With the advent of technology, the travel industry is flourishing enormously. Travel companies are going online and coordinating with global travel content suppliers to aggregate resources from multifarious options. This leads the travel company to become popular among modern travelers. Although the benefits of booking online are evident to the end-user, lots of companies remain loyal to the old over-the-phone booking system, which is time-consuming. People now don’t prefer booking or purchasing travel products from an agency that asks for personal meetings. They rather would love to engage in an online travel agency, which enables them to search, select and purchase from multiple options. With 80% of travelers utilizing the services from travel websites or applications, the importance of online travel agencies is rapidly growing day by day. OTAs are the aggregators of travel product suppliers and play the role of an intermediary between the suppliers and end-consumers.
In a research it was revealed that the 90% of young generations prefer purchasing products online and when it comes to travel, they definitely don’t want to waste their time on standing in a queue to search for flights and book a ticket. Rather they prefer to sit in their comfort zone and get all information related to travel activity. From searching flights and comparing prices among several airlines, updates on their availability, hotel room facilities, searching for top destinations, local guide, transport services and many more activities can be done with a few simple clicks and that too at an affordable price.
An online booking system offers the utmost convenience. As a business owner, your prime responsibility is to see your customer happy and making the booking process convenient for customers is a great way to achieve your goal. When your customers make a booking from your site, it increases the sale of your services. Today, very few travelers book hotels or flights from their website. It is more convenient for travelers to search and book travel itinerary from one channel instead of hopping around from one website to another. The reasons why people prefer OTAs over booking directly from the hotels or flights are following:
- Cheap fares: When your customer book and purchase travel service from an OTA, it provides him with an opportunity to search and compare the prices among various airlines and hotels and with this feature, a user can easily grab the best deal on flight ticket or while booking a hotel room.
- Deals and discounts: Since OTA increases sales of airlines or hotels, so they give a specific commission to the OTAs. So, OTAs on a regular basis can offer discounts and promo code for every deal, so that the user can purchase their services at a very low rate in compare to the market.
- User-friendly: The interface of the website or mobile application of an OTA is designed in a way so that the user can easily get all the required features with a few clicks and get his work done in a few minutes. It makes the booking process fast and convenient; hence the traveler can easily make the travel arrangements without any hassle.
Traveling is an activity that is not going to de-escalate ever and so the needs of an OTA, who hires a travel technology solution that enable them to proffer out of the box services to the clients and let them enjoy the luxury of creating travel itinerary according to their will.