In today’s AI-driven world, where innovation is touching spikes and the market is saturated with innumerable options, how do you choose the best?
Moreover, in the travel industry, which has an expected growth rate of 5.1% globally over the next decade, investors and innovators are setting new bars by introducing best travel CRM software to their travel business that speaks of advanced technology and address the evolving demands of modern travelers.
With the growing LLM and machine learning, there’s a pool of competition and no dearth of travel CRMs that are highly automated.
But is that the only criteria for business owners?
What about your business size/ What about adaptability? Will it be convenient enough to respond to changing market dynamics? What about the pricing factor?
Well, 87% of travel agents and DMC operators have reported that – automation is not just the only solution. While automation helps to manage the business smoothly, any tool has to be future-proof to meet the future demands of the industry.
On that note- Let’s find out how to define the best travel CRM tool for your business:
Features: The Deciding Factor
When choosing the best travel CRM for your business, It all comes down to – the features. It is the deciding factor and segregates the product from the herds of choices.
A Travel CRM that automates the workflow. streamlines the operation, saves you time and effort, increases your business efficacy, and gives you ample scope for customization that supports your current growth and future vision are the checkpoints to consider while choosing the best.
Here are the 6 best non-negotiable features a travel CRM should have:
1. Automation
57% of DMC tour operators have recorded that smoothening out the whole business operations has remained the biggest aspiration to say yes to travel CRM software.
While business owners have different motivations – The automation feature serves the purposes when it comes to increasing business efficacy, smoothening business operations, and reducing manual work hence manual errors.
With automated features set up in your travel CRM, your team can work cohesively to get all the timely updates in real-time. If there’s a phone call or an email or a quotation has to be sent out to a prospective lead- your team gets an automated reminder for that.
For example- a customer scans your website and fills in all the travel details but stops midway and doesn’t proceed. The CRM automatically sends out an email with a personalized itinerary along with a special discount to nudge your potential lead.
What could be a better management for lead nurturing? Further, with automated reminders, you will also get notifications for payments. No more hassle of missing out on payment dates. This strengthens your relationships with your vendors and builds trust.
2. Centralized Dashboard
With a centralized dashboard, you can have a full-fledged view of every single business operation. The status of the booking queries, generated booking vouchers, no of bookings done, failed bookings, and the status of quotations- all you can see updated in one single platform.
It further helps you to gain a deeper insight into teams’ collaborative efforts, develop a better strategy to nurture leads, improve customer relationship management, and make your team self-sufficient.
Some of the advanced travel CRM software comes with a dashboard that enables you to customize it according to your business needs.
3. Customized Itinerary Builder
Another crucial feature to look into in a travel CRM is how quickly the tool can generate customized itineraries. Some advanced CRMs can create instant customized itineraries within 60 seconds.
The best one enables you to create itineraries with automated costings saving you time and effort. This is essential to thrive in a highly competitive industry.
Where customers have innumerable options to choose from – your job is to make things accessible and handy to them. Remember customer satisfaction speaks a lot about your business. Don’t let the chance go by.
4. Real-Time Data Analytics
Things can get only improvised if you can measure it. The best travel CRM will give you real-time data analytics that enables you to study your business closely.
With real-time data analytics, you can identify customer engagement rate, individual performance, the efficacy of your sales team, the performance of the marketing team, the status of the strategy implemented, customer behavior patterns, and many more.
It eliminates the consuming tasks of manual reporting by enabling your team members to pick up the report handy.
For example, if you have recently launched an email campaign, with data reporting- you can track the rate of engagement, the open rates, the click rates, and the conversion rates at any given time.
5. Payments Tracking Feature
A proper cash flow in the travel industry business is essential to run a smooth business. One of the non-negotiable features of travel CRM is payment tracking. Without it, your business will go haywire.
The payment tracking feature enables you to keep track of inbound payments, outbound payments- overdue, refunds, and upcoming payments. Additionally, you can keep track of your customer spending graph.
And that’s jackpot data you can optimize to strengthen your lead nurturing strategy. Also, the tool enables you to generate proforma invoices directly without being dependent on the accounts team. That surely speeds up the invoicing process.
6. Streamlined Bookings
The foundation of any travel business lies in its efficacy in managing bookings. It sets a status for standard business. Streamlined bookings make it possible for you to organize your bookings in one place.
Travel CRM with this feature effortlessly helps you to collaborate with your suppliers, and confirm the booking. It also enables you to make changes if required.
Your team will get real-time updates on the flight status, accommodation status, payment status, and travel updates that need to be sent out to your customers.
Further, it provides real-time updates on end-moment changes, and cancellations, if there are any from the customer’s end, and gives you a scope to adjust it accordingly that can avoid revenue loss.
Moreover, with a one-click booking voucher, your customers can get all their travel-related information in one document from flights to locations to transport to excursion activities- eliminating the hassle of carrying multiple documents with multiple information. This becomes handy for clients when they have booked multiple locations in a single tour.
Final Words
While the market is saturated with innumerable options to choose from- deciding the best travel CRM tool boils down to advanced features like- booking management, payment tracking, data analytics, centralized dashboard, quick itinerary builder, and automation. You can never go wrong with a travel CRM having these features in one tool.
Another important factor to consider while choosing the best CRM is your business size. How big or small your business is – accordingly you can decide and segregate if there are any features that you can pass. That will also impact your pricing which is yet another crucial factor to consider.
Lastly, it is essential to not overlook whether the tool supports customization and will it afford your future needs.
