Let’s set the scene. You’re a travel agent looking to maximise your bookings for the coming months as the industry continues its recovery following the re-opening of borders. You'd like to think you have everything set up to win over a widening audience, with more travellers booking with agents for the first time.
Or do you?
According to a recent study conducted by ASTA (American Society of Travel Agents) and Sandals Resorts, 44% of people say they’re more likely to use a travel agent to travel post-pandemic.
As ever, there are numerous reasons why, whether it’s seeking the security of a package holiday offered by an expert, or changes to how people traveled, as intrepid jetsetters and causal travellers alike made up for lost time. This idea of ‘revenge travel’ was identified by many in the industry, with a notable rise in ‘bucket list’ and ‘once in a lifetime’ trips booked; which offered, and continues to offer, travel agents the perfect opportunity to demonstrate their exponential value to clients.
The growing demand for agency services is clear as travellers continue to seek more authentic, and meaningful experiences, whilst also requiring personalised advice during the booking process, in order to curate a trip that’s perfectly tailored to their needs.
So, are you making the most of this opportunity? Or are you still undertaking hours of legwork trawling through sites, doing thousands of searches to finalise those all-important deals, while trying to keep up with the changing industry?
Do you have access to exclusive global connections in key destinations all in one place?
You get all this, and much, much more, with Insights. Let's explore how.
Powered by AI-driven data and marketing technology, Insights is a search and marketing platform for travel agents with unbeatable personalised recommendations and customisable marketing materials available at the touch of a button.
It’s packed with intuitive features specifically designed to boost your travel agent marketing, help you tackle current and upcoming travel trends, and skyrocket your success. It enables you to offer only the absolute best travel experiences, ultimately securing more bookings and repeat customers in the long run.
Plus, as more travellers entrust their holidays to travel agents, and with other agents racing to fulfil this demand, having a leg up on the competition is essential.
So, what does Insights actually offer?
You’ll never miss out on a destination trend again with Insights.
Using in-market global data and real-time insights garnered from powerful AI, it allows you to keep track of, and capitalise on, destination trends that are most relevant to your source market.
Insights is powered by:
• historic travel search data
• real-time market data
• an awareness of seasonality
• historic booking and itinerary data
All this ensures that our information is valuable, relevant, and influenced by real bookings, to offer you opportunities that closely match the current and upcoming preferences of your market.
Not only does this enhance the quality of product you can offer your customer, but it boosts your value as a travel agent. You become the best source for the most in-demand destinations and well-rounded travel suggestions most suited to their needs.
This puts you ahead of your competitors and increases the likelihood of them returning to you time and time again.
What makes Insights even better? It’s intuitive, driven by an AI system that actively learns from your behaviour when using the tool.
Why? Because you can’t offer bespoke experiences to your customers without a tool that provides a personal experience for you, as their trusted travel expert.
When you access Insights, you will see Destination cards, which are recommendations based on their opportunity value. These are the destinations that offer the best growth for you based on your current market, customer booking behaviours and competitor activity.
So, once you know your most valuable destination opportunities, how you interact with them tailors your further recommendations.
• Anchor a destination to keep it at the top of your recommendation list regardless of its ranking.
• Save it for later to remove a destination for a period of time, and create a reminder for it.
• Discard a destination to tell Insights you’re not interested.
So not only can you expect to receive data such as demand fluctuations and price decreases in your market, as well as any new hotels added and the most popular month to book suggested destinations – but your recommendations are tailored to you and how you operate.
As a travel agent one of the biggest questions is: how can you ensure you’re offering the most in-demand locations to your customers, while also catering to the current growth demand for travel in a way that’s meaningful and personal?
With Insights, of course.
While it’s no secret that travel agents have undeniable skill and knowledge when it comes to agile customer service and keeping ahead of the curve, Insights allows you to take this not just one step further, but a whole leap.
With Insights you get access to a portfolio of globally sourced, exclusive destinations and hotels, but they are presented in an intuitive way with comprehensive filter options so you can quickly refine your searches based on customer preferences.
You can cater to a wide range of factors, such as: international or domestic locations, destination theme, traveller type, regions, star ratings and more. Not only does this mean you’re able to streamline the booking process, but you’re able to offer them completely bespoke travel opportunities from the outset.
Also, Insights is updated daily, with clear week-on-week trends visible, which you can then leverage to maximise your booking rates.
It goes without saying that the consultation stage before your customer books is one of the most critical, and how you communicate with your customer is vital!
So, the ability to create personalised marketing materials in Insights is a pivotal benefit to travel agents.
Having identified which destinations and hotels most excite your customer by using the filter options, you now have the option to use the Custom Flyer tool to showcase the top choices. You can refine these choices further by star rating, traveller type and TripAdvisor rating for even more bespoke results.
What’s more, you can personalise all marketing materials with your own branding, removing the costly and time-consuming process of creating marketing content from scratch – a huge benefit for independent or home-based agents in particular.
99% of marketers suggest that personalisation helps to ‘advance customer relationships’ and has an ‘extremely strong’ impact on whether that customer books or not, so with feedback like that, we’d say it’s critical to form your relationship on a personal level.
Enhancing your customers’ trips and earning more has never been easier with Insights.
With the 'Mobility & Experiences' section, you can review the most popular mobility products (transfers and car rentals) and experiences in each destination you are researching. These are ranked by opportunity value to you, with key information that you can use to excite and incentivise your customers!
You can interact with these experiences in the same way that you can with destinations – in that you can anchor, save for later or discard the displayed options to ensure that Insights continually recommends the most valuable options for you and your clients.
Cross-selling is one of the most effective ways of boosting your earnings per consultation, and so this integrated feature should be your new best friend while using Insights!
