Shortlist & Share Travel Itineraries.
A feature designed for Central Bookers (Travel Desk) to shortlist and send the travel options to their employees making the entire booking journey seamless.
Objective
To enable the Centre bookers / Travel desk employees to shortlist few travel options ad get it confirmed with the employees.
Problem Statement
Our KAM ( Key Account Management ) businesses holds the major share (more than 65%) in business travel through our product. In these Business, a central booker or a group of employees part of their travel desk makes the bookings for the rest of the employees in the organisation based on individual requests.
The travel requests containing the travel date, destination and other details are shared to the central bookers over regular email. Based on which they finds relevant travel options on our product and then shares the same with the requesters through reply to their mails. Usually flight and hotel screenshots are taken from our product and shared to emplyees.
The employees in return will reply to the mail with their preferred travel option and the central booker then completes the booking on our platform.
Pain Points
When you get multiple requests from the employees daily for multiple dates and destination, it becomes difficult to track them and get it booked with-in the defined TAT.
Taking screenshots of multiple options and compiling it over mail is cumbersome, requires too much of effort and time consuming.
The Average TAT for these requests are less than a day usually, but at times few requests gets missed from employee side and gets delayed. The central bookers have to then send multiple reminder mails to the employee to revert with their final preference.
Half of the process is outside the product, which we could stream line if we could get it online inside the product.
The Approach We Took
Since we had the booking funnel already in place, we agreed upon adding extra modules on top of the existing booking funnel. For this we had to:
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Identify who is travelling, so that the appropriate travel policy can be applied.
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Create a new shortlist & Share module in between the search listing and booking.
Identifying the traveller is an important step in this feature. Till now the booking has been done using the central bookers account. Hence the travel options shown was based on his or her travel policy and not the actual travellers. Here the central booker uses his intiution/experience to match the properties to the employee levels.