Must-Have Features in the Travel Business Portal
Gone are the days, when one used to invest days and months to design a perfect traveling plan. Today neither you need to go and stand in queue for transportation tickets nor roam here and there to find the best hotels for the stay. The travel industry has already shifted from offline to online mode, a few years back. Now travellers are ready with their list of traveling wishes, and it’s the responsibility of travel agency business to make their wishes come true.To run a successful travel agency business, one must need travel booking software. Your software must be smart and advanced to ease the process of booking transportation tickets, hotels, restaurants, etc. However, who would like to travel somewhere with the responsibility of looking after other activities?If you are planning to start your traveling agency, here are the must-have features for your travel agency software:
Profile Creation and booking process
The profile creation process on the travel portal should be easy. Allow the multiple profile creation options like creating using email id, through social media, or from mobile number. The profile creation will be the first action taken by the user on your society to book tickets.The booking process should be easy and short. Make sure you are not asking for too much detail in the ticket booking form, as it can divert the user to other travel agency portals to save their time.If your booking process is smooth, the customer will come again and again to book their tickets.
Customization packaging option
For traveling, tour packaging is one of the important features. Today people are very particular about their travel accommodations, activities, food, etc. Offering an option to add and subtract few activities from the travel package, will help the customer to buy the best travel package as per their requirement.Providing limited tour packages will not give your customer the vacation of their dreams. Gone are the days, when people used to make travel plans as per the availability of travel packages in travel agencies. The personalized experience will drag them to visit your travel agency software again for the best traveling experience.Also, offer them multiple packages of a particular destination by making changes like a number of days, stay in the hotel, participation in any local and cultural activities, etc. While buying travel agency software, make sure you are hiring an experienced company.
Payment method
Keep in mind the payment process is the last step of buying your product and services. Provide your customer’s payment flexibility. Offer multiple payment options like third-party payment applications, payment apps, usage of credit or debit cards.As everything is digital and fast now, make sure your payment process is fast and secure. The customer will be adding her personal and bank information, the transaction should be safe for you and the customer both. Keeping multiple payment options will even help international travellers to book tickets or hotels without facing any issues.The more options you will give, the more area of the audience you can attract. Either you can hire software development services to build your Travel agency software from scratch, or buy a white label travel solution like MakeMyTrip from them.
Multi-lingual and currency
How frustrating will it be to convert each word into a local language? While running a travel agency, you will have a wider audience. Your travel agency must be for people from different corners of the world. It is your responsibility to provide a personalized and rich experience to all the visitors.To attract an international audience, your travel agency software must have multiple languages and currencies supporter features. These features will help you to serve customers of different countries and your revenue will be more.There are many countries where people speak their local language. While booking any travel package or ticket, for sure they will check the prices. What if you cut the step of transferring the mentioned currency into local currency? It will be a huge deal for them. Reading content on your software will help them to understand your services and they will visit your software over again.
Search Option
Today, we are just one search away from the required information. The customer will not have enough time to go through your software, in brief, to find what she is looking for. Make sure your travel agency should have the search option feature. It will give the liberty to all the customers to directly find the information they are looking for.Also, you can make it a predictive search. When the customer types the keywords to find the information or services, a drop-down list will be automatically popped up below the search option. This is a great way of eliminating the long list of search results and help the customer to find the relevant information instantly.
Gallery
Will you blindly buy the product without seeing any picture? No, right! For the Travel agency business, the gallery plays an important role. Visuals are the best way to communicate with your audience. Your customers must be looking for breath-taking pictures of their vacation destination. Moreover, it will assist them while choosing hotels, vacation destinations, restaurants, etc.Make sure the gallery has the best pictures. Try to provide multiple pictures for a single destination or service. Also, you can ask your customers to provide their vacation pictures for the credibility of a customer’s travel agency.Conclusion
Traveling is not merely a way of taking a break from regular life, now it has become a profession. People look for the best and affordable packages to travel. These features will help you to build a safe and secure platform for all travellers. Prefer buying the pre-build travel software to avoid the huge investment and last-minute rush. White label travel solutions like MakeMyTrip are the best for people who are new in this business.
Do You Need Debt Management?
The need for debt management among American debtors has probably never been more intense. Economic turmoil throughout the nation has sent stock values dipping and real estate values relinquishing all of the growth we’ve seen over the last few decades, and it doesn’t look like there’s going to be a turnaround any time soon. Unfortunately – and, to be honest, not so coincidentally – consumers spent the boom times spending like there was no tomorrow. Virtually nobody put their earnings in savings. Instead, we borrowed more and more money and watched their credit card balances spiral out of control. Now, as even the minimum payments are increasingly difficult to make and full satisfaction of all financial obligations seems beyond the debtor’s wildest imagination, debt management has become an absolute necessity for virtually every American. The time for purchasing without restraint has ended, and it is past time for the country to work on paying back all that has been borrowed.However, while we agree that debt management must be seen as a priority for all consumers, that does not mean that you need to immediately start shopping for debt management firms. Much as the advertising campaigns of everyone from bankruptcy attorneys to Consumer Credit Counseling companies would have you believe that experienced professionals are necessary elements of any successful debt management approach, the reality is that many individual consumers can handle their own affairs with only disciplined budgeting and a change of perspective about their spending habits. It will take some investigation of both your own situation and an education of the verbiage and philosophies employed by experts in the field, but all of that should be within the capacity of most ordinary Americans. While it is true that some of the programs we shall discuss will truly require the assistance of businesses specializing in specific forms of debt management, that certainly is not true for all forms. More importantly, there are aspects of debt relief that should be adopted without delay no matter your own particular situation.After all, most of what the debt management companies are paid to suggest ends up being essentially common sense not all that different from what your parents probably advised once upon a time. While their help may be of some obvious importance, it is probably not (for every borrower) worth the time or money spent, or, at the least, it’s true that the time and money spent for aggrieved debtors could be better used elsewhere. Debt management professional services do not come cheaply, remember. The actual amount of the fees will change depending on the emphasis of the debt management approach and the amount of debt the borrower client currently holds. Most of the companies, particularly home equity mortgage lenders (and, in the case of refinancing, that can run into the tens of thousands of dollars), base the money they will collect from borrowers upon the total size of the balance they are dealing with. Once again, for specific forms of debt management these costs may be considered justifiable, but the fundamental principles suggested by most debt counselors could be fully understood by consumers without having to pay such high prices for the authorities’ wisdom.At the start of the process, if you have not done so already, borrowers will need to talk to representatives of the creditors. This will most assuredly be the first step that the debt management professionals would take, but, much as there is a value to be found in time-worn experience with the industry and skillful rapport with their employees, every consumer should at least give this a try on their own behalf. After all, there’s nothing you have to lose. If for no other reason, speaking to the credit card reps will allow you to know exactly on a given day the parameters of your debt (balance, interest rate, payments, and so forth) which a surprising amount of borrowers have never bothered to record. Write down all of this information on a single page to help with your subsequent budgeting and debt analysis. While speaking with the representative, though, it would be in your best interest to attempt to negotiate a reduction of interest rates or waiver of some of the past fees you had incurred from bills that had not arrived on time. Don’t even bother with attempting to lower the actual balances; that can be done, through a program known as Debt Settlement, but it actually does require the assistance of trained professionals and a legitimate enterprise.While you can’t expect your balances to be diminished, many borrowers are surprised to find just how conciliatory the credit card representatives seem. If you speak confidently, with an air of dignity, and expect your requests to be honored, most lenders will agree to some sort of arrangement that at least partially eliminates the fees and, quite often, lowers the interest rates. If you are currently behind in your payments, they will ask you to bring your accounts current, but they are also likely to be open to working with a different payment schedule as well. This is not, of course, because the multinational credit card corporations are concerned about your finances. No, even though Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection remains a poor choice of debt management after recent changes to the United States bankruptcy code, it still does remain an option for the most desperate borrowers as the lenders are all too well aware. With the threat, however remote, of bankruptcy lingering about every problem credit account, the representatives are trained to cater to debtors’ worries and comply with every effort to mollify their troubles so as to maintain them as clients. Make no mistake, bankruptcy will be no real solution to your credit card debt dilemma. Even if you could manage to qualify for the debt elimination program after the alterations to the law, your credit rating would be utterly ruined for a decade and virtually every asset or possession would be subject to seizure for court auction.Regardless, this fear of Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection is one of the primary reasons that the credit card companies are so quick to restructure payments. They would like nothing better than to ensure that you continue to slowly repay your credit cards (and the ever accumulating interest) for the remainder of your life, and, because of this, they will bend over backwards to please their clients through interest rate reduction, fee waivers, and other similar benefits that – all things considered – are of negligible harm to them compared to the steady income guaranteed from debtors’ regularly sent minimum payments. In some circumstances, the credit card companies will even allow the account to be, as they call the term, re-aged. In other words, for those borrowers with late or missed payments whose credit ratings and FICO scores reflected their delinquencies, the lenders would agree to send information to the three credit bureaus reporting that the accounts were actually current. Once again, this would only be possibly because of the credit card companies’ fears that, should the borrower believe his or her credit has already been irrevocably destroyed, he or she may first consider bankruptcy, and the representative will do everything in their power to keep their client within the throes of revolving debt.This, of course, is where proper debt management techniques come in to play. It’s not rocket science, after all. All you have to do is figure out a workable household budget and stick to it. Done correctly, this type of debt management should allow sufficient additional income for the borrower to start paying down their credit card debt above and beyond the minimums. As well, this should help the borrower to save funds for accidents in case the worst would happen; keep in mind that should you suddenly be out of work or needing medical attention you do not want to get further in debt. Forward thinking should be the most important element of debt management. There’s no need to maintain several credit card accounts for emergencies if you already have money in the bank for just such an occasion. Keep one or two cards open, to be sure, if for no other reason than to safeguard your credit rating, but you should only maintain those accounts that boast the lowest interest rates nor the highest available balances. Also, you should make sure that the interest rates of those cards are firmly set with written documentation. In the hope of a sincere attempt at debt management, an unfortunate number of borrowers transfer their various balances to cards featuring (what should be a suspiciously low) interest rate only to find out too late that the fine print indicated the interest rate was adjustable. Unwary debtors have found their assembled debts suddenly collecting interest at percentages of twenty percent or even higher.Of course, should debt management plans be correctly organized, you won’t need to transfer credit card balances: you will be too busy paying them off. Budgeting is so important in the early stages of debt management. Cut corners where ever you can. Most Americans spend so much so foolishly that, once they actually begin paying attention to where their earnings go, they’re amazed how quickly new money becomes available once they’ve changed spending habits and started looking for ways to reduce household costs. It’s almost like a second income suddenly presents itself! As a nation, we have become so used to buying what we want whenever we want, that we forget that so many seemingly necessary purchases can wait. Even with home appliances, it’s better to take the time to replace the washer or refrigerator when you have the cash on hand compared to charging it to a credit card or even signing on to yet another lay away plan. It won’t be easy and, depending upon your needs, will require no little patience and resolve, but the inevitable satisfaction you will receive once your debts have been eliminated should easily outweigh the momentary strife.As we have written, most of debt management should be thought of as being just good common sense. Figure out a proper budget, shave away all household costs that are not completely necessary, and then calculate the most advantageous form of debt repayment. Obviously, all bills will need to be paid and paid on time. There should be no reason to ever risk the potential of another credit card charge for checks arriving a few days too late – for that matter, it’s written into the contract of some loans that interest rates will rise inversely proportionate to a falling FICO score (inevitable consequence of such missed payments).That said, the next step should be to put all available money freed from careful budgeting, no matter how small the amounts, towards satisfying the credit card balances themselves. Some family economists counsel that the highest interest rate accounts should be tackled first, while only paying minimums for the others, in order to best counter the greatest threats to financial security. On the other hand, there’s a school of thought that argues that the lowest balances should gain priority both to remove the number of accounts left open and improve motivation for the borrower to continue his efforts. You would be shocked to learn how effective eliminating even the slightest of bills can be for the harried consumer. Of course, as you would expect, the actual decision depends so greatly upon the specific fortunes and deficits of the consumer that no competent debt analyst or counselor could hope to knowledgably advise one approach over another without a close reading of the finances of the borrower in question.In this way, it is at times useful to avail yourself of the help of debt professionals and the debt management companies. For some borrowers there is simply no other way to accurately discern their best method of action, and, while maintaining a budget and putting an end to poor spending choices should go without saying, some forms of debt management may actually do a disservice to the individual or family if incorrectly calculated. Moreover, for borrowers in especially dire circumstances (those borrowers whose debt to income ratios, with debts assessed at their minimum monthly payments foregoing utilities, ranging above forty percent), there simply be no other option.This does not mean the borrowers should abandon all personal attempts toward debt management. There’s much that can still be done, whether from increasing income or reducing purchases, within the realm of any household. However, by looking soberly at your prospective earnings and ultimate debt load, you should be able to reasonably estimate the time it would take to eradicate all existent financial obligations while yet setting aside sufficient savings for whatever emergency may occur. For some hopeless candidates, bankruptcy may truly be their only option. For others, provided they have the right sort of unsecured debt, the previously mentioned Debt Settlement alternative could be a blessing and, in a matter of days, cut half of their credit card balances away without much lasting effect upon credit reports. It’s all up to the borrowers, as (if you’ll excuse) it should be, but you will never know if you have made the right decision until you educate yourself about the possibilities and do everything you can to eliminate debts through your own actions.
Ecommerce Trends To Watch For In 2017
Many studies have shown a double-digit rise in worldwide ecommerce sales in 2016. Many analysts even predict that the worldwide ecommerce sales will increase consistently till 2020. However, the number of people accessing ecommerce websites on their mobile devices has been increasing rapidly. Likewise, a number of studies have shown a steady increase in mobile commerce sales driven by customers’ mobile engagement behavior.Each enterprise needs to ensure that its ecommerce website keep users engaged by functioning like a mobile app. It must optimize its ecommerce website for mobile devices and allow users make payment through popular mobile wallets. At the same time, the business also needs to keep track of the emerging ecommerce trends to accomplish higher conversion rate and increase digital commerce revenue. There is a series of trends that will impact and shape ecommerce sales in 2017.7 Trends that will Impact and Shape Ecommerce Business in 20171) Personalized Shopping ExperienceUnlike mobile apps, websites lack the capability to personalize user experience by taking advantage of the features of underlying device and operating system. But many enterprises nowadays use analytics tools to gather a wide variety of customer data. The data collected through analytics tools help businesses to identify the preferences and understand the behavior of individual customers. Also, an ecommerce business can leverage the information to engage customers by showing the right product, content, ads, and deals to each customer. It can further personalize the shopping experience of each customer and boost ecommerce sales by delivering app-like user experience.2) Social SellingThe data posted on various websites depict that people spend more time on social networking platforms than other websites. Many businesses promote their products or services on popular social networks to divert visitors to their ecommerce websites regularly. There are a number of social networking websites that allow users to buy products or services directly without visiting an ecommerce website. Many social networks are even planning to roll out new features to generate more revenue by facilitating social selling. The ecommerce business owners can take advantage of these social selling options to promote their products more effectively and boost sales.3) Chat BotsMany high-traffic websites nowadays interact with customers through chat bots. In addition to working as customer service executives, the chat bots also help users to perform commercial activities like shopping and booking. Many ecommerce website developers and owners will soon explore ways to keep visitors engaged by interacting with the machines efficiently. However, an enterprise has to deploy a variety of chat bots to meet the varying needs and preferences of customers. Some ecommerce companies have already used chat bots to provide personal shopping service and send messages. Many enterprises will soon use chat bots to make their ecommerce website more interactive and make shopping experience personalized.4) Artificial IntelligenceThe popular mobile platforms make people use artificial intelligence on a daily basis. A large number of people nowadays perform common tasks by talking to their machines through Google’s Assistant, Apple’s Siri, or Microsoft’s Cortana. Large ecommerce companies like Amazon have already started using artificial intelligence to chat with customer. But the ecommerce websites will need a variety of personal assistant to optimize the end-to-end shopping experience. More and more ecommerce businesses will take advantage of artificial intelligence to interact with customers in a smarter way and without deploying additional staff.5) Contactless PaymentThe mobile commerce apps enable users to choose from many payment modes – debit/credit card, internet banking and mobile wallets. A large number of buyers nowadays prefer making payment through their mobile wallets to debit or credit cards. In USA, some companies like Starbucks are using contactless payment options successfully to generate more revenue. Hence, the customers will love to buy product from an ecommerce website that allows them to use contactless payment options. Hence, many enterprises have to redesign their ecommerce websites in 2017 to accommodate the emerging mobile and contactless payment options.6) Same Day Delivery and ReturnThere are many people who still prefer brick-and-mortar stores to web stores due to instant delivery. The web store owners must focus on reducing the delivery time of online orders to make more people buy products online. A number of studies have also shown that many customers do not hesitate to pay extra for same-day delivery. Hence, the ecommerce businesses have to explore ways to reduce delivery time of orders. Some companies will even provide flexible delivery option to customers and set up local drop-off points to ensure faster delivery. Likewise, they also need to ensure that each customer has option to return orders without putting extra time, effort and money.7) User Generated ContentMany people nowadays read the product review and comments posted by other buyers before buying a product. Likewise, many people even choose a web store based on the shopping experience posted by other customers. Hence, enterprises can easily boost ecommerce sales by providing additional information about the products through pictures, description, specifications, and user reviews. Many ecommerce businesses will encourage customers to write reviews and share their shopping experience. They will even explore ways to promote the product more effectively through the user generated content.However, the ecommerce trends keep changing at regular intervals. Hence, an enterprise has to keep track of the emerging trends to generate more ecommerce revenue. At the same time, it must explore ways to attract and retain customers by improving discovery, logistics and delivery through latest technologies.