Selling and how to sell are the most important skill sets for every travel retailer. Mastering effective selling techniques is crucial for driving bookings and customer loyalty. Embracing personalized customer experiences can significantly enhance both offline or online interactions and sales outcomes. Here’s 5 things every travel business should be doing to boost bookings:
1. Welcome Customers With A Warm Greeting
Yes, it sounds very simple but welcoming everyone with a smile shows positivity. Moreover, It also shows your interest in customers. For example, you can impress them with a smile and welcome, along with a greeting like “Hi! How are you? “or” “Welcome to ABC Travel” or “I wish you an enjoyable journey!” As you know, the first impression is the last impression. Therefore, a smile should be the first impression from your end. As a result, it will help you deliver a great reservation experience. Remember, most leisure travellers are excited about their travel plans and they are sharing that excitement with you.
2. Explore Possibilities
The world changes constantly, and travel agents need to be aware of what people require in order to grow and improve how their business works. Streamlining the work process by partnering with other services to grow a business is a good method. Hiring a marketing service or signing up for referral services allows some agents to find more leads and focus on being a travel agent.
3. Understanding Your Customers’ Needs
We have one mouth and a pair of ears for a reason! The most crucial need in travel selling is understanding your customers’ needs. For this, sales and reservation executives must interact with customers and listen to their preferences, likes, and maybe dislikes. Furthermore, observe their previous booking behaviours to understand their interests. You must see what they intend to book and ask them questions about their choice of airline or hotel options to understand their purchase mindset. Furthermore, you must understand the reason for some specific bookings. All these things will help you understand what customers are actually looking for. In this case, you can suggest destinations and services based on their interests.
4. Engage In Cross-selling And Upselling
Upselling and cross-selling are sales techniques to recommend other relevant services to customers. While upselling focuses on selling a higher-end service than the original one, cross-selling focuses on selling complementary or related products. An example of upselling would be to recommend that customers buy a fully inclusive package holiday when they have come to book a flight-only. An example of cross-selling would be to encourage customers to purchase an airport transfer service for a weekend city destination they have booked a hotel at. For both of these travel sales skills, you must consider the right timing to make your recommendations. The recommended service must not be too expensive, and the additional purchase must add value to the traveller’s journey. The best time is when the customer has finalised the reservation or just thinking over what to match with it.
5. Technology
Technology can be a driving factor in helping you to manage your travel enterprise more efficiently. Don’t overlook it! Portway Systems is a travel technology company powering small-to-large enterprises. We understand that running a travel business can be challenging. Faced with increasing competition, travel businesses must move quickly to meet customer needs while addressing complex technological demands. Managing reservations and keeping accurate information about your clients, prospects, reservations, contacts, operations, and financials is vital to keeping your business on track and running efficiently. That’s why our travel technology suite of products includes the best Travel CRM, Mid & Back-Office, Reservation Management, ERP, and Reporting digital tech-stack. Our key business markets cover the UK & Ireland, Europe, USA, and EMEA.
For more information visit https://portwaysystems.com/
