Agency wallets are a gateway to many untouched revenue opportunities for airlines. Airlines are returning to profitability in 2023, but the growth percentage is steep. According to travel experts, this market gap can be fixed by optimizing the revenue opportunities, especially with their tied-up travel agencies.
Why?
Travel agencies contribute almost 40% of the overall profit from travel agencies and 60% of the revenue from leisure and corporate travelers. Travel agencies serving different faces, cultures, and people, revenue opportunities, and payment preferences are expanded. With the world moving towards a decentralized payment system, trying to bundle it with centralized payments will result in missed revenue opportunities, especially with airlines.
An agency wallet is a flexible virtual payment option that stores and handles multi-currency payments worldwide.
What challenges are faced by travel agencies without an agency wallet?
- They cannot initiate a single payment for ad hoc and group bookings which takes a lot of manual effort and time from the revenue team
- Ability to handle and offer different types of customer needs namely, group travelers, corporate/business travelers, and leisure travelers
- Providing payment flexibility in dealing with holiday management, booking prepayments, and payment installments
- Determining the ways to expand the revenue opportunities for each customer
What challenges are faced by airlines without an agency wallet?
- Disconnected payment environment, user journeys, and revenue systems leading to revenue loss and leakages
- No internal flexibility to strategize and streamline the payment system for travel agencies, corporate managers, and general customers
- Finding ways to fully utilize the back-office operations
- Less progression, innovation, and providing various payment options
What are the benefits travel agencies will get when they use agency wallets?
Travel agencies will be most benefited from agency wallets due to the nature of their business as they are the main source of revenue for the airlines through group bookings, tourism, corporate travels, and leisure travels.
Let’s see the top 5 benefits that travel agencies get to experience when they use agency wallets,
● Multiple payments at the same time
Travel agencies cannot pay for their ad hoc and group bookings at the same time. In legacy systems, everything is handled via email, calls, and messaging with continuous follow-ups. Agency wallets have the flexible functionality to initiate many consecutive payments.
● Smooth payment modes
Wallets offer instant payments, refunds, cancellation options, coupon codes, and dynamic travel payments. Unlike bank operations which may take 3-7 business days to handle payments, agency wallets have no delays and can offer instant refunds wherever necessary.
● Integrations with multiple booking engines
Airlines will have the flexibility to connect with multiple booking engines without any hindrance in reconciling and payment issues. This will contribute a lot to the airline’s growth due to the extended revenue opportunities with multiple booking engines.
● Easier calculations for the accounting team
There is complete transparency in handling business payments from public travelers to travel agencies to corporate travelers. All the department managers can monitor and evaluate which product or service is the most profitable to the airline and how to leverage it.
● Great customer experience
Seamless payment options is a great advantage any industry can provide for its customers. Travel agencies can operate better with agency wallets featured with many new-age payment modes making them loyal and convenient to choose your airlines.
How can airlines serve better with an agency wallet?
● Negotiate better deals with travel agencies
Agency wallets make travel agencies bring consistent business opportunities. Airlines could negotiate better deals with travel agencies by offering commissions or booking deals and payments done through agency wallets.
● Serve beyond satisfactory customer service
Travel agencies have a multitude of internal processes to deliver the best experiences to their travelers. Agency wallets help them reduce the time spent to initiate, and manage the payments allowing the travel agencies to get exceptional customer service.
● Straightened out internal processes
There might be some disconnect with the travelers as wallets are already available in a lot of other industries. A wallet can straighten the payment process from external sources to internal sources. Airlines can use agency wallets to properly strategize and straighten the internal process.
● Stakeholder, airline system and agreements alignment
Internal agreements or business flow might not have official documentation on agency wallets. Most airlines wouldn’t consider adding wallets as a part of their agreement, marketing, or growth plan. But that could change if wallets are properly utilized.
Conclusion
Payment innovation is a smart step to increase the bottom line of airline operations. We provide an agency wallet as a separate enhancer tool that serves as a one-point payment solution secured with trustworthy and safe policies benefiting the travel agencies who go with group bookings.
GroupRM provides a 360° group booking revenue management system assuring 23% of revenue growth from group booking.
