Find the right solution for your travel business isn’t easy!

There are many CRM solutions available for travel agents and tour operators, and it can be overwhelming deciding which is right for your travel business. From our conversations with clients and travel industry experts, we have come up with a list of the key features you should look for when selecting your CRM as a travel agent or tour operator:

1. Use a cloud-based CRM software to avoid issues if there’s a disconnection.
2. It matters to clients if their itinerary and other documents look good, so make sure you have the ability to create a beautiful itinerary and other documents that look great (like Sugati can!).
3. Choose a CRM for travel agency or tour operator that can set up workflows and tasks to make your life easier!
4. Find a multi-feature, easy to use reporting function to help you to understand your business well.
5. Use a CRM solution which has pre-defined fields. This avoids confusion and issues if people put in different terms into free type fields, and it allows for easy reporting.
6. Look for a CRM system which has the flexibility to change setups and formatting, for titles and names, for example. This is easy to do in Salesforce.
7. Find a system which can take your data through Mailclean automatically, as you can with Sugati Travel CRM based on Salesforce.
8. Choose a solution which provides instructions on how to handle an enquiry.
9. Find a solution which has a clear, easy to use interface.
10. Find a system which integrates with other solutions, such as MailChimp, Salesforce Pardot or PayPal, for example.
11. Look for excellent customer service! Personalised, friendly and attentive customer service makes a huge difference.

If you’d like to find out more about Sugati or book a demo, please get in touch!

Find out what our clients say about us here!

Sugati is proud to announce the new Tour Booking System Features…

Sugati Travel CRM has just launched some exciting new features to make tour booking even better! Every tour operator software is different, and we make sure Sugati is the best CRM for the travel industry, we upgrade our CRM solution for you, considering our clients needs as well as challenges faced by tour operators and travel agents. Here is below some of the features we have recently launched!

Some of the features include:

• Fixed departure tours: An evolution from tailor-made tours. With this new tour feature, you can set up a tour template, and from this we can clone a specific departure date, to create multiple tours and save you time and effort. 
• Tour search: You can search on our tour booking software for a specific tour or for a specific customer. We allow you to customise many aspects to suit your travel agency or tour operator needs – continent, budget, country, nights and more. You can change your customised settings without Sugati doing this for you, making the process quick and efficient as well as perfectly tailored to your requirements.
• Discount codes: Create discount codes for a marketing campaign, with provisos such as an expiry date, validity for certain individuals only and named codes. You can also offer discount codes in the form of ‘early bird’ pricing, set either as a percentage or as a figure.
• Manage your waiting list: Sugati, travel CRM, will automatically manage your tour waiting list according to the rules you set. Customers can sign up for a tour on the chance the tour operator will secure more spaces, and either pay a deposit or not according to what you wish to happen.
• Tour manifest: This is all in one place with Sugati, and with the click of a button, you can send the manifest. With the press of a button, the manifest is generated as an attachment which you can send to suppliers. It’s that easy!

This feature update contains many other exciting new aspects. Get in touch or request a demo to find out more!

Our recommendations

So if you want a cloud-based CRM solution, I recommend you make sure you can access your:

• Marketing data to enable marketing automation
• Sale data to deal with enquiries, quotes, booking, inventory and supplier information
• Service information to deal with client complaints and additional requests
• Client and supplier communities (log in areas) allowing you to engage with your clients and suppliers. The idea is the client can amend their details, make changes to their bookings and view their travel documents. Suppliers can update their inventory, rate requests, monitor their payments and upload their invoices.

This will help you to achieve the best possible levels of success with your travel cloud-based CRM. Sugati is a mid-office CRM solution designed for both travel agents and tour operators. We help the travel trade understand why technology helps the travel sector. If you’d like to learn more about how Sugati can help your travel agency, please request a demo today.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is a rapidly developing and fascinating area, however, how can it be applied to tour operator software, and is this the future for the industry? Wouldn’t it be amazing if you didn’t have to invest in AI and your system provider had a built-in AI solution in your travel technology CRM?

A system which has the ability to:

• Identify as well as qualify leads
• Work on proposals that can engage actively with potential clients using the language that clients use
• Emotionally understand client complaints and get back to them to resolve potentially escalating problems

This is already being done by some market leaders. Airbnb used to allow homeowners to set the price of accommodation. They are now suggesting what the prices should be based on what sort of events are happening around where the owners are located. What potential clients are looking at and the rates other owners are setting. This is all done using a combination of AI and data mining.

The future

Beyond Verbal can detect the tone mode after listening to a conversation for about 10 seconds. This is a potential game-changer in terms of customers and maybe even for marketing too.

You as a travel technology buyer need to ensure that the travel CRM software you are going to invest in must have the capacity for Artificial Intelligence, as this is the future for travel technology solutions.

Get in touch to discuss how our fantastic Sugati CRM solution can help travel agents and tour operators.

It’s crucial you automate your travel CRM process if you want to secure repeat bookings and happy customers. Sugati CEO, Tin Aung, explains why. Your end clients are overloaded with information. The last thing they want is to be sent generic holiday offers rather than the type of holidays that interest them. You don’t want to be sending a honeymoon offer to a couple who have just returned from their honeymoon.

Of course, making sure you send the right information to the right people is partly to do with the travel CRM software and partly to do with the underlying data. The principle is to onboard a travel software which has the ability to display a complete journey view of your customer and has an engine to automate user engagement journeys.

We recommend our clients, tour operators and travel agents consider:

1. Enquiry journey – What type of holiday do you want to be sending to potential clients (leads) and retargeting them (with their permission)?
2. Quoting journey – Once a quote has been sent to a potential customer, how do you track them, remarket to them to remind them of the holiday quote they are reviewing?
3. Booking journey – This is where your clients are committing to you. How do you deliver that dream holiday, how do you seamlessly remind them of the balance due, how do you send invoice and ATOL certificate and how do you securely take payments?
4. Pre-holiday space – With the automation engine above, what information do you want to be sent to clients at what point to keep exciting them?
5. During the holiday – If you choose to, you can still actively engage with your clients who are on holiday by providing timely and relevant information. This is one of the opportunities that you as tailor-made holiday providers can use to make a difference between you and businesses such as booking.com, who concentrate on transactional activities only.
6. Post-holiday – How do you capture your client’s holiday experiences and report these findings back to the product team, sales team and suppliers? This allows you to constantly improve your product or holiday offerings, reduce the administration required to run reports, review feedback and, if necessary, push the data onto a reputation management site such as Feefo.

These factors will improve your offering to the client, increase user engagement and repeat bookings.