Grow your travel business with Freshsales CRM

Introduction

The travel industry is an ecosystem of diverse partners—aggregators, booking platforms, tour operators, ticketing agents, and hotels. This complex network, coupled with the seasonal nature of travel marked by holiday packages and targeted campaigns, creates a unique and ever-evolving business landscape. To thrive in this market and provide exceptional customer experiences, travel companies need to be agile and adaptable.

Challenges with travel sales

Travel sales grapple with the inherent seasonality of the industry, with distinct peak periods and slower seasons. Here are the challenges faced by the travel industry:

• It’s not enough if you engage prospects just ahead of the peak season. It's crucial to engage customers throughout the year to stay top-of-mind or risk being forgotten. 

• A related challenge is that prospects prefer different channels of communication like phone, email, chat, and social media.

• Some travelers crave customized itineraries and travel packages, while others might just want to book tickets. Coordinating these asks requires robust pipeline management. 

• Travel agents navigate a complex ecosystem of hotels, airlines, tour operators, transportation vendors, etc. A successful travel agency needs to cultivate strong relationships with these partners to deliver an exceptional travel experience. Using hotel CRM solutions, travel agents can efficiently manage these partnerships and ensure seamless coordination to enhance their service offerings.

• Prospects could include individuals or businesses. Without different modules and multiple pipelines to handle them, it will be difficult for agencies to assign prospects to the right sales owners.

• Without clear visibility of leads and their interactions with promos or discounts, it’s difficult to track and measure the effectiveness of channels and campaigns.

Benefits of a travel CRM

A Customer Relationship Management solution like Freshsales helps you streamline communication with partners, helps manage seasonal surges in travel inquiries, and nurtures customer relationships throughout the year. With a travel CRM, you can personalize customer communications, increase bookings, optimize your sales processes, and ultimately propel your travel business toward sustainable revenue growth.

A travel CRM software is aligned to your business processes. You can track complex itineraries, automate communications, and personalize your marketing outreach. It empowers you to cultivate year-round customer relationships, streamline collaboration with partners, and create personalized experiences that drive loyalty and growth.

By streamlining processes and providing valuable insights, a CRM system allows you to make data-driven decisions and capitalize on new opportunities for growth.

What are the key features of a travel CRM?

All-in-one solution: Look for a CRM that centralizes all your day-to-day operations. From managing customer data and tracking deals to automating tasks and engaging with clients across channels, a comprehensive solution eliminates the need for juggling multiple tools.

Easy-to-use: CRMs shouldn’t be complicated for end users. An intuitive interface with simple navigation boosts adoption and minimizes the need for extensive training. As your company grows, seek out a CRM that can effortlessly scale alongside your operations.

Workflow automation: Your CRM should help sales teams decrease their time spent on non-sales activities. Reclaim precious time by automating repetitive daily tasks. A robust CRM for travel companies should allow you to set up workflows for actions like sending follow-up emails, updating deal stages based on triggers, generating itinerary documents, and more.

Multichannel communication: Meet your travelers where they are. Choose a CRM that seamlessly integrates with phone, email, SMS, popular messaging apps like WhatsApp, and social media platforms. This empowers you to provide consistent, responsive customer service across all touchpoints.

Sales and marketing campaigns: Nurture leads and re-engage existing clients with targeted campaigns. Look for a CRM with built-in email marketing capabilities, the ability to segment audiences based on preferences or past trips, and analytics to track campaign performance metrics.

Analytics: A good travel CRM offers robust reporting and analytics. You can track vital metrics like sales revenue, conversion rates, campaign performance, etc. These insights empower data-driven decision-making and help you identify areas for improvement.

Mobile app: In the dynamic world of travel, your team needs access to information anywhere, anytime. A mobile app for your CRM is essential, allowing you to check client details, update deal stages, and perform simple tasks on the move.

Customizable: Opt for a CRM that lets you customize fields, reports, and even create custom modules to match your specific workflows and data requirements.

Why Freshsales is the best travel CRM for your business

1. Contact and deal management

A well-structured CRM solution is a travel agent's command center. Freshsales’ contact and lead management capabilities offer several ways for salespeople to get information quickly without rummaging for the right data.

The table view of customer data gives you a spreadsheet-like experience—search, sort, or edit columns to focus on the specific details you need right now.

The Kanban view helps represent your sales pipeline visually, allowing you to track deals intuitively. The Kanban represents each contact as a highlight card that can be dragged and dropped across deal stages.

For example, you can move a lead from the "Contacted" stage to "Itinerary sent" to "Proposal accepted" with a simple drag-and-drop. Simplified views tailored for account management put customer information, itineraries, and communications history at your fingertips, saving precious time. 

In addition to customer management, a CRM for travel companies can directly capture prospect information using web forms. With forms embedded in your website, campaigns, and other sources, you can feed leads directly into your CRM, giving you a higher volume of leads to work with.

The travel industry is complex, with a diverse clientele and a variety of offerings. Multiple sales pipelines in your CRM bring more clarity to the sales process. Tailor each pipeline to match your unique sales processes, track deals with precision,  and gain a clear picture of your overall sales performance.

For instance, you can set up separate pipelines to manage business travel bookings (with stages like "corporate account setup" and "volume discount negotiation") versus leisure travel for individuals or families (emphasizing personalization and itinerary refinement).

2. Automate repetitive tasks to boost productivity

Automation is a game-changer, freeing up time for the high-touch interactions that matter.

With Freshsales, you can set up workflows to automate repetitive tasks like updating customer records after a booking, sending emails with itineraries or documents, and updating invoices.

With sales sequences, you can set up a series of automated steps to nurture your contacts and convert them. For instance, you can design personalized email sequences with destination spotlights, limited-time offers, or testimonials to re-engage leads who haven't booked with you yet.

With automation, you can take repetitive tasks off your sales teams’ plates. This also helps you streamline processes and eliminates the risk of important details slipping through the cracks.

With automation, you can also eliminate time-consuming manual lead assignments with auto-assignment rules. For instance, you can set up rules to auto-route all corporate or business leads to one particular sales owner. You can also set up leads from a particular territory to be automatically routed to a sales owner. 

3. Reach your customers where they are with a multichannel CRM

Modern travelers expect seamless communication across channels. In today's connected world, your travel agency needs to be where your customers are.

Freshsales seamlessly integrates multiple communication channels, ensuring a consistent, personalized experience across the customer journey. You can connect with buyers through built-in phone, SMS, chat, and email. Interact with customers and provide real-time support to inquiries across channels like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

How can you use Freshsales for the best results? Engage website visitors in real-time with trigger-based chat campaigns. Use custom chatbots to answer frequently asked questions about flight schedules, visa requirements, or travel deals, guiding leads through the initial stages of their journey.

You can also use email marketing to share compelling content and personalized messaging—sample itineraries, destination highlights, or early-bird offers—nurturing leads and re-engaging past clients for repeat business.

4. Engage contextually with a 360 customer view to boost conversions

In the world of travel, understanding your clients is crucial to delivering superior customer experiences. A customer 360 view within Freshsales brings your customer's travel journey into sharp focus.

By aggregating data from various touchpoints like website visits, customer interactions, past trips, and conversations, you gain a map of their interests, preferences, and engagement with your company. By understanding customers better, you can personalize your approach towards them. You can then segment and nurture them down the path to conversion.

With Freddy’s AI-powered contact scoring, your sales team can focus on the hottest leads. Identify those most likely to convert based on their interactions and demonstrated interest, ensuring no promising opportunity falls through the cracks.

Imagine a travel agent sees that a client has been browsing pages about safaris in Kenya. With Freshsales’ 360-degree view, they also discover this client previously booked an adventure activity in Dubai. With this knowledge, the agent can propose adding an adventurous safari to their upcoming trip.

5. Generate quotes on the fly with CPQ

Creating detailed travel itineraries and crafting accurate quotes can be a time-consuming process, and the right travel agency CRM can help. Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) empowers your team to generate quotes with speed and precision, ensuring a seamless booking experience for your clients.

With CPQ, Freshsales enables you to have an up-to-date catalog of your travel products and services. Organize offerings like flights, hotels, excursions, and packages, attaching detailed descriptions and visuals to aid your sales team in crafting compelling proposals.

Customize your pricing models for single or multi-destination packages. Easily calculate prices across multiple currencies, and incorporate taxes and discounts as needed.

Imagine a client inquires about a trip to Iceland. Using CPQ, your sales rep can swiftly pull in various components—flights from different airlines, hotel options across price points, and a selection of guided tours. The pricing automatically updates with each selection. Alternatively, for a client seeking a hassle-free experience, the agent can present pre-configured travel packages with bundled pricing and a streamlined quote generation process.

6. Freddy AI: your time-saving, productivity-boosting copilot

Right from identifying the right leads to surfacing insights that drive conversion, Freddy AI is the copilot that can guide you to your revenue goals.

• Freddy AI analyzes customer data and behavioral patterns to score leads, pinpointing those most likely to convert. This saves your team valuable time and lets them focus their energy on the hottest prospects.

• Need help finding the perfect words for a follow-up to a promising lead? Freddy AI can suggest subject lines, compelling email body text, and calls-to-action tailored for the travel industry.

• Your AI copilot can delve into deal data, analyze email exchanges, and highlight potential risks, giving you real-time recommendations on the next best steps to move deals forward.

7. Customize your CRM

While Freshsales offers powerful features out of the box, no two companies operate the same. That's where custom modules unlock the full potential of your CRM.

For instance, you can create a custom module called “tour packages” and track contacts, leads, deals, and other information for that module. In addition to the default fields to capture information, you can create custom fields to suit your new module and store relevant data. 

8. Continue selling on the go

The Freshsales mobile app (iOS and Android) puts CRM in your pocket. Access client information, update deals, schedule follow-ups, and even track offline activities like client meetings—all from your smartphone.

Real-time push notifications keep you updated on tasks, new leads, and upcoming appointments. Customize your notifications to ensure you receive the most important alerts without being overwhelmed.