Get your day organised with smart data

Back in the day most travel consultants used a physical paper trail of sorts to keep on top of their bookings. In my case it was small index cards for domestic bookings and A4 sized folders for international ones.

We would print out the itinerary on the dot matrix printer and stick them to either the index cards or folders, and then arrange those by travel date. The whole idea was you could see which of your bookings were travelling imminently and logic (remember that in travel?!) dictated those closer to time of travel are more likely to have a demand or two from the airlines and other suppliers in the booking.

At some point most of the industry did away with this system, and expected staff to simply remember what they should work on, or even worse, made them totally reliant on GDS queues. Coupled with this, airlines heavily invested in robotics to add demands and auto cancellation rules to bookings, and suddenly travel consultants were completely reliant on the list of bookings in their personal GDS queues.

The problem of course with a GDS queue, is that it cannot prioritise what you should work on. So now travel consultant spend a lot of time going through all the bookings in their queues, trying to figure out which to work on first. Add to this the fact airlines use different formats in how they add their remarks, and suddenly the productivity of front-line travel staff are severely impacted due to additional time spent per booking, trying to figure out what the suppliers are asking for, and by when.

We thought surely there must be a better way, and so we developed some very smart machine-learning algorithms to understand the various remarks from airlines. We then grouped these demands into their various categories, and where there is a deadline set by the airline, we can read that as well and add it to the list of actions we can understand is still expected per booking.

However, we did not stop there. We also figured out ways to “clear” the demand should the required action be taken. So for instance, if we pick up the airline is asking for APIS information in a booking, and later we detect this was added, we will “clear” this request and leave only the ones still outstanding as required action items.

As a result, we’ve turned the data in your bookings into smart, organised data which in turn enables your staff to have views on their bookings organised in ways to ensure the most urgent actions are done first. They can now also easily see what’s on their plate without having to spend endless hours on GDS queues. Our initial estimates show that an average consultant could easily save an hour per day working this way!

So - what are you waiting for? Let us smarten up your booking data for you! https://www.calendly.com/agentivity/discovery

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