management business up and running, the next crucial step is to devise a marketing strategy that best aligns with your business goals. By accessing customer data and analytics, businesses can personalize travel packages to meet customer expectations while increasing engagement. Having a solid marketing plan will give you a competitive edge over your competitors. You can develop an implementation schedule for your campaigns and measure them accordingly to choose what works best for your business. A well-thought marketing plan along with attractive travel offerings will generate a profitable business in the long run.
Promote Your Business
There are many ways to promote your business. Social media campaigns, newsletters, email marketing, and online advertising are some of the ways to reach a wider audience, increase brand awareness, and attract prospective customers to your brand according to the location, interests and other parameters. You can also hold online contests, quizzes, and discussions to find your target audience and engage with them in a meaningful way.
How Custom Travel Solutions Can Help Get You Started
Custom Travel Solutions offer dynamic and innovative travel booking platforms to fulfill all your business needs for a fully customizable, state-of-the-art travel management system. With its dedicated travel fulfillment and consulting services, businesses can get access to affiliate management services, vendor negotiation services, auditing, marketing solutions, sales and after-sales assistance, international travel agency listing, consultancy services, to name a few.
Depending on the size and scope of your travel management company, you can choose a generic travel club brand or customizable departure travel club to offer a one-stop booking solution to your customers. The services and offerings can be tailored to meet your unique business requirements. The engage API lets your customer access the travel inventory under your brand identity. Additionally, Custom Travel Solutions can handle subscription management, billing, manage and modify bookings, appoint temporary executives to help with your business model, perform audits, and more. The experienced team of consultants at Custom Travel Solutions will work with you to create marketing campaigns, provide unparalleled customer assistance, manage different travel inventories, generate reports, and more to streamline revenue and position your brand for growth.
Our member engagement service helps manage all aspects of the customer lifecycle, such as on-boarding and post-booking assistance to drive engagement and promote loyalty. Access to analytics provides useful insights into customer behavior and preferences for designing better marketing campaigns and providing tailored recommendations. You can track key performance indicators to implement key growth strategies with measurable results.