The Travel Agency Perspective of Revenue Management

Abstract

This chapter discusses revenue management tools required for online and offline travel agencies to generate incremental revenues based on their negotiated contracts with travel suppliers. The display and ranking of hotels, opaque hotels, packages, and air itineraries to maximize conversion rates are reviewed. Air override commissions (back-end commissions) are a major source of revenue for OTAs and TMCs. Productivity of brick-and-mortar travel agencies can be enhanced by managing the screen real estate for the agency desktop provided by the GDS. Normalizing hotel products from multiple sources for quick comparison shopping and optimizing travel spend for corporations are discussed. Various models to optimizing travel spend for leisure customers in the context of split hotel stays and sequencing multi-destination trips and theme-based shopping are proposed. The chapter concludes with new approaches to generate revenues with multimodal, multiday and destination, fintech products, and thoughts to reinvent the online travel agency.