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Servicing and automation
Today, Online Travel Agencies estimate roughly 12% of their bookings involve a voluntary or involuntary ticket change, suggesting this consumes 11% of their customer service resources. Levels of self-service for ticket changes are reasonable today, with 64% of respondents enabling this via web and 57% using mobile.
However, a significant minority of Online Travel Agencies continue to handle ticket changes manually via the contact center.
Effective investment in self-service tools for rebooking could lead to automation of time-consuming ticket exchange and refund calculations, potentially saving Online Travel Agencies money by reducing demands on contact centers or agents. Self-service capabilities, available through a fully digitalized ticket exchange and refund experience, can enhance the customer experience, offering a quick, automated and transparent process.
As the travel industry moves towards providing much more seamless end-to-end journeys, the adoption of self-service capabilities becomes more essential.
This is true for all players in the industry, and specifically for online travel agencies, self-service brings an opportunity to differentiate themselves, increase efficiency and improve customer satisfaction.”
Javier Laforgue
EVP, Travel Unit & Managing Director Asia-Pacific, Amadeus
Virtually all respondents (96%) said it was ‘important’ (41%) or ‘very important’ (55%) to invest in a Trip Management System (TMS) to empower agents to better serve travelers over the coming 12 months. This is potentially linked to the overall objective to better service the traveler over the entire trip.
The majority of Online Travel Agencies plan to use their existing TMS to enable LCC bookings (64%), LCC servicing (55%) and LCC search (49%).
Investment in effective LCC search could offer more content to travelers by unlocking additional carriers. Online Travel Agencies today have an opportunity to address all search use cases thanks to off-the-shelf connections to airlines, covering all search travel funnel use cases. This frees Online Travel Agencies to focus on enhancing airline relationships, rather than dealing with connectivity complexity.
At the same time, Online Travel Agencies estimate they have automated 22% of their manual processes using robotics today, although more than half of respondents said they had automated less than 20% of manual processes. A quarter of respondents said less than 10% of processes have been automated.
Online Travel Agencies plan to increase the use of robotics soon, with plans to automate a further 27% of their processes on average. This would take the number of automated processes close to 50% for the average Online Travel Agencies.
The potential of robotics to enhance the efficiency of Online Travel Agencies therefore presents a significant opportunity for travel technology providers. Streamlined business processes thanks to the standardization of back-end system workflows and enhanced data quality can help Online Travel Agencies achieve optimum productivity. At the same time, robotics can reduce the risk of Airline Debit Memos (ADMs) as well as costly human errors, thanks to compliancy with internal operations with customized rules set up by the Online Travel Agency to automatically deal with policies, issuance, queues and other criteria.
“There are areas of focus that add value for Online Travel Agencies”
Guillaume Pamélard
VP Travel Sellers, EMEA Strategic Accounts
Amadeus
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