As one of the longest-standing reservation management systems in the industry, Zaui always strives to make online bookings easy for tour, activity, and transport operators. With a robust suite of tools and features, the Zaui reservation management system improves operational efficiency, cuts costs, and boosts the revenue of operators.
Beyond digitizing the booking process, Zaui equips you to power up your business with promotional campaigns, while delivering a memorable travel experience to your guests. Even though every aspect of our booking software makes life easier for tourism operators, there are a few features, which are crowd favourites.
Favourite Features of our Reservation Management System
We decided to list down the most popular features among our clients to help others in the tourism community searching for their next restech partner.
If you are new to the world of reservation technology, here is your cue to what to look for in the new online booking system for your business.
1. Online Booking Engine
A simple and hassle-free booking option on the website is a must-have for tour and activity operators to increase the share of direct bookings. When there is no option to book on your website directly, potential customers are forced to call front staff, confirm the availability, and share the payment details to reserve their spot.
An online booking engine can minimize those tedious steps to a few clicks on your website and make the booking process frictionless for your guests. Integrating an online booking engine into the website can provide customers with a quick, flawless booking experience, attracting more direct bookings.
Zaui’s online booking engine can be easily integrated into our clients’ website, and its guest-centric features help them get more direct bookings. Whenever an enthusiastic traveller lands on their website and gets interested in their tours or activities, they can book tours right from their website, without any delay.
As our online booking engine is optimized for mobile, travellers on the go will have no difficulty booking tours online. And the quick-view availability calendar is handy for those who make last-minute in-destination bookings.
To top it off, built-in multi-currency and multi-language features make the booking process frictionless for global customers who want to book in their preferred language and home currency.
Our business doubled in the first year of operation with Zaui and grew by 40% in the second year and we expect continued growth in future years. Zaui integrated into our website seamlessly to provide an easy shopping experience for our customers.
Don Coggins at Copper Cayuse Outfitters
2. Channel Manager
It’s no secret that distributing tours and activities through various sales channels brings more revenue for your business. However, managing multiple sales channels in real-time can be challenging. What you need is a tool that can manage these sales channels without any hassles.
Channel Manager is a game-changer in our reservation management system, enabling centralized management of different sales channels, reducing your workload. You get a single dashboard to manage all your sales channels. It means that you are capable of distributing your tours worldwide, partnering up with global distributors with ease.
Instead of you updating the booking manually, the channel manager updates the system whenever there is a new booking or cancellation via a third-party seller. The live, real-time inventory management also eliminates the risk of overbooking.
Best of all, the channel manager keeps you in the driver’s seat. Channel Manager lets you decide the reselling channels you want to sell, choose activities and inventories available to resellers, and set the cutoff times.
Another perk is that it simplifies the complexities associated with payouts and pricing by automating it. While it helps you expand your reach, it saves your time on endless data entry and payout calculation.
We are very happy with Zaui. The technical support is outstanding, and the flexibility to interface with other platforms makes expanding our sales channels quite easy. Also, the user interface on the back end is very friendly; it helps us organize our daily operations and allows us to manage high sales volumes with relatively few staff.
Carolyn Bates, Sales & Product Manager, Grayline WestCoast Sightseeing
3. Zaui Insights
Data-driven insights are vital to making informed decisions, and Zaui Insights does precisely that by equipping our clients to keep their fingers on the pulse of the business.
Zaui Insights is an analytical dashboard that provides you with a critical overview of your business performance, identifying the latest trends. By tapping into these data, you can forecast revenue and bookings patterns and create strategies rooted in evidence.
It gives you essential information about the three vital factors that drive your tour and activity business—revenue, bookings, and customers. Based on the insights, you can decide how to adjust your tour offerings, which package is working well, or whom to target next time.
Monitoring real-time KPIs provides you with a good understanding of what is going on at any point in time. The easy-to-analyze visual graph makes it easy to extract information and learn whether promotional campaigns are successful or not. It gives you a leg up on the competition by enabling you to tweak the ongoing promotional campaign or strategy based on the insights.
4. Promo Codes
As an effective and proven marketing tool, promo code is a must-have in a tour and activity operators’ tool kit. Promo codes work like a charm, enticing travellers with incentives to book their next trip with you.
Zaui’s promo code features allow you to create, manage, and distribute highly customized promotional codes in a couple of clicks. In the Zaui system, you can offer promo codes for either a fixed value or a percentage discount, depending on what works best for your business margins.
Tour and activity operators can use promo codes to promote new/less popular products, upsell, and attract more bookings during the holiday season. Zaui even lets you use promo codes to extend your guests a bonus offer. With Zaui’s unique auto-generated code feature, you can preconfigure the rules to serve your guests who have already purchased an experience with another special offer.
When you use promo codes, it is equally important to measure how effective your campaigns were. Zaui offers comprehensive reporting of promo codes empowering you to gain deeper insights into sales made using them. Armed with these insights, you will be all set to fool-proof your promo code campaign for the next season.
5. Notifications
Connecting with your guests and keeping them informed both pre and post-tour is crucial for tour, activity, and transport operators. However, setting up emails for each guest and reaching out to them after their trip can be daunting, especially when operating with a small team.
Have you ever wished for an easier way to send these personalized email communications to your guests?
Good news! Zaui’s notifications feature allows you to automate emails for every booking made, saving you from the tedious work of creating emails manually. You can pre-draft these emails and set the time and date for the emails to go out.
Whether it be information about the upcoming tour or unexpected delays, tour, activity, and transport operators can rely on the notification feature to provide guests with relevant information and a frictionless guest experience.
To make the best of this feature, here we have covered everything about Pre & Post Tour Emails Operators Should Send to nurture guest relationships.
We are so excited with the outcome. Zaui reduced our booking steps from 12 down to just one, making our work more efficient and improving our customer’s experience. Asante sana (thank you!)
Elizabeth Jere, Co-Founder, Jiranileo
6. Activity Gift Cards
Experiential gifts are gaining popularity among shoppers as they create unique memories the recipient will never forget. Experience gift cards are also easier and faster to purchase than a traditional gift. And it’s a favourite amongst last-minute gifters!
No wonder Zaui’s Activity Gift Card is one of the highly requested features among tour and activity operators. Activity gift cards with a personalized message give customers an opportunity to gift their loved ones with an experience. Zaui lets the customers forward the gift to the recipient, or in an old-fashioned way, they can print out the gift card and send it to the recipient.
Besides sprucing up seasonal campaigns, gift cards also help you drive revenue during the off-season. Another added advantage for tour and activity operators is that gift card recipients often end up spending more than the face value of the card. Sometimes the recipient invites another person or upgrades their tour, which brings more revenue for you.
Wrapping Up
A reservation management system is crucial today to address the digital self-service habits of customers. Knowing the popular booking software tools among other tour and activity operators will help you better understand how your peers are benefiting from an online booking system.
If you are shopping for booking software now but not sure where to start, we can help you. Our latest Buyer’s Guide to Choosing an Online Booking System provides a round-up of everything you need to know when you hunt for a reservation management system for your tour and activity business.
Get Your Free Guide To Finding The Right Online Booking System
Or even better, chat with us. We will give you a walk-through of how the Zaui reservation management system could help you attract direct bookings and boost your revenue.