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Tours and activities: instant web bookings still largely a dream

Posted Date:  September 19, 2012

In a travel industry where electronic ticketing for airlines is a reality, where you can make a hotel reservation literally in the lobby and then stroll up to the desk to check in, and the activities space is still comparatively in the stone age.

Customer Problems

  • After making a tour booking online, you’re requested to print this voucher and bring it to the bus tour’s office to start your tour. He just booked online, and then is instructed to print something out and bring it along. This leads an obvious conclusion that booking the bus tour online requires more effort than just turning up at the bus tour’s office and booking there.
  • Since many activity suppliers have to plan for the upcoming day’s bookings, so that they have booking cut-offs, say minimum 48 hour booking deadline to book an activity online. The industry is telling him to book online, but at the same time, preventing any sort of impulsive buying.

Supplier Problems

  • Magic voucher-Incredibly, his piece of paper may look very different from the piece of paper the next customer is holding. Hassle to the suppliers, as there could be dozens of variations. The very piece of paper the customer is holding is collected by the activity supplier and added to a redemption report. This report is then sent back to the online seller of the activity, who then pays the supplier for all the vouchers that were redeemed.

Where we are today?

Established players and startups alike have been working on this problem for years. Some have made by allowing him book instantly and just show up with a photo ID. But so far, these efforts have been both commercially and technically fragmented.

Today, an activity supplier may have to divide their available inventory between the extranets of all the online sellers that are delivering him sales. And if something changes, he has to log on to every one of those extranets and adjust his availability for that period. And on the redemption side, have to log in to a variety of extranets to verify whether the customer standing in front of their office has actually paid.

Learn from industry peers

The activities sector need not look very far: Both air and hotel sectors have worked this out for their incredibly complex, and, in the case of hotels, very fragmented spaces.

Just do it

As mentioned above, current efforts to solve these issues in the activity sector have been led by resellers of activities. In an industry with hundreds of thousands of suppliers, the fragmentation for back office and technology systems will only grow as suppliers move their business online, meaning it will be incredibly hard to establish a commercial standard.

The sector desperately needs a common, neutral way to handle these issues. So far, only a select few have stepped up to the plate to offer a solution. Even fewer have bothered to pay attention or to try to run with those efforts. Perhaps it’s the industry’s biggest suppliers that need to come together via a standards body like OpenTravel to solve this incredibly important task.

A task that, all sector hype aside, is the true key to unlocking the tours and activities sector.

Courtesy : www.tnooz.com

Author: Anoop .N

Delivery Manager, Teknokraaft.

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