How Agency Wallets Can Help Airlines Handle Payments Flexibly

How Agency Wallets Can Help Airlines Handle Payments Flexibly?

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Agency wallets are a gateway to many untouched revenue opportunities for airlines. Airlines are returning to profitability in 2023, but the growth percentage is steep. According to travel experts, this market gap can be fixed by optimizing the revenue opportunities, especially with their tied-up travel agencies.

Why?

Travel agencies contribute almost 40% of the overall profit from travel agencies and 60% of the revenue from leisure and corporate travelers. Travel agencies serving different faces, cultures, and people, revenue opportunities, and payment preferences are expanded. With the world moving towards a decentralized payment system, trying to bundle it with centralized payments will result in missed revenue opportunities, especially with airlines.

An agency wallet is a flexible virtual payment option that stores and handles multi-currency payments worldwide.

What challenges are faced by travel agencies without an agency wallet?

  • They cannot initiate a single payment for ad hoc and group bookings which takes a lot of manual effort and time from the revenue team
  • Ability to handle and offer different types of customer needs namely, group travelers, corporate/business travelers, and leisure travelers
  • Providing payment flexibility in dealing with holiday management, booking prepayments, and payment installments
  • Determining the ways to expand the revenue opportunities for each customer

What challenges are faced by airlines without an agency wallet?

  • Disconnected payment environment, user journeys, and revenue systems leading to revenue loss and leakages
  • No internal flexibility to strategize and streamline the payment system for travel agencies, corporate managers, and general customers
  • Finding ways to fully utilize the back-office operations
  • Less progression, innovation, and providing various payment options

What are the benefits travel agencies will get when they use agency wallets?

Travel agencies will be most benefited from agency wallets due to the nature of their business as they are the main source of revenue for the airlines through group bookings, tourism, corporate travels, and leisure travels.

Let’s see the top 5 benefits that travel agencies get to experience when they use agency wallets,

● Multiple payments at the same time

Travel agencies cannot pay for their ad hoc and group bookings at the same time. In legacy systems, everything is handled via email, calls, and messaging with continuous follow-ups. Agency wallets have the flexible functionality to initiate many consecutive payments.

● Smooth payment modes

Wallets offer instant payments, refunds, cancellation options, coupon codes, and dynamic travel payments. Unlike bank operations which may take 3-7 business days to handle payments, agency wallets have no delays and can offer instant refunds wherever necessary.

● Integrations with multiple booking engines

Airlines will have the flexibility to connect with multiple booking engines without any hindrance in reconciling and payment issues. This will contribute a lot to the airline’s growth due to the extended revenue opportunities with multiple booking engines.

● Easier calculations for the accounting team

There is complete transparency in handling business payments from public travelers to travel agencies to corporate travelers. All the department managers can monitor and evaluate which product or service is the most profitable to the airline and how to leverage it.

● Great customer experience

Seamless payment options is a great advantage any industry can provide for its customers. Travel agencies can operate better with agency wallets featured with many new-age payment modes making them loyal and convenient to choose your airlines.

How can airlines serve better with an agency wallet?

● Negotiate better deals with travel agencies

 Agency wallets make travel agencies bring consistent business opportunities. Airlines could negotiate better deals with travel agencies by offering commissions or booking deals and payments done through agency wallets.

● Serve beyond satisfactory customer service

Travel agencies have a multitude of internal processes to deliver the best experiences to their travelers. Agency wallets help them reduce the time spent to initiate, and manage the payments allowing the travel agencies to get exceptional customer service.

● Straightened out internal processes

There might be some disconnect with the travelers as wallets are already available in a lot of other industries. A wallet can straighten the payment process from external sources to internal sources. Airlines can use agency wallets to properly strategize and straighten the internal process.

● Stakeholder, airline system and agreements alignment

Internal agreements or business flow might not have official documentation on agency wallets. Most airlines wouldn’t consider adding wallets as a part of their agreement, marketing, or growth plan. But that could change if wallets are properly utilized.

Conclusion

Payment innovation is a smart step to increase the bottom line of airline operations. We provide an agency wallet as a separate enhancer tool that serves as a one-point payment solution secured with trustworthy and safe policies benefiting the travel agencies who go with group bookings.

GroupRM provides a 360° group booking revenue management system assuring 23% of revenue growth from group booking.

Reinventing-series-booking-for-airlines-through-automation-6

Reinventing Series Booking For Airlines Through Automation

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For airlines looking to increase operating revenue and get consistent business, series bookings from travel agents have emerged as a source of delight.

Now, what are series bookings?

Essentially, if a travel agent or tour operator wants 20 tickets from London to Spain every Saturday for the entirety of the football season, it is considered a series booking.

With series bookings, travel agents no longer have to go through the hassle of making multiple group bookings every time they want to fly their customers to a particular location in a recurring fashion, say every weekend.

At this juncture, when airlines have begun prioritizing the generation of consistent revenue to operate their flights, automating, and making the series booking process seamless can be a gamechanger.

The pains of navigating a flawed series booking process

Before the series booking is finalized, the travel agent would have spent hours or even days on email threads or the phone, explaining the requirement to the group desk. Usually, the travel agent must fill out countless passenger details in the outdated reservation systems of airlines or work on time-consuming spreadsheets to be emailed to the airline sales team.

In both these cases, the airline must spend tons of hours calculating the fare with all the relevant factors in consideration in a highly error-prone process.

The travel agents must then wait for days to get status updates on each group booking within the series booking request. Subsequently, the travel agent must go through each of the group fares and reach out to the group desk team of the airline to painstakingly negotiate all aspects of the series booking quote.

 Often, by the time the negotiations for each ticket are through, the flight fare would’ve already changed.

There is also no mechanism for the travel agent to partially accept, reject, or negotiate the fares.

 Since groups are complex and unpredictable, they require constant changes in terms of schedule, number of people, etc., which is another painful process for the travel agents and the airline.

Automating series booking—a win-win for airlines and travel agents

The process of series booking needs to be streamlined every step of the way.

 Airlines can provide travel agents with a dedicated booking portal to raise series requests with a few clicks using an automation solution.

 They can enter the number of seats they want, the origin & destination, and the price they are willing to pay for the seats. Then, the system automatically comes up with a fare that the travel agent can accept or reject.

 Crucially, the travel agent can even accept parts of the series booking quote and negotiate the rest of the groups’ fares with the airline based on their budget or the ability to get a better deal elsewhere.

 It is worth mentioning that travel agents can make whatever changes they want to the bookings with just a few clicks. Additionally, the travel agent can make the payment right away or pay a small upfront amount.

Either way, the airline gets a significant amount of money that it can use for its operations, along with the guarantee that the flights will be reasonably filled. 

 A great advantage for airlines is that since the quote is generated automatically and instantaneously as the travel agent enters their requirements, there is no room for error.

 Most importantly, if airlines see that the travel agent has declined their quote, they can have their revenue management team reach out manually and provide a fare that will help retain the travel agent’s business. This means that the group desk can focus exclusively on such high-yielding tasks rather than unproductive manual labor, such as following up on emails.

 Moreover, airlines can keep close track of the request history of various travel agents to provide customized promotions that fit the goals of both the sales and revenue management teams.

Conclusion

Automating series booking will pay off in both the short and long term because it saves time and resources for all the stakeholders. In the short term, it provides operating revenue for the airline, and over the long term, they don’t have to face an increase in manual labor for processing series bookings when the number of fleets increases.

GroupRM has played a vital role in many airlines’ efforts to bring in consistent revenue and contribute to their flights having a load factor that makes the trip worthwhile by making series booking a seamless and error-free process. As a result, numerous airlines, especially in the Asian markets, have brought down the average turnaround time per series booking using our solution. 

To know more, Reach us for a demo or book a demo with the sales team at https://stagingv2.grouprm.net/. 

An Airplane Surrounded by 5 Sales Component Pictures that represents the Airline's Ancillary Sales

What Ancillaries Should The Airlines Focus On In The Post Covid Era?

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Long before covid, airlines—especially the budget carriers— have been boosting their operating margins with ancillary revenue. Ancillaries, which are non-ticket sources of revenue for airlines, brought in 109.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2019 alone.

Since the pandemic has made passengers pickier—they expect personalization and higher safety standards—and airlines need a massive boost in revenue to recover from the devastation caused by international travel restrictions, ancillaries are expected to lead the way.

Choosing the right ancillaries to focus on

Emerging from the pandemic, customers have a variety of concerns they need resolved before they can trust air travel again. A few of them are: 

  • Increased safety measures
  • Flexibility in pricing
  • Modular offers for corporates

Meeting these should be an airline’s primary focus if they want to rekindle passenger confidence in flying and provide a seamless journey for their customers. This is because customer behavior has seen a massive shift due to social distancing requirements, fears of infection, the economic downturn, and the shift towards online buying. 

The way out of the pandemic—personalizing the passenger experience

To stay relevant and gain increased customer loyalty, airlines need to focus on personalization the way Netflix and Amazon have been able to, by moving from a product-focused approach to a customer-focused one.   

Here are a few of the ancillaries that you can offer passengers in light of the pandemic and your efforts to fill more seats with high-yield passengers. 

Covid related health measures

Passenger confidence will be boosted if you take the initiative to offer ancillaries, such as travel insurance and baggage wrapping and immune boosting kits to protect from infections. Ensure that the insurance is affordable and comprehensive, covering aspects like screening, telemedicine, treatment, and quarantine costs.  

Also, you can take a cue from a variety of tour operators who are offering tours in Russia with a twist—you will be given the vaccine on arrival. 

Moreover, some airlines are allowing passengers to book seats or whole rows near them to ensure social distancing. This can be quite lucrative if airlines are able to automate the booking process and make sure those seats are blocked from being booked by others.

Crucially, passengers also need to be offered the ability to cancel without any penalty if they contract covid.

Modular bundles for business travelers 

Identifying flights or timings with more business travelers and offering something as simple as Wi-Fi will do wonders for your bottom line. Also, offering business-class lounges, extra legroom, transport facilities in their destination, etc. for corporate travelers can significantly boost ancillary revenue.  

To attract more corporate clients, airlines can also begin offering tickets that offer changeability of the seat, refundability, and easy upgrades. 

Frequent flier rewards 

Airlines can present passengers with the opportunity to be part of a rewards program that benefits the fliers every time they use the services of the airline. Seeing rewards accumulate will serve as an impetus for many to become loyal to the brand.  

Further, the airline can make money selling loyalty points to credit card companies who pass it on to their premium customers. These customers go on to become patrons of the airline.  

Tour packages

Tourists and religious pilgrims will form a substantial part of airline revenue for the next few months, given the reluctance of many business travelers to begin corporate travel because of factors, such as remote work.

 So, catering to the tourists with fully packaged trips to their dream destination, including car rentals, hotels, and food, will serve to delight your passengers and add to the bottom-line as well. It is worth noting that airlines can profit from offering relaxation or wellbeing-themed tours because of the effect that the pandemic has had on people’s minds and bodies.  

Conclusion 

Airlines need to come up with innovative, personalized products through dynamic bundles across all touchpoints and channels. Doing so will go a long way in giving the airline a competitive advantage amidst these turbulent times.  \

If you want help with offering customer-centric ancillaries to optimize your revenue and strengthen recovery, don’t hesitate to reach us at  marketing@infinitisoftware.net