In the news: This week we introduce new products from three hospitallity players – Journeyful’s mobile app, Travelport’s business intelligence product for travel agencies, TripAdvisor’s Review Express’s extension
Journeyful takes hotel booking mobile with new app
Journeyful app created due to increasing usage of mobile to research travel.
Singapore based travel tech start-up, Journeyful, has taken a step into mobility with the release of an app for both iOS and Android, an extension of its existing reward based online travel agency.
Billed as a rewards based hotel booking engine, it offers travellers a choice of over 200,000 hotels worldwide at the best price guaranteed. It has a unique rewards system that allows users to earn reward dollars on hotel bookings, as well as from their friends’ bookings via referrals rewards.
The mobile app shows mobile users an interactive destination map with hotel listings in the area. Journeyful said this enables users to filter hotels by price, rating and location and allows users to make hotel bookings in 30 seconds with instant confirmation.
To make the journey stress-free for users the OTA has a team of standby travel consultants and customer service executives to assist users via phone or email.
Moe Ibrahim, Journeyful’s CEO, explained the reason for developing the app: “Having a mobile app is a natural step for us as all studies show an increasing usage of mobile to research travel. Therefore, we want to be where our customers are and provide a secure, user-friendly and updated platform where our users can research and book hotels on-the-go, with the confidence of booking the best deals without ever having to leave the app.”
Journeyful has also released several features to enhance usability and customer experience, including an open reviews feature that allows users to submit a hotel review along with photographs or videos. Other travellers can view reviews before booking the hotel and when someone up-votes the review, the user gets a Journeyful Reward.
Travelport’s Agentivity helps APAC travel agencies work smarter and more efficiently
Agentivity helps agents to work more efficiently. (Image credit: BerryHappy/iStock)
Travel agencies in Asia Pacific can now be better informed when making business decisions – both tactical and strategic – with Travelport’s new businesss intelligence product known as Agentivity.
Travelport said the new product is designed to place highly relevant booking data and business insights directly into the hands of agents.
Agentivity is developed by UK-based Inside Group to provide travel agencies with instant web-based access to actionable insights on all aspects of their business, including daily operations, booking trends, additional revenue opportunities, emergency notifications, individual consultant productivity and much more.
In most cases, no change to workflow is required by the travel agency and because Agentivity is web-based, no software installation is required.
The solution constantly monitors all agency activity, and provides insight into the different elements of the business, empowering the agency to react to potential problems and opportunities instantly.
Said Edd McArdle, co-founder at Inside Group: “Agentivity significantly enriches the data we can collect in the agency environment and turns it into actionable insights that enable travel agencies to work smarter and more efficiently.”
Mark Meehan, Travelport’s managing director, Asia Pacific, added: “As Travelport moves to expand both our Air and Beyond Air offerings, a business intelligence solution like Agentivity is incredibly useful to our agency customers and enables them to fully exploit the business opportunities we offer through our Travel Commerce Platform and concurrently upgrade the professional competency of their own operations.”
TripAdvisor adds extension to Review Express for hotel owners
Extension added to TripAdvisor Review Express. (Image credit: TripAdvisor)
TripAdvisor has enabled a new extension to Review Express, the travel site’s free review collection solution, to enable hotels to systematically collect the travel site’s reviews following a guest’s stay.
This automation is made possible through an integration with the hotel’s existing technology provider. Over 100 technology providers, including property management systems and booking engines, are already on board allowing their hotel customers to benefit from the integration to drive more new reviews.
Review Express is a free solution that makes it easy for hotels registered on TripAdvisor to encourage fresh reviews. Since its launch in May 2013, business owners had the option to visit TripAdvisor’s Management Center and send customisable emails to their customers asking them to write a review about their experience.
TripAdvisor has simplified the process through an integration with the hotel’s existing technology provider – hoteliers can now set up an email campaign so that the review request is sent automatically to guests, two days after they check out.
“Over 50,000 hotel and bed & breakfast owners have already made Review Express part of their post-stay communication programme for customers – now, we have created a faster solution for time-pressed accommodation owners through this new integration,” said Minesh Shah, TripAdvisor’s senior director, global hotel partnerships.
A recent study revealed that 70% of hospitality business owners have taken steps to improve their quality of service as a result of TripAdvisor reviews.
Shah added that by making Review Express available as an automatic solution, it helps hotels to systematically encourage their guests to share feedback and use that feedback to help inform continued improvements to service.
