Agencies, suppliers., and tour operators with ambitions to take their travel companies global all have one thing in common—an extensive network of resellers/ subagents who serve as B2B sales channels, bringing in business from diverse locations. In these cases, travel companies often must spend a lot of time and resources tracking subagency performance.
To mitigate this issue and maximize B2B revenue, travel companies need a powerful travel ERP solution with channel management capabilities.
Here, we look at the features that every good travel ERP has that allow you to easily manage your subagents and the respective sales channels in a hassle-free manner.
Comprehensive reporting and analytics capabilities
One of the biggest challenges of managing a subagent network is performance management. The subagents might be spread worldwide, leaving you with many sleepless nights figuring out how to objectively track their performance.
With the right travel ERP, report generation is automatic; track all the parameters you want and generate reports based on commissions, individual agents, branches, or suppliers.
Further, you can send the agents summaries of their sales for any period of choice, including day, week, month, financial quarter, and even year. It is worth mentioning that the transaction reports are pretty comprehensive and cover booking/ cancellation/ promotion details, failed transaction records, change requests, etc.
Easy management of pricing and revenue
- If you are a large agency, you may find it tedious to set up markups, commissions, margins, exceptions in terms of percentages for each subagent. However, if you have a travel ERP, you can use it to set up exception criteria and business rules to govern each class of subagents to manage their revenue.
High level of personalization
A travel ERP also comes in handy if you want your subagents to have their user interface with customized branding. As the master agency, you can allow your subagents to quickly set up a B2B login and a corresponding private label B2C portal. Using this browser & mobile-friendly portal, your subagents can have their end customers book directly from anywhere in the world at their convenience.
With this arrangement, your travel agency can tap into an additional distribution channel for enhanced revenue. The subagents can further set up their markups according to the customer and provide a secured payment gateway of their choice where customers can directly book their tickets.
The personalization doesn’t stop there; subagents can use travel ERP for sending branded emails, vouchers, and quotes to customers.
To fully optimize the revenue from one of your subagencies, you need to also ensure that the travel ERP automates their back and mid-office processes, including customer management, quality checks, vendor management, corporate policy enforcement, auto invoicing, and booking management.
Given the importance of data security, the master agency can also provide role-based access to sub-agents, corporates, branch operators, etc., with a private user interface.
Credit management
- Since credit from master agencies is the lifeline of many subagencies that make bookings on their behalf, a good travel ERP needs to facilitate credit management. Notably, the master agency can set up reminders when the subagency’s credit dwindles beyond a preset point. Also, the travel ERP can be configured to allow the credit to be replenished by either the subagency or the master agency, based on the requirement.
Conclusion
If you have a network of subagents bringing in business, the need of the hour is a comprehensive online B2B agent management platform. Ensure that it allows you to track subagency performance closely, provide credit, offer private labeling or cobranding, set up commissions as needed, and handle payment reconciliation as well. With such a travel ERP system, you will find that maintaining subagents all over the world is a rewarding process. If you want to learn more, reach us at [email protected] for a consultation.
