You already know online bookings can make last-minute guests a breeze to handle, but that’s not the only way online booking software can make your life easier — even if you never want to take a single booking direct from customers on the web.
Availability and Pricing
Centralized availability tracking is mandatory if you’re taking direct customer bookings online, but it’s also critical for offline bookings as your tour or activity company expands. Who hasn’t ever misplaced a booking, or double-booked a space? Multiply those little hiccups by additional inventory or additional staff members and a few minor issues can turn into an embarrassing habit. “The tour guide didn’t show up,” isn’t a review anyone wants to wind up with.
When you use online booking software like Rezgo, every booking you record is tracked against the day’s availability, so you can’t double book a space. And with lists of upcoming bookings, you’ll never lose track of the bookings that have been placed. You can even automatically turn your bookings into easy-to-reference manifests. Plan to shut down while you go away for a week? A couple clicks and you can turn off bookings for that week, no problem.
Making pricing changes is a snap, too. You can make pricing changes across your whole inventory or for any individual tour or activity without having to cross reference a single thing after making the change.
Managing Commissions and Referrals
Do you work with outside distributors? Do you want to? If you have your agents, concierges and other referrers record their bookings using your online booking software, you can calculate and track the exact commission they’ve earned. Rather than keeping spreadsheets and spreadsheets of data, you can reconcile your commission payments directly through Rezgo. Report commissions with a single search, cut a check, and you’re done with the month’s commission payouts. Nice and easy for everyone involved.
Onboarding and Training Staff
Hiring new staff members can be a nerve-wracking process, particularly when you know you’re going to need to train them on the many documents, spreadsheets, programs and files you use to keep track of every aspect of your business. Once you centralize your booking process online, all your carefully-managed systems can be found in one place — and that makes training a lot easier.
More than that, Rezgo allows you to restrict staff members’ access to only the systems they need, and to keep an eye on their activity in the system. No need to lose sleep wondering how that important customer’s contact information was lost or who forgot to take payment ever again – not only are those mistakes harder to make and easier to recover from, they’re also on record.
Customer Relationships
Want to contact a customer after a tour to say thanks and remind them to leave a review? Need to inform everyone of a last-minute tour cancellation in an emergency? Want to see at a glance what customers are extra-loyal? All of that is easier when customer information and booking information is kept together.
With Rezgo, you can export your customer data in a format accepted by all major email marketing platforms, so it’s a short step from knowing your customers’ booking habits to contacting them with the perfect offer.
Physical Goods
It’s hard enough to manage tour inventory offline — if you’re also keeping track of physical goods on paper or static files, you’re a superstar at staying organized. But Rezgo also makes keeping track of stock, orders and physical good sales easy with a full suite of product-management tools.
Because it’s the same system you use for bookings, you can sell products and tours or activities together, and track stock and availability simultaneously. And you’ll know which of your customers book tours, buy physical add-ons, or do both. Plus, all the reports you need for accounting are in one, convenient place. Simple, right?
On-The-Go Access
Have you ever needed to rush back to your office at the crack of dawn or late at night because you needed some vital piece of information about the day’s tours? Or found yourself digging through a half-dozen files that aren’t formatted for your phone to get someone the data they need? When you keep your bookings online, all that information is available anywhere you have Internet access.
Since Rezgo’s back-office features are all formatted for mobile use, it doesn’t even take a computer. Just log in, grab the info you’re looking for, and get on with your day or night. Go ahead and leave your desk behind — you’ll have everything you need in the palm of your hand.
Even if you never plan to let a single customer book directly through the web, an online booking platform could be the perfect solution to all your administrative woes. There’s no risk, so why not find out? Trial Rezgo for free today!
Written By | Nissa Campbell
