Dynamic Packaging Solutions for Online Booking Engines: Building One-stop Shop for Travel Experience
Imagine that you don’t need to spend your time switching between suppliers or book a room, a flight, and local activities. Think about a trip booking solution which allows for flexibly changing your tour content. Consider a platform that can easily align your budget with the entire tour, including accommodation and activities. In fact, such solutions exist for a long time and they are powered by dynamic packaging systems. Unfortunately, only a fraction of the travel industry players employ this approach.
Several decades ago packaged holidays were an exclusive product of tour operators. Nevertheless, some time passed and the new technologies opened doors to dynamic packaging world for OTAs, travel suppliers, and vacation planning tools. The common manuel practise combined with emerging technologies transformed into innovative instrument. Now the old-fashioned approach fuel the travel industry disruption.
What is dynamic packaging
Dynamic packaging technology allows customers to get customized tour packages comprised of various inventories including hotels, flights, car rentals, attractions, and events.
The main difference between common tours and dynamic packages is that users can configure their trips via a single packaging interface and receive a full price estimation based on the individual price and availability of each component in dynamically generated tours.
In addition to travel content customization, the package “dynamism” is defined by price quotation. Based on pricing, dynamic packaging mechanisms can be classified into following types:
Semi-dynamic packaging. The total price of the package is changed based on selected components. The price of inventories remain static. This approach is common for the systems with the legacy revenue management modules. Prices are changed manually, rarely, and stay centralized.
Dynamic pricing. The price of the package is a sum of variable inventory prices. The price variability depends on factors that apply to each individual inventory. These factors can be a customer type, an inventory supplier, or other individual specific.
Full dynamic packaging. In this case, yield management is applied to the whole package, based on the value for the customer, the combination of inventories, etc. For instance, if a user chooses more expensive flights the price of a hotel can be increased respectively.
Dynamic packaging is not new for the travel industry, nevertheless, the approach gains popularity due to the demand for one-stop booking experience. Customer experience personalization also heats up the interest for packaged tour solutions: Personalized packages can potentially solve a plethora of problems related to the pre-booking research traditionally done by travelers.
The typical system consists of three main layers: supplier integrations, a business logic layer, and a user-facing layer.
How dynamic packaging works
Tour operators and online travel agencies (OTAs) are potentially the main users of dynamic packaging. Currently, most tour operators quote a total tour pack price while OTAs break down the pricing by components. Dynamic pricing automates the service that defines the core value of both types of businesses: providing holistic booking experience. Tour operators automate their existing processes, while OTAs can introduce packages with all inventories properly timed related to each other and aligned to user preferences.
Dynamic packaging can also be used by hotels and airlines. By adding ability to book services from external suppliers, such car rentals or attractions, hotels and airlines can increase their direct bookings and complete the travel shopping at one place. The customer doesn’t have to switch between providers. For example, Delta Vacations and Air Canada Vacations have already enhanced their booking capacities with hotels and car rentals.
Although dynamic packaging is aimed to cut costs for tour operators and increase conversions in OTAs, it has one important disadvantage. Distribution of travel packages requires businesses to reconsider their customer support efforts and make additional investments into them.
Supplier integrations for holiday packaging engine
Supplier integration is a foundation layer of any packaging engine. It defines the inventory available for booking. The selection of suppliers depends on various factors, including target markets (different suppliers provide access to inventories in different destinations), inventory availability, API support, etc.
The main engineering problem here is inventory search consolidation and integration. The information is distributed via various APIs that differ both in terms of their inventory offer and technology. The common source of inventories for dynamic pricing systems are:
Global Distribution Systems (GDS). GDS is a network system which provides travel retailers with information covering airlines, hotels, and ground transfers. They return basic data including availability rates, and also allow for booking. Currently, GDSs cover a significant share of the market. Mostly they are represented by such companies as Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport. A retailer that plans to integrate their service with GDS must meet a number of requirements.
Central Reservation Systems and Computer Reservation Systems (CRS) of hotels and airlines. These systems consolidate the information about inventories on the supplier’s side. An OTA or tour operator can source inventories directly from a supplier. Main drawbacks of this approach are 1) legacy systems, 2) the absence of own APIs, and 3) the need to connect with many suppliers to achieve decent coverage.
Wholesalers and bed banks. These providers mostly cover the accommodation sphere. Wholesalers and bed banks suggest detailed information on travel inventories and provide modern API support. While they consolidate fewer suppliers than GDSs, the integration doesn’t require additional certification. Hotelbeds, Bonotel, Cloudbeds are the main representatives in the category. The systems here are usually more innovative than GDSs and supplier ones.
Events and attraction providers. This category includes tour and activity OTAs, local providers, and B2B wholesalers that supply information and booking capacities for museums, attractions, and events.
Car rental suppliers. Besides integrating directly with local car rental services, a smart move is to consider the main players like Cartrawler and Rentalcars. They offer both information and booking capacities via their APIs.
To get a broader understanding of integration opportunities, consult our dedicated overview of the main travel industry APIs. We listed all key service providers and detailed their engagement approaches.
Business logic layer of dynamic packaging software
Tour packaging engine is the middle ground between inventory supply and a presentation layer. Typical dynamic packaging software includes the following functional modules:
- Inventory management
- Booking system
- Payment System integration
- Multilanguage and multicurrency support systems
- Yield management or revenue management systems
- Workflow management
- Data import/export and reporting (BI)
To enable dynamic packaging, all these components have to be cross-integrated and have efficient data flow between each other. So the key barriers to integrating dynamic packaging in existing booking systems is the lack of consistency in the data that can be collected and slow exchange of information.
When working with legacy systems, staff needs to switch between various software environments, using separate software for booking, payments, content management, and workflow. It makes operations time-consuming and inaccurate.
The other side of the problem is incompleteness and delays in data transition. Outdated prices, the lack of information about travel content frustrate customers and travel agents.
Additionally, dynamic packaging should employ value-added functions like AI-based recommendation engines and revenue management systems.
Customer facing layer
Building user-friendly travel portal is a must for modern online distribution. Common booking UX in OTA doesn’t have to differ much from the UX of a travel retailer selling dynamic packages. While package creation seems a long and cumbersome process for a user, there are some basic approaches to making it smooth and intuitive:
Modular design. You can break down the package into logical parts (e.g. Hotel> Flight >Transfer) and use an existing interface flow for each of these steps.
Price and schedule visibility. Always list multiple flight, ground transportation, and accommodation options per each step and ensure that travelers can see how exactly their choices impact the final price. Always quote upsale price adjustments, if an opaque price doesn’t apply.
Explicit data collection. Regardless of whether you have a personalization engine under the hood or not, it’s always a good practice to ask users directly about their trip specifics to accommodate better for their requirements. Introduce such fields as “business traveler”, “need a hotel for part of my stay”, “driver’s age”, “flexible dates” to improve search and simplify booking.
Tours and activities based on other user choices. You can use a simple rule-based recommendation engine to suggest relevant attractions to be added to the package using the location, time, and accommodation data. Suggesting T&A is a good upsale opportunity.
Chatbots for customer care. While chatbots can’t handle all customer problems, they can aid in a booking procedure, especially for elderly users.
Disruptive Technology Opportunities in Dynamic Packaging
Recommendation engine for packages
A recommendation engine becomes a critical aspect of any eСommerce solution. As the goal of dynamic packaging is to create a personalized end-to-end travel solution, the integration of a recommender engine can turn the system into a full-blown vacation planning platform. There are three basic personalization engine types that can be used in the travel industry.
Scoring and classification. The technique entails that you divide users into broad segments by type of travel, location, budget, and destinations. This provides a basic level of personalization which nonetheless can be efficient in any types of packaging solutions.
Content-based personalization. Another path to building a recommendation system is applying a content-based approach. A method entails finding similarities between previous traveler choices and predicted options. For example, if a traveler opts for a low-cost flight, the system recommends a three-star hotel, or a traveler chooses a trip for two adults with a child to Paris, the system recommends a hotel with meals and tickets to Disneyland.
Collaborative filtering. A less widespread technique is collaborative filtering. The method entails predicting tailored travel products based on options picked by other users with similar characteristics. This method is more advanced and can be applied to those tours where explicit attributes like price, amenities, etc. don’t provide the full picture. These can be theme tours and specific attractions where the quality of a product is defined by emotional experience of a traveler.
The main problem that most personalization engines face is the cold start issue. It simply means that if the system doesn’t know a user well, it will need some time to gather relevant data to provide meaningful personalized suggestions. Scoring and classification methods partly bypass this issue as they can work with initial traveler data. The other two will require more time and user action tracking to work properly.
Revenue management for packages
A revenue management module makes a dynamic packaging engine more competitive. The technique entails achieving optimal sales by using customer segmentation, supply and demand insights, yield, and pricing data.
The biggest value for the system can be generated by yield management. This functionality is critical for travel resellers. As tour providers don’t control inventories, they have to deal with many unknowns. It makes the tasks for mediators more sophisticated than that of hotels and airlines. A new trend here is to use machine learning techniques for:
- Demand forecasting
- Customer segmentation
- Yield optimization
- Dynamic pricing
A machine learning-based system is especially valuable for online distribution. Smart algorithms allow for providing personalized offers to each individual client. The other benefits of the innovational approach are system autonomy, real-time data processing, and accuracy. The system can analyze behavioral, social media, and market data assuming the right prices for the right people at the right place.
How to implement dynamic packaging
The implementation of dynamic packaging is not only a sophisticated technical task, but also an expansion to the new market segments. We suggest these strategic steps to be considered for building and integrating a dynamic packaging engine:
- Research and evaluation. Define the business need. Determine why you need dynamic packaging, what goals the company plans to achieve with integration. Prepare and document requirements for the system. Determine the ROI of the project.
- Select inventory suppliers. The match will depend on the scale, types of inventory the business requires, destinations, etc. You’ll have to decide whether to go with GDSs, inventory wholesalers, join the affiliate program of some large OTA, source directly from suppliers, or the combination of multiple sources.
- Engineering. Select one of the alternatives: in-house development, engagement with a travel technology consultant, and the integration of an existing software product. If you plan to build an innovative solution with an AI-based recommendation engine and advance yield management functionality we recommend considering consultancy involvement first.
- Reshape business processes. The new system allows a travel organization to optimize performance and boost efficiency. Assess the areas affected by integration and the changes that are required for training staff or recruitment of new specialists.
- Evaluate the project results. The results of implementation must be evaluated both by financial changes and customer feedback. Based on this information, the further improvements can be added to the development pipeline.
Final word
Dynamic packaging is the path to one-stop travel customer experience, the trend that keeps developing. Single-segment OTAs can use dynamic packaging as a lever to enter new markets. This fact makes dynamic packaging a good startup opporturtunity. Tour operators, on the other hand, can make customer experience more flexible by configuring packaged tours based on precise understanding of customer preferences.
The technique can be also relevant for hotels and airlines. End-suppliers strive to increase direct bookings, but the main barrier is the customer need to combine accommodation, flights, and car rentals to complete a vacation purchase. Dynamic packaging can help introduce end-to-end booking coverage right from the supplier’s platform. Otherwise, travelers have to rely on OTAs suggesting customers to solve all vacation-related problems in one place.
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Originally published at AltexSoft’s blog: “Dynamic Packaging Solutions for Online Booking Engines: Building One-stop Shop for Travel Experience”
