Developing B2C B2B travel portal or OTA software platform, top 10 things to do (Complete Guide).

In 2022, everyone wants to travel. More number of people are traveling, companies are sending their delegates to conclude the pending business deals and lux travel is also rise. Travel agents, tour operators and OTA platforms are seeing a unique trend nowadays, Complete Digitization. Digital transformation in terms of setting up online travel portal and OTA software solutions is key to staying agile and being ahead.

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The traditional model of making personal visit to any of the travel agency and placing the booking, have totally changed. All the bookings happen online. Hence, your travel booking portal should be technologically advanced to meet the needs and preferences of your client.

If you are a travel agent and you plan to develop a new travel software or website for your company, make a note of the below mentioned factors. For those who own their own websites, you might be wondering why you are losing business? For all your queries, we are providing 10 important facts to consider before you design your travel website. If these factors are followed you can gain reach and thereby your business develops.

The travel website should be developed on responsive design platform. This enables your website to perform well on mobile devices too. Every time customers won’t browse on desktop and make their bookings. Therefore, it’s very important to provide them with the best user experience while they sign-in to your website using tablets or mobile phones. You can have the website in front end HTML and backend as PHP or Dot Net technologies or you can use CMS tool like wordpress. Alot of new age travel agencies are using the latest technologies like Angular, NodeJS and ReactJS too.

SEO & Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is very vital to ensure top ranking of your booking website in the search engine. Google Adwords and Keywords adds-on to this scenario. A professional travel portal development company’s help is advisable to gain visibility in organic as well as advertisement links on any search engine. Using better digital marketing techniques, you can sell your travel deals better.

The purpose of your travel agency portal is to generate travel business leads. In that case, it is very important that you place call-to-action buttons in the proper space.

Here certain psychological factors are also to be considered. Behavioral psychology will enable your website to choose and create meaningful typography, layouts and colors.

Content Management is another major factor to be considered for your travel agency portal. A lot of contents arranged in a messy way will never generate business from your website. The contents should be short and apt for the context. Infographics and images can give more look and feel to your travel reservation portal.

Your web design should showcase the best deals or offers to initiate traffic. Many people plan their travel while they get good offers for flight tickets.

Some travelers even prefer traveling during the off season to save their money. So a way to make a proper plan on managing the deals and season should be integrated within the website to evoke interest in website visitors.

24x7 customer support is required if you plan to run a website for your travel agency. If you have clients from all around the world, then online support should be organized on the basis of geographical locations.

Instant flight search feature has to be embedded in your website. This helps the visitor to get the required information by entering fields in the available search form. Date, time of travel, location all these are mandatory fields to be included in the form.

Customized services based on location can generate more clients for your business. For that you need to integrate other service providers to your website. Car rental, hotel reservation etc. based on destination helps the traveler to make bookings prior to their arrival.

Partnership with local and international service providers will always end up in gaining more customers for your travel agency. All range of bookings starting from budget travel options to 7 star reservations can be included in your list of services.

If the aim of your business is to gain a global presence then the website translator has to be embedded within the website design. Though English is a global language, people from many parts of the world won’t be able to read and understand the content on your website. To avoid this difficulty, website translator must be a part of the website.

Travel APIs are a set of web services

(XMLs/JSONs) using which travel agencies or OTA platforms connect to a source, which may be GDS or any third party travel content aggregators. By integrating travel APIs XMLs, agents can offer real time availability & booking services of flights, hotels, transfers, sightseeing and all ancillary services including bookings, amendments and cancellations.

For a robust travel booking platform, there can be two options 1 - AWS - Amazon Web Services and 2. Dedicated Server. Depend on traffic expectations on your platform, server company and server parameters can be defined which can range in $60 USD to $500 USD per month. On the other hand, if you want setup the hardware in your local office then the pricing parameters will change significantly.

Now that you are well aware of travel APIs and why to integrate travel APIs, you must find the best travel API provider and API integration company. While plenty of travel technology companies are available, the question is how to find the best API company. Let me help you in preparing a questionnaire that fits your requirements.

• What are the major API integration services you offer?
• Please provide 7-8 benefits you offer to travel agents?
• Do you make custom web design or use the theme?
• Can you provide the portfolio?
• Do you provide case studies to showcase the results of your web design?
• What is the policy for building websites in comparison with the competitors?
• How do I get the timely work progress of the project?
• What are the types of travel technologies you are specialized in?
• Do you give round the clock support and also handling the updates of the applications?

It is well known that the cost of labor in Western countries like the United States is high. So, when it comes to comparing price and also the quality of work, India has a vast pool of talent that is available at a comparatively inexpensive rate. By shifting their business service to a developing country like India, companies can leverage cost differences and get their services completed at a much lower price. Hiring a team at lower cost is a major advantage but let me tell you a few more advantages that are also considered.

Outsourcing to a third-party provider usually provides a large cost saving to businesses. For example, for a US company, getting a website developed and maintained in-house is much costlier than just outsourcing web development to an IT outsourcing service provider in India.

Outsourcing lets the company dedicate concentrate on its business core operations.

Outsourcing a business task like in a web development project, to a software development

outsourcing company

expert in development results in a high-quality, on-time, bug-free product.

According to the business requirements a company that hired a third party outsourcing company can increase or decrease in the size of the outsourced team. If a company hired a size of five remote developers for its project, but for some reason, it requires more developers, then the outsourcing service provider can easily scale up the team.

Another major benefit that

US companies draw from offshoring

is getting their work done by highly skilled and certified professionals. India is well acknowledged for its expert IT professionals, due to this reason many software companies have offshored their software development centers to India.

With IT hubs in Bangalore, Gurgaon, and Hyderabad, India has proved itself to be a part of all the developed nations when it comes to IT infrastructure. Even the increased establishment of start-ups and SMEs are very well utilizing advanced technology tools to provide excellent web solutions.

It’s hard to find countries that have favorable and supportive government policies, whereas India is popular in terms of IT industry policies. The

Information Technology Act

and all other IT policies in India are supporting the industry’s growth.

Apart from the major these, there are many other perks of outsourcing web development tO India like consistent in quality, round the clock support, faster project delivery, and much more.

Whether you want to minimize your cost, include advanced technologies towards growing your business, outsourcing to India could be the right step. There are many advantages you can avail, cost benefits you can leverage, timely updates on work, maintenance and round clock support, and technology stack you can bring to the table when you choose to outsource travel software development to India.