Travel Agents tips

Qantas has sold its remaining 12.4 percent shareholding in Australian travel agency Helloworld Travel Limited for $22 million.

The Middle East’s almost year-long summer is its competitive advantage when attracting the European market. However, the region would do well to add more beachfront properties and curate experiences beyond its Uber-luxury eccentricities.

The leading group representing U.S. travel agents testified in D.C. on Thursday that it supports a federal proposal to require much fuller and upfront disclosures by the airlines of all their fees, but raised concerns about how much agents would be require to tell their clients in “offline” meetings or phone calls.

The potential of generative artificial intelligence (AI) to produce personalized travel recommendations and itineraries, as well as on-point content for travel companies, is setting the travel sector abuzz. 

Flight Centre, the Australian-based travel agency well known for its mass-market brands, is firmly fixed on tapping into the rising demand for luxury experiences with an expected 15 percent growth in revenue for the segment.

If the sudden dropping of all restrictions by the Chinese government caught travel agents and tour operators off-guard, it begs the question: why? 

Deploying travel advisors with zero travel booking experience sounds like a bad idea. But travel agency Fora believes it is leveling the playing field for individuals passionate about travel to earn extra income by planning and booking trips.  

During her Christmas holiday, a software developer created a tool to generate and map travel itineraries using generative artificial intelligence (AI). 

Mondee is scooping up Brazilian online travel marketplace Orinter for $40 million, its first acquisition since going public last year, the company said Wednesday.

Affluent U.S. travelers are ready to drop some serious money on their travel plans in 2023 and they’re keeping Virtuoso’s global network of luxury travel agents busier than ever.

Mondee has been going through a lot of changes over the last year, and the numbers shared during its latest earnings call reflect that.

Travelsoft, a company that offers software products focused on travel bookings, has added a third brand to its portfolio.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Monday, March 20. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

The conventional wisdom back in 2015 was that travel agencies were a shrinking business. But that year, Spanish entrepreneur David Hernández thought he saw a whitespace for creating a fast-growing travel agency business, and he launched plans to create Pangea.

There are so many startups and other companies developing products powered by generative AI that it’s hard to keep track. 

Mention Bentley or Fabergé, and the brands are instantly recognizable as paragons of luxury. It’s the type of brand recognition that equates to valuable equity. Yet, marketing luxury brands of this nature is about so much more than selling a product or service. 

Two travel tech startups have raised nearly $28 million this week.

Getting its first overhaul in 14 years, online travel agency Cleartrip unveiled a revamped version of its booking tool for agents. With what Cleartrip describes as a user-friendly design and round-the-clock support center, AgentBox 2.0 enables travel agents to book over 100 airlines, more than 500,000 hotels, exclusive holiday packages, group bookings, and meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions. “While the earlier version, first introduced in 2009, was more about making agents familiar with online adoption, the upgraded tool focuses heavily on the backend stack, offering a suite of products including flights, hotels, packages, buses and trains,” said Sukesh Shetty, head of B2B at Cleartrip. One of the reasons why the tool was never upgraded after 2009, he said, was because the company was so extensively concentrated on business-to-consumer that business-to-business was just an ancillary product for Cleartrip. “We want to be a catalyst in agents’ growth and not just another platform provider,” Shetty added. Additionally, Cleartrip registered 70 percent growth in monthly agent transactions and onboarded over 5,000 agents in the financial year 2022. The company also reported a 200 percent surge in summer travel bookings compared to the same period last year.

Brazilian travel operator CVC has engaged financial and legal advisers to study a potential follow-on share offering and is in talks with “strategic investors”, the company said on Friday, driving its shares over 11% up.

Focusing on personalization as a key factor in customer satisfaction, online travel platform Yatra.com has launched a subscription program — Yatra Prime. The online travel company aims to provide exclusive benefits and enhanced travel experiences for its members through the program.

SOTC Travel has introduced three new regional languages to its website – Hindi, Gujarati and Tamil, in addition to English – in order to target the growing customer market within Regional India-Bharat and provide a more accessible guest experience.