Blog - Online Booking Software

Package Spotlight: CLNDR

The availability calendar is a very important feature of the tour and activity business that nearly every customer or potential customer sees before making a purchase. Calendars like this need to be feature-rich and allow for many different use cases. CLNDR is the package that helps us do just that. With CLNDR we have a fast, responsive, and feature-rich availability calendar that allows tour and activity operators to sell faster and smarter.

Package Name: CLNDR.js
Website: http://kylestetz.github.io/CLNDR/

Brandon Parker

Brandon is the Manager, Front-End Development and Analytics at TRYTN. He has over 10 years experience in the web development field from family-owned to Fortune 200 companies.

November 2019 Release Notes

We’re excited to talk more about some of the enhancements that we’ve made to the platform in November! Vast improvements to tickets and overall design for the booking platform are just a few along with Mailchimp integration, enhanced reporting, and many performance and security enhancements.

Stay tuned for more exciting updates as well as a walkthrough of the new booking platform redesign in December.

Account Updates

New affiliates report to learn more about success and profitability of affiliates
Added filtering to check in to only show activities with bookings
Transaction search page will now notify you if your search did not match any transactions
Fixed an issue where some transaction identifier searches on the transaction search page were not returning results
General performance, resiliency, and security enhancements

Booking and Embedding Updates

Many usability and design enhancements
General performance and security enhancements

General Platform Updates

Tickets are now attached to confirmation email as a PDF
Tickets have been enhanced to be easier to read and more inline with industry standards
The platform now support Icelandic Króna (ISK) currency
Tour and activity operators can now integrate with Mailchimp
Resiliency and security enhancements

Customer Insights with the Improved Customers Report

Several months ago we introduced the Customers report. This report gave high-level insights about your customers. Specifically buyer information, number of purchases, and a small amount of information about each purchase a customer has made.

While this report helps our activity and tour operators get to know their customers a little better it lacked some of the information needed to make actionable decisions.

A few weeks ago we released an enhancement to this Customers report. Going forward the report is faster and performs better on smaller screens. But that’s just the beginning. We’ve also added more metrics and some insights so you can know more about your customers buying habits.

Lifetime Value

The Customers report now includes information about the lifetime value of each customer. At-a-glance you can easily find the total revenue, number of bookings, and average order value for the customer. Knowing who your most valuable and most loyal customers are helps build a community. Happy customers refer additional customers through the most powerful advertising medium: word of mouth.

Booking Date Breakdowns

Also new to the Customers report is a breakdown by month of the purchases made by your customer. Here you can start to see trends in buying habits and can market to the customer when they are most likely to buy from you. As an example assume John Smith has had 5 bookings, each in July, and each a year apart. You can assume based on this information that this next July they will likely want to book with you again.

Another new metric in the Customers report is the last booking date. This gives you an at-a-glance view of not just the date of the last booking for the customer but also how many days ago the booking was placed. This can help you engage customers that you haven’t seen in a while, perhaps with a promotion, to try to re-engage them.

Transaction Details

The Customers report has always shown details about the customer transactions, but this has been cleaned up in the new Customers report. No longer does the report show all transaction data all at once. Now, you will see a list of transactions with the transaction ID, refund status (if refunded), purchase date, and total revenue from the purchase.

Once selected you will find additional details about that transaction, mainly the items the customer purchased for that specific transaction. Transaction information includes the item title, quantity/participants purchased, and total of the item purchased. You can use this information alongside the other new information to help identify your customers preferences and market personalized messages to them based on their past purchases.

Package Spotlight: Lodash

Sometimes as a developer you come across a problem and through research on how to solve it you discover a package that changes your life (so to speak.) In my case, Lodash is that package.

Many years ago I was trying to release a wizard where at the beginning of the wizard a payload of product data was presented. As questions were asked the JavaScript needed to narrow down that list until eventually a single product was left.

In order to do this I needed a way to manipulate, filter, and search complex arrays and objects. This is what Lodash excels at and I have been the biggest fan ever since.

With Lodash you are able to take complex objects and arrays and sort, search, filter, and otherwise manipulate them to fit your specific needs. It’s a highly optimized script and can perform extremely fast on large and complex data sources. It’s utility seems to have no end and I am always finding new ways to use Lodash to solve both simple and complex problems alike.

Package Name: Lodash
Website: https://lodash.com/

Brandon Parker

Brandon is the Manager, Front-End Development and Analytics at TRYTN. He has over 10 years experience in the web development field from family-owned to Fortune 200 companies.

Consumer Buying Habits

In September 2019 we asked consumers to answer five questions about their last vacation. The goal was to learn more about how consumers think about and plan vacations and the experiences that they have while on vacation.

Below are the results of the survey as well as the analysis of the results. We’ve broken this down into three primary sections: when consumers take vacations, how the book experiences, and if online booking matters to them.

At TRYTN we strive to bring not just new functionality to help tour and activity operators and businesses sell more but also information. Information can be key to understanding your market and how to better execute your business and marketing plans. This case study was created to help businesses understand what their consumers may be thinking about when taking a vacation.

When Consumers Vacation

The first question that was asked in the survey was approximately when was the date of your last vacation? From this question we can identify two primary data points: distribution of months vacations are typically taken and how long ago the last vacation was. This first graph shows the distribution by month of when survey respondents said they took their last vacation. Perhaps not surprising but most vacations are taken around spring break (March or April) and are very steady through Summer months and into early Fall (June through September) which is also typically when school is not in session.

We can also see that many people do not vacation in the Winter months. This is surprising given that many consumers do tend to travel to warmer places to get away from the cold or to mountain regions for ski trips. Our suspicion is that consumers are taking multiple vacations a year and the Summer vacation came after the Winter vacation.

We can also determine the length of time since the consumers last vacation. Given that we asked in September most customers had taken a trip within the month or the last three months which corresponds to the distribution of vacation months from the above graph.

Some interesting data points is that a combined 8.5% of respondents stated they hadn’t taken a vacation in over a year. The vast majority of consumers take at least one vacation a year (91.6% of all respondents have taken a vacation in the last year.)

How and When Customers Book Experiences

Perhaps more important than when or how often a consumer takes a vacation is how that consumer books experiences for that vacation. This first graph represents the question did you book experiences for your vacation prior to arrival at your destination? This helps us to understand if consumers like to plan out their vacations or see what interests them as they learn more about the location while in the destination.

From this graph we can see that around seven out of every ten consumers like to pre-book their activities and experiences prior to arrival at their destination. About three in ten will wait until they arrive for vacation to book their activities and experiences.

As a business owner it’s important to remember both types of consumers are potential customers. Are you enabling customers to book with short notice? If you have a large purchase cut-off window set you may be missing out on potential customers.

Likewise, are you incentivising customers to book online ahead of time, perhaps through an online booking discount, promotion codes, or flash sales? Given the majority of customers like to book activities and experiences ahead of time this is a consumer buying habit that you cannot afford to ignore.

Next we asked consumers to tell us what primary method they used to book experiences for their last vacation. The following chart shows the breakdown of responses from respondents.

Surprisingly direct was the number one response. Given the popularity of online travel agents (OTAs) we expected the OTA segment to be larger and reduce from the direct traffic. Around 11% place their bookings through a traditional travel agent or through a hotel or cruise package (think all-inclusive packages.) This shows the importance for tour and activity operators to offer a way to book online. Direct bookings offer you the largest return for your investment because you don’t have the large commissions that you do with the other methods.

We next asked a similar question: what medium did you use to book your activities and experiences? For this we wanted to learn how people are booking. As an example did you go into the travel agent office or did you call or email them? Not surprisingly most respondents book their activities online as this is the most convenient. The next largest category was in person which likely results in walk-up reservations which does not directly correlate with the percentage that books their experiences once they arrive (this is about half of that response.) Given the availability of phone and internet service it’s likely that even once at the destination consumers are still using phone and online means of booking to book their activities and experiences.

Given the large number of responses in the online column it’s important for tour and activity owners and operators to realize that online booking is an important part of a consumers journey when planning out their vacation. This question also helps to show that tour and activity operators need to allow customers to book online.

Do Customers Really Care about Booking Online?

The million dollar question really is are you more apt to book if online booking is available? It can take a lot of time and effort to switch systems or move from an in-person/phone reservations to accepting online reservations. Tour and activity operators that really want to drive business and increase the growth of the business in a dramatic way need to have the ability to accept reservations online.

But what does it matter as a tour or activity operator if the customer doesn’t see the value in online booking ability? That’s why we asked if it made a difference to them. Would a customer be more willing to book an activity or experience if that business offered online booking? Yes, a resounding yes! Most consumers, nine out of every ten, are more likely to book an activity or experience for their next vacation if that business offers the ability to book online.

Conclusion

In conclusion the majority of consumers are taking vacations in the Summer months and the vast majority take one to two vacations per year. Most consumers book activities and experiences directly with the business online and are more likely to book with a business if that business offers online booking capability.

Mailchimp Integration

We are excited to announce a new integration partner: Mailchimp. With Mailchimp businesses can maintain customer contact lists and using advanced segmentation strategies can specifically target customers with marketing messages through social, email, and postcards.

Enabling Mailchimp with TRYTN is easy. Simply navigate to the settings page, find Mailchimp under the Integrations section, and enter the required fields. There are support documents that also list where you can find the required information within Mailchimp.

Once activated your customers will be prompted if they wish to opt-in to marketing communications with your business during the checkout process. We will continue to enhance this integration in the coming months to give you even more powerful ways to utilize Mailchimp and drive additional revenue to your business.

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