Travel Agency Apps: Benefits of Having App for Travel Agency
Ravi Makhija
February 28, 2018
Travel industry has grown at a tremendous rate over the last few years. Technology has played a vital role in enhancing the entire travel industry. A mobile app for travel or tourism agencies is one of them.
Here are some of the latest statistics of travel & tourism industry:
- One reliable statistical data of UNWTO i.e; United Nation World Tourism Organization, the international tourist arrivals have increased up to 1.3 billion in 2019.
- As per Statista, the tour and travel industry contributed 2.9 trillion US dollars in GDP in 2019 worldwide. While, in the United States alone, it has contributed 580.7 billion US dollars.
Considering the travel industry’s growth, travel agencies and tour businesses have started joining the mobile bandwagon by launching their own mobile apps.
Now, we will first walk through some of the most popular travel agency apps that have become popular across the globe.
Best Travel Agency Apps
Let us look at some of the best travel agency apps worldwide.
1. KAYAK
KAYAK is a famous American online travel agency owned by Booking Holdings. It possesses a website and mobile apps that are available in more than 30 countries and 18 languages.
It does the legwork for you by searching hundreds of different travel sites as soon as you decide your goal for the trip. Cheap flights, car rentals, exclusive hotels, etc., KAYAK is there for you.
The app allows you to keep track of all of your travel arrangements in one place, including free flight updates, airport terminal maps, and security wait times.
- Play Store Rating: 4.6/5
- Play Store Install: 10,000,000+
- Offered by KAYAK.com
Key Features of the KAYAK app
- It allows you to book tickets flexibly. It means the app enables you to search, filter, and sort to discover a suitable travel deal for you. It includes car rentals, hotels, and more.
- Price alerts help you save more for the trip. How? It offers alerts whenever the price falls. Besides this, you can access Explorer to find the best travel destinations in your budget.
- Filter options help you discover the best flights based on departure times, airlines, amenities, etc.
- Price forecast offers suggestions on whether to book a flight or wait.
- It provides a flight tracker feature using which you get essential updates about flight. These include gate change, baggage claim alerts, real-time status, etc.
- The car rentals feature enables you to search rentals using different filters for more than 70,000 locations.
2. Expedia
Expedia is one of the most popular travel agency apps for all travel enthusiasts. It offers exclusive savings on hotels, cars, flights, and other travel experiences.
The app enables you to book from over 500,000+ hotels across the globe. These include luxury hotels, airport hotels, resorts, etc.
The ultimate purpose of Expedia is to allow users to plan and book their journey efficiently across the world.
- Play Store Rating: 3.7/5
- Play Store Install: 10,000,000+
- Offered by Expedia
Key Features of Expedia app
- The app allows you to save more by booking bundle deals. These include booking hotel and flight tickets together
- Advanced filters like price, free cancellation, deals, or reviews help you find a suitable hotel effectively.
- You can discover the perfect flight by sorting as per price, no change fees flights, departure or arrival time. Also, users can book a flight for a specific class.
- It offers reward points to users who complete their booking within 30 secs of signing in.
- It allows you to discover and book a wide number of activities worldwide. These include tickets for tours, theme parks, etc.
3. Flyin
Flyin is one of the most well-known applications to discover incredible deals on hotels and flights. It allows you to book from 450+ airlines. Also, it enables you to book from 6,00,000+ hotels, resorts, villas, apartments, etc.
- Play Store Rating: 4.6/5
- Play Store Install: 1,000,000+
- Offered by Flyin
Key Features of Flyin app
- It allows you to book bundles. These include booking flights and hotel tickets together.
- The payment flexibility feature allows you to book and pay through a credit card. It also offers an option to pay the amount by choosing an installment plan.
- It offers round-the-clock customer support to resolve any of the queries.
- The app provides the best and most exclusive deals tailored to users’ needs.
4. Viator Tours and Activities
Viator is a subsidiary of Tripadvisor that offers various tours, travel, and extraordinary travel experiences worldwide. It allows you to discover and book travel experiences anywhere & anytime.
The app enables you to manage bookings, get inspiration for the next destination, and book tours & activities nearby immediately. Moreover, Viator has a massive travel community that has reviewed more than 350,000+ experiences. Hence, you can book anything without any hesitation
- Play Store Rating: 4.5/5
- Play Store Install: 1,000,000+
- Offered by Viator App
Key Features of Viator Tours and Activities App
- It offers ultimate flexibility for bookings. The app provides free cancellation and varied payment options to satisfy users’ needs.
- You can create a wishlist of activities they want to do in the future.
- Obtain push notifications for all future bookings.
- It provides 24*7 customer support.
5. TopDeck
TopDeck is a popular travel agency application that allows you to plan trips effectively. It enables you to check in, manage your itinerary, etc.
The app acts as a 24-hour Travel Leader, providing you with the most up-to-date trip information, weather, maps, and city guides. It allows you to share everything right from the app on social media.
- Play Store Rating: 4.5/5
- Play Store Install: 10,000+
- Offered by Top Deck Tours Limited
Key Features of TopDeck app
- It allows you to budget your travels before going for a trip. Here, you need to enter a budget and track spending in multiple currencies on the go.
- The currency converter feature helps you to convert currency anywhere and anytime.
- Weather forecasts enable you to stay updated with the weather of various locations
- Manage bookings and journeys in the app without any hindrance.
6. Priceline
It is yet another popular online travel agency app through which you can find airline tickets and hotel stays at discounted prices.
Whether you are planning a vacation or a business trip, Priceline is there for you. The app allows you to find 5-star hotels to budget hotels using your palm. Moreover, it allows users to book tickets with free cancellation.
Priceline also has a loyalty program with the name Princeline VIP. Moreover, the VIP program in the app provides loyalty benefits, savings, and more.
Play Store Rating: 4.4/5
Play Store Installs: 10,000,000+
Offered by priceline.com
Key Features of the Priceline app
- You can compare various domestic and international flights to get the best deal.
- Priceline has tied with 290+ car rental brands around 28,000 locations. You can check the best car rental deals and book with free cancellation.
- Using the MyTrips feature, you have complete freedom to make any changes in your trip. Check all of your travel journey details easily.
- Priceline VIP provides some of the most exclusive deals on excellent hotels.
If you want to take your travel agency business online through a mobile app, you are going in the right direction. How?
Firstly, smartphone users are increasing. People are relying more on mobile apps to book their travel journeys.
Besides this, mobile apps provide a vast number of benefits to travel agencies. Here we will look at some of them.
Benefits of Mobile App for your Tour or Travel Agency Business
Here are the some of the most amazing benefits that travel or tour agencies can reap by building a mobile app:
One-Stop Destination for all Bookings
One of the prominent reasons why most of the holiday or travel lovers use travel apps is because they can make their booking or cancellation process easier, faster, transparent, and automatic using one application only.
With the help of a mobile app, a travel agency can include some basic and advanced facilities that will help customers make arrangements faster.
Check availability: With this functionality, customers can easily check if their desired flight or hotel is available for the chosen dates, and if not, they can plan their trips to other dates.
Instant booking: when customers get availability on their desired dates, they prefer to book them instantly before it becomes unavailable. They also expect a faster and easy booking process. They like to book tickets for flights, trains and also like to book hotels.
You can offer them flight booking services, train booking services, bus booking service, hotel booking service, restaurant reservation service through your travel app.
You can also offer them to visit the same place that they had visited before. It will impress them as you are taking care of your customers.
By providing all the above services in an app, a tourist does not have to open any other application separately for all of their traveling schedules.
Tourists will easily manage bookings through one application and that’s what we call the great experience with a travel agency.
Enhance customer support
A good tourism app is one that always provides the best services and is always looking for enhancing customer support. When someone is traveling for the first time, they worry about these little things like food, place, accommodation, weather, people, and many more.
You can add all the essential features in your application so customers can easily find all the things via mobile application.
To know more regarding key-features of Tourism Apps that you can consider for developing a tourism mobile app.
It is your responsibility to make them feel safe and to give a better solution to their problems. In this way, you can enhance customer support. With the help of a mobile app, you have to provide all the important things that matter to tourists.
- 24×7 customer support via chat/ Email
- Instant updates of the tour
- Improved user-experience
- Support on different channels to increase the user-base & brand value
By providing all these solutions through a travel agency application, users can access them anytime & anyplace. This will increase your brand loyalty.
Provide Exclusive Offers & Discounts via your app
Everyone loves to get a discount or reward for using the same service again. As traveling is exhausting money, your users will value a rewards program or a great deal.
Initially, you can provide a discount on certain services for all the users who have downloaded your app and are booking their first ticket.
Secondly, you can make an agreement with the airlines, hotels, and other businesses to provide your clients with different deals and offers.
Moreover, you can also integrate a rewards program in your app; using it; users can collect points and redeem them on any of your booking services.
Decreasing Paperwork & Simplifying Transactions
One of the most essential benefits of the mobile app for the tour or travel industry is that it has played a vital role in decreasing the overall process of paperwork.
Smartphones are really comfortable and convenient devices through which you can offer all the tickets to the users in soft copy and they can access on the go.
Now, users don’t need to carry a lot of documents with them. Hence, with the advent of travel apps, a wide range of formalities have been reduced.
Another essential benefit of travel agency apps is online transactions. With the help of a mobile app, users can book for the tickets in advance. Also, while they are on a tour or business trip, they don’t have to carry cash as they can make various payments through the travel app.
Top-notch Customized Services
With the help of the mobile app, travel agents can offer customized services via tour packages to the customers for different purposes, such as solo trips, family trips, business trips, etc.
Here, travel agents can understand the needs and the priorities of their target audience and then provide highly customized travel services. In short, they can check the demand of their users & then design travel packages favorable to them.
Moreover, travel agency apps can help their users in emergencies such as a natural disaster or any adverse situation.
Increase Customer Loyalty via Latest Technologies
By integrating the latest technologies in a travel app, travel agencies can provide a best-in-class experience to their users. Here is how integrating different technologies can benefit travel agencies:
Virtual reality allows the customers to take a virtual tour of the place before reaching a specific location. Due to VR, more users will purchase services through the travel agency app because customers love to purchase things that they see or feel.
Augmented reality enables users to fetch details about any place instantly.
Apart from this, people love to purchase things or make decisions via voice search. Moreover, as per travelport, 69% of travelers stated that they used a voice search to plan a trip. Hence, the integration of Alexa will be beneficial to the users.
Therefore, integrating the above technologies will help you retain more customers and ultimately increase customer loyalty.
Act as a Marketing Tool
In this highly competitive world, to grow your business, it is deemed necessary to promote the business very effectively to stand ahead of competitors in the market.
Today every business needs to promote its business; otherwise, a business may not maintain its presence in the market.
If you do not promote your business, there is less chance to enhance business visibility to the world.
The main reasons behind some businesses are in the limelight and some are not in the market is only promotion. An app is an ultimate marketing strategy that will help your business be visible in the market.
Further, to ensure that your app reaches the target audience, you need to advertise your app on different channels.
Moreover, you can also approach a digital marketing agency, they will create a proper marketing plan and promote the app on various platforms.
Conclusion
From the above benefits, we can say that a mobile app has become a vital element for every tour and travel agency to reach new customers and serve the travel industry for a long time.
If you have decided to develop a mobile app for your travel agency, don’t hesitate to share your project details with us.
Guru TechnoLabs is a Leading Travel App Development Company. We will help you take your business online through a scalable & reliable travel application.
