The NiCHE system currently deliberately handles larger and more complex tours through enquiries and simple cheaper tours through direct booking. The reason for this is that we found that number of sales and average sales amount increased when an expert sales consultant handled an enquiry, rather than a direct booking.
The online booking forms get too complex and we have seen many abandoned bookings or the PAX called instead. A well formatted enquiry with an automated fast quoting process is ‘the sweet spot’ in online niche travel sales.
Specialist travel is all about service and expertise. Am I right?
So we have streamlined our system to enable great service with very little effort (client with 7.5 million turnover manage with 6 consultants – some from home).
For the long tail of travel an enquiry based system will give you the better bottom line. Guaranteed.
The automated system also has more pitfalls; mainly legal ones. If you want to collect money online through e-commerce you are required to guarantee the availability of the product. So you would need a guaranteed allotment of rooms from the Hotel XYZ in order to sell rooms. You would also need to be able to guarantee a seat on that flight from ABC to XYZ.
Alternatively you could collect the Credit card details without processing them, confirm everything and charge then. Messy and outdated practice… We don’t do that.
Our system makes the enquiry process so easy and painless and gets the PAX to talk to a sales person. That person can then cross-sell or up-sell and bind the PAX to your brand. It is non threatening/no strings attached and the success rate is very high. The back-office processes don’t take up time and can be split among the team.
We do recommend that one consultant ‘holds hands’ along the whole enquiry and booking and is the direct contact person for the PAX. A quote gets sent within 3 minutes, follow up set automatically, new quote can be generated or original quote accepted. Turned into invoice and automatically all TO DO items for this trip will be set etc…
If that consultant is not available another consultant can take over easily with all the infos and deadlines in his/her TO DO list.
Online itinerary building and payment is somewhat successful for price driven mass tourism. However, it is our experience that the niche PAX are price sensitive but mainly they want to have a relationship with ‘their expert’ and the confidence that their most precious time of the year will be a wonderful experience.
