Travel Agencies: What are your pain points?

Oh yes, the effect of Covid-19 to our industry was massive, but all around the world the situation is getting slightly better and the business is about to return. The level and the speed of recovery differ by region. In the sub-Sahara region we expect things to change quite soon. If you e.g. look into Nigeria, especially the domestic market is not only almost back to normal, exactly 21 airlines are currently applying for their Airline Operators Certificate; also all international airlines are back in Nigeria. This is happening in other countries as well.

High-time (if not the best moment!!!) to have an honest and deep look into the internal pain point you had before the crises in order to tackle them down now and be ready for the come-back of travel.

Data breach, data inconsistencies, loopholes, incorrect data, data far too late available, no state-of-the-art margin controls, demotivating ADM’s, cross selling not executed, PNR theft, fraud, problems to pay BSP as per difficult debt

This series of small articles will elaborate, why now is the time to look at all your pains or management, Marketing without pre-trip or post-trip initiatives and many many more.and to find out, how travelcenter.africa® with its system, TraviTec is able to eliminate all your pain points.

Data breach & data inconsistencies:

If systems don’t speak to each other, if there are no interfaces in place, the team members physically need take over the “interface role”. What does this exactly mean?

As you are using one or more of the GDS’s (Amadeus, Travelport – Galileo, Sabre), you are creating most of your reservations through these systems. In case your invoicing tool does not read the GDS files (AIR, MIR or IUR), you will need to type in all the ticket information manually into your invoicing tool.

If then your invoicing tool does not integrate into your accounting software, again, you will need to type in all the data manually.

Manual intervention –apart of the fact that it takes ages to transport data and is not efficient at all- comes always along with mistakes and failure.  Wrong ticket numbers, lump up of taxes, wrong names, etc. lead to massive problems in your accounting department as i.e. reconciliations are a big problem. Assume you have a fancy back-office system, all the functionalities will not work as the data is full of errors.

With faulty data in the system, it takes ages for the accounting to correct them. That point comes along with a delay of management relevant data like debtor control, margin control, liquidity reports, etc.

In a low-margin business you will need live management data, live margin controls.

travelcenter.africa® with its product TraviTec provides full and seamless integration of all parts of the process. No inconsistencies, no data loss, all live and seamless and no invest into complicated to handle IT infrastructure.

Next week we will discuss all above mentioned travel agent’s pain point in detail.

Author

Peter HALLEBACH