TravelCarma Wishes you Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Christmas means fellowship, feasting, giving and receiving, a time of good cheer, Merry Christmas and have a great weekend. 


TravelCarma wishes you all Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Hotel Software Solution from TravelCarma

TravelCarma, one of the leading Travel Technology Solution providers has come up with the Hotel Software Solution. There’re many travel solution already available in the market but TravelCarma solution has managed to differentiate its solution with integrating many innovative and profitable solution with it.

TravelCarma Hotel Software Solution offers many helpful features, some of which are as follows:

• Facebook Booking Engine
• Central Reservation System
• Online Concierge
• Build User Generated Content
• Real-time Inventory Distribution
• Online Channel Management
• Integrated Social Media

The TravelCarma Hotel Software Solution also allow you to Add new channels, sub-channels, setup their credit limits, commissions, payouts etc. It is useful to both Offline / Online Agents along with Corporate Clients & Branches. This Hotel Solution is a Co-brand able system, which is quite useful for corporate sales and agency sales channels. It also helps to Manage Licenses and contracts to manage the sub-channels for sales & distribution.

  

No solution is useful without proper reporting and thus TravelCarma Hotel Software Solution Generate real time reports.

To Know more Click Here

Collaborative Travel Planning Tool by TravelCarma

TravelCarma – a Div. of Avani Cimcon Technologies Inc. has launched yet another one-of-its-kind Collaborative Travel Planning Tool that helps travel businesses make their customers’ buying experience much engaging than ever. Collaborative Travel Planning Tool along with trend-settler Facebook Booking Engine asserts its marketing position as leader in B2C solution for Travel and Hospitality Industry.

Collaborative Travel Planning Tool allows potential booker to select Hotels, Activities, Rental Vehicles for specific travelling dates and create the travelling plan out of it. This plan can be saved and shared with friends on Facebook or via email and invite them to review the plan and provide their feedback. Furthermore, this tool allows the saved plan to be booked with real-time rates and availability check.

The objective of Collaborative Travel Planning Tool is to empower Travel and Hospitality businesses to attract more visitors to their own websites and generate direct (B2C) business.

Facebook Booking Engine

After complete study on user browsing patterns of social media platforms mainly for facebook and twitter TravelCarma has effectively instigated its Facebook Booking Engine especially for Hoteliers and Travel portals across the world.

The Facebook travel solutions package of which the Booking Engine is a part is an add-on to TravelCarma’s suite of online solutions for the Travel & Hospitality business.

Hotel Reservation System

Online Hotel Reservation System
Online Hotel Reservation System allows setting up suppliers and their business. Hotel CRS (Central Reservation System) allows individual suppliers to manage the complete details of their inventory and get real time reports.

Six Ways Travel Industry Can Use Social Media

Every hour there is a new news and exhilarating social media story or article to smack the news bulletin. But the query residue that is the travel industry in reality using social media as a value addition in their core business.

Here are Six ways that Travel Industry and Online Booking Technology providers can use Social Media to get their strategy right in their business diligence :- 

1. Customer Approach

For Travel Industry, social media plays an increasingly important role in their customer engagement strategy and customer-centered management.  

When we talk about customer engagement, significance is a key and lookout. The amount of personal data that sites like Face book, Orkut gives and even business related stuff on LinkedIn the marketers like us should jump on this occasion to drive significance and use this information to drive their business, which is used similarly in Facebook Hotel Booking Application.

2. Risk Communications 

The crisis like Ash clouds, hurricanes, health scare and terrorism always affect the travel business. The travel industry has to face these risks persistently and their aptitude to covenant with this crisis scenarios swiftly and competently is critical to their success and also sadly their failures.

Social Media again plays a crucial role here by helping customers informed and averts disasters before they take hold through mediums like Twitter where audience can be informed before the announcements on the evening news. With social media, things have advanced fairly where we all can approach to several real-time monitoring and passing of information faster and easier to next levels.

3. Special / Discounted Offers

Many firms in this industry are now following Twitter, Facebook for their package booking solution and are taking into account these sites to be a better podium to update customers of real-time price quotations and hot deals to explore such opportunities to connect and sell.

4. Building Target Audience Groups

By having Community Groups a business can use an extraordinary commendation overhaul to propose a specific content or data from and to similar users, to offer functional and real time updated travel information to each community member.

The best example for that are the TripAdvisor and the Booking Engine Third Party Integration providers which have connected at Facebook. The purpose or goal behind this relation was that travelers increasingly prefer to hunt for recommendation and information about a destination from their friends and concerns for the Online Hotel Booking System.

5. Real-Time Communications

Real Time Communication or sharing an information platform plays an important role in the travel industry to point out how faster a service can be handled and how package booking solution can be implemented in this industry.

Like in hotel industry amenities can be dealt with a Facebook or Twitter account and even online bookings can be done on Hotel Booking from Facebook Account.

6. Connect With Locals

Social media is completely about people and the information they possess. Local Public are always ready to share their first-hand facts related to their experience, any time of their day walking on streets or using a Social Media account.

How well do we understand Hotel Distribution and do we work with the right distribution partner?

Every hotelier today wants to ensure that their hotel property or chain is visible as well as bookable by their end customers. A customer here for a hotel would be a direct guest, who would book a hotel room by either calling the Hotel Reservation office or by booking his / her room via the hotels website booking engine. Other types of customers here are those that we in the industry call B2B clients i.e. Travel Agents, Free Lancers, or Corporate Houses. These types of customer always demand a better negotiated rate or a commissionable rate. 

Today Technology to drive operations and sales for a hotel plays a major role. A hotel uses two types of Sales Solutions or rather Inventory and Rate Management Systems. One of course is the PMS (Property Management System) and the second is the CRS (Central Reservation System). Yes, and both of them although server more or less the same purpose of Inventory and rate management, they are both used for direct segment of the hotels operation. A PMS is completely in-house or rather works good to receive and record guest details for a hotel, mainly used by the Front Office or Reservation Office, at the Hotel Premises. Where are CRS does also help is sales & marketing of the Hotel Inventory but targeted for customers outside. This would mean that the objective of the CRS is mainly to cater to customer reservations does via the hotels website, the GDS (Global Distribution System) or Internet Distribution Partners or Online Travel Agents (OTA’s). 

Hoteliers who opt for GDS connectivity presume that by doing so they would start receiving 20% of their reservations via the GDS. Well, this is not true, as GDS is only a medium to reach out to Travel Agents connected across the globe. Today there are over 600,000 travel agents connected via one GDS or another. Yes, it is important to make sure that the service provider is able to connect you to all four major GDS players, namely Amadeus, Sabre, Galileo and Worldspan, of which the last two have now merged into one company called Travelport, however are still know by their own individual brand names.  So going back it is important to understand that to generate good volume of reservations / revenues via the GDS the right rates and commissions need to be offered to Travel Agents. Nevertheless it is important to also note that Agents who book hotels are mainly consortia’s. What do you mean by Consortia’s you may ask? Well, Consortia’s or also known as TMC (Travel Management Companies) are Travel Agents located in multiple locations across the globe and manage large corporate houses located in multiple countries / cities across the Globe.

There a handful of them i.e. American Express, Carlson Wagonlit, HRG, FCm etc.  Now since these consortia’s mainly work with large corporate houses, with these corporate houses we also do have a Travel Manager. These Travel Managers negotiate a rate for their Corporate House with multiple hotel chains or Independent Hotels. These Rate Negotiations are done on a Global Scale also know as RFP (Request for Price) which is managed by a solution called an RFP Tool. Here too we have various suppliers, i.e. Lanyon, Nexus, RFP Runner etc. 

Well, you must be thinking now this looks more complex that you though when you started reading this article. Well, it really is not. It is first of all very important to understand that does your hotel property fall under the bracket that of a corporate or leisure hotel. If you are a leisure hotel then GDS is something that may or may not really bring in the numbers you would be targeting to receive. This channel then certainly is a dead channel to even invest time in managing. Therefore it would make much more sense in opting for a solution that would provide you a Content Management System / Website and a booking engine that would be available on a transaction percentage value.  It would make more sense to dedicate your time and effort managing a B2B Booking Engine powered from your website.

If you are a hotel located in a Metro city as well as support a lot of Corporate / MNC business with RFP Rates, then it would be necessary to have GDS connectivity with an RFP Solution as well. Remember RFP and GDS complement one another. If you don’t have either of them you would lose out on a complete solution to drive corporate business. 

TravelCarma.com launches Facebook Booking Engine for Global Travel Customers

Florida, USA – September 27, 2010. After comprehensive research on user browsing patterns of social media platforms namely Facebook and twitter TravelCarma.com has successfully launched its Facebook Booking Engine for Hoteliers and Travel portals across the Globe. The Facebook travel solutions package of which the booking engine is a part is an add-on to TravelCarma’s suite of online solutions for the Travel & Hospitality Industry.

“It’s been a tremendous achievement for us to launch this futuristic Facebook booking engine for all our customers which will help them get more business and stay ahead of competition in today’s volatile markets, said Saurabh Mehta, Founder and CEO of TravelCarma. It is a part of our holistic strategy towards social media which allows us to derive maximum quantifiable benefits for clients from this powerful viral marketing medium. “This serves as a milestone in our effort to continual improvement and development which is an integral part of our organization philosophy”

TravelCarma’s Facebook Booking Engine provides the following features:

• Direct Search of Inventory and Rates from client’s existing Facebook page that has already generated considerable fan following or can use a new one
• Ability to showcase bookable/enquirable hot deals and packages on Facebook 
• Results of Search displayed directly on Customers Website, thereby not loosing Brand Identity
• Increase traffic to client’s website 
• Single Sign-on for Facebook Users to book from client’s travel portal.

Other powerful social media features would be:

• Ability to share (on facebook page) and Tweet (on Twitter public timeline) deals and packages the moment they are launched on the site. This would allow site administrators to broadcast from a single entry point.
• Provide ways for consumers to “like”, “share” and “tweet” deals, content etc. This will help our clients to generate “word-of-mouth” publicity, which is considered to be the best marketing strategy so far.
• Consumers can share their itinerary/plan with their Facebook friends and colleagues or “Twitter” followers for their comments. 
• Capture visitors who come via Facebook automatically into site’s registered customer database (with permissions) 
• Our Planner/Itinerary module also allows users to share individual portions of itinerary or planner on “Facebook” and “Tweet” the same.

TravelCarma Inks Contract With One Of The Leading Destination Agents In Africa

TravelCarma - a Div. of Avani Cimcon Technologies inks major deal with Kenya based destination agent; wherein TravelCarma will provide technology to take destination agent's business online and help them significantly increase their profitability.

TravelCarma's solution includes CMS driven Travel Portal, Internet Booking Engine, Reservation System (CRS) to manage contracted rates, Sales and Channel Management System to handle B2B, B2E, B2C and Travel Distribution Partners' business. One of the highlights of this solution is Facebook Booking Engine, which will allow destination agent to promote their hotels and travel packages on Facebook, which now accounts for highest traffic generated on any website.

This Kenya based Destination Agent promotes Kenya, Tanzania and other popular destinations within Africa and supports local tourism industry. With the help of TravelCarma's distribution technology, many small and individual hotels in Africa will get an opportunity to sell their hotels via Internet. This deal is considered to be a major foot step towards strengthening African Tourism Industry.