Top 10 Must-Have Features of Online Booking Systems
As a tour and activity provider, the last thing you want is to get an alert that one of your tours is overbooked. It might seem like a good problem to have — so many people want to enjoy your tour — but it can be a stressful situation to manage. This is when your customer service skills are put to the test, and you want to do what is best for your guests, your business and your sanity. Here’s how to deal with overbookings:
Take a Deep Breath, and Understand That It Happens
Don’t panic. Overbooking is fairly common in the travel industry, and your guests will be patient if you provide them with a solution promptly. When you are selling through multiple channels, overbooking is always a risk. If it happens, contact guests in order to see if they can switch to the next tour. Offer them a discount or a premium benefit for the confusion. Make it a positive experience, and let your customer service skills shine through.
Create a Waiting List for Your Tours
A waiting list is beneficial for both you and your customers. When a tour has been sold, customers can opt to be put on the waiting list. If you have any last-minute cancelations, you can quickly contact the customers on the list and see if they are interested in joining the tour. Once you have a waiting list created for each tour, you do not have to stress as much about overbooking. Instead of selling too many seats for one tour, customers will simply be redirected to the waiting list where they can choose to input their information.
Invest in an Online Booking System to Prevent Overbooking in the Future
When your distribution network includes multiple channels, you need to implement an online booking system that offers live availability to all of your agents. Live availability ensures that everyone can see the most accurate information about your tours and activities in real-time. An agent will instantly know if a tour has been sold out, and therefore it will not be overbooked. Instead, the agent can offer the guest information about your waiting list, and the guest can decide if they want to sign up. By automating the booking process, you no longer have to manually handle bookings from multiple channels. This significantly reduces the risk of overbooking your tours.
Overbooking is relatively common in the travel industry, whether you are an airline or a tour and activity provider. The key to dealing with overbookings is treating your customers with respect, and making sure that everyone still gets to enjoy one of your fabulous tours. Of course, once you have successfully maneuvered through this situation, you will want to prevent it from happening again. With Rezdy, you won’t have to worry about overbooking anymore. By automating the booking process, Rezdy prevents overbooking even when you are selling through multiple channels.
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Simon has over 15 years’ experience as an IT professional. He also has extensive experience in the travel industry from being an around-the-world traveller and managing a dive centre in Southeast Asia for over 3 years. Simon is now dedicated to providing the best online booking solution for tours and activities operators; he is the brains behind Rezdy.Outside office hours Simon is a true activity addict – mountain biking, sailing, swimming, beach volleyball – just to name a few. But most of all he loves diving in Australian waters.