Attract more travelers to your eCommerce and help your operational teams be better prepared with the help of technology.
One of the busiest seasons for tourist and traveler mobility is approaching. With the help of technology in your eCommerce and your operational team, you can be prepared to ensure an optimal shopping experience for your users through your online sales channels. Likewise, you can ensure that the high flow of travelers translates into higher sales, avoiding any setbacks for your company.
Jose Luis Landaeta, Head of Customer Success at Reservamos SaaS, has prepared 10 tips to get your company ready for this season. Here’s what he shared with us:
Prepare your operational teams
Anticipate your travelers! Set up alerts at the beginning and end of your sales funnel. This way, you can immediately know if there is any drop; for example, you can activate alerts if page visits drop by 5%, or if there are no purchases within a period. At Reservamos SaaS, our partners have 24/7 access to all their data at each step of the funnel, allowing them to monitor each stage and act immediately.
Increase server capacity. During these dates, it is common for servers to collapse due to high demand. If you prepare, you will avoid poor shopping experiences and potential revenue losses.
Use personalization tools to offer travel recommendations based on user preferences and behaviors. This can help increase the relevance and conversion of your offers. And remember, avoid making major changes to the homepage of your eCommerce to prevent confusion, errors, or poor user experiences (UI/UX).
Communicate and share specific coverage schedules so that your entire team knows who to turn to in case of any eventuality.
Monitor your market more agilely and efficiently to respond to any pricing and promotion strategies from your competitors. This way, you can adjust your offers and maintain competitiveness in the market.
Adapt to your travelers with the help of technology
Motivate your travelers to book in advance by activating dynamic pricing strategies for those users who book their tickets well in advance.
Analyze the demand for your routes at different times and update your inventory. Afternoon or evening transfer options are the most popular among travelers, as this allows them to arrive at their destination at night and enjoy it during the day. During these peak hours, you can increase your inventory to take advantage of the flow of travelers.
Keep your travelers informed about any changes, delays, cancellations, or incidents that may occur during the high season. Use Marketing Automation tools, social media, email, and text messages to communicate directly with your travelers and share any information that will enhance their satisfaction.
Make sure you have the safest and most popular payment methods among your travelers. At Reservamos SaaS, we have a fraud prevention system and a specialized team that guarantees high acceptance rates, keeping chargeback levels almost at 0%.
Reinforce your customer service teams to handle the high volume of help requests.
Get to know the technological ecosystem of Reservamos SaaS, developed to boost your company’s performance during peak seasons. With the help of our solutions, you can optimize your operations and offer better shopping experiences, ensuring a significant increase in your sales.
Through Platform AI, we ensure unique purchasing experiences, driven by Artificial Intelligence.
Author: Adrián Cuadros, Co-founder & Head of Product, Reservamos SaaS
If we think about what the online ticket purchasing experience was like 10 years ago, we’ll likely find that it was practically non-existent and that the airline reservation sites were the ones betting on innovation on their web pages, to provide a differentiated experience to their travelers.
At that time, there wasn’t a mobile-first approach, where the experience was based on users searching and purchasing through their mobile phones. There wasn’t a focus on innovation either; this made the digital purchasing experience slow, as it represented a very low percentage of sales; moreover, payment methods were equally limited and the acceptance of credit or debit cards was very low, due to high fraud rates.
So, when and why was the vision to evolve this experience proposed?
The arrival of Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) came to transform ticket sales for travel. By creating digital sites that concentrate the offer from various brands for online ticket purchases, ensuring an adequate user experience, mainly focused on purchasing through mobile devices. This first transformation in the travel industry led companies from other sectors, such as buses, to direct their efforts towards a necessary innovation of their online sales channels.
A fundamental factor in this process is that travelers also began to shift from physical ticket counters within bus terminals to online booking. Conversion began to be a metric to measure and analyze because even though there were sites from the bus lines themselves, the effectiveness of making sales through these web pages was low.
Use of AI in the travel sector
Artificial intelligence in the travel sector has three main uses:
Inventory optimization
Revenue management through dynamic pricing strategies
Personalization
Inventory optimization essentially means that companies can adjust their routes and schedules to find an optimal number of trips according to market supply and traveler demand; eliminating scenarios such as the possibility of losing money due to insufficient supply; and having an oversupply when demand is low.
Revenue managementessentially means that bus companies: 1) maximize their resources; 2) increase occupancy and advance purchase on each route and schedule; 3) ensure the best possible price according to demand; 4) increase profits within their market by balancing occupancy and the best fare.
Personalization means leveraging all the information, data, and behavior generated by the navigation of travelers within an eCommerce, to offer them the best possible experience, with the most attractive offer (price, added ancillaries), and the least friction when completing the purchase.
For example, pre-filling search data, filters, passengers, seats, and payment methods, to streamline the digital purchasing process. This way, the effectiveness of communication with the traveler is maximized by addressing topics that we know interest them.
traveler
What is Platform AI, and what makes this technology disruptive?
Platform AI uses two of the three most important capabilities of AI, which are: revenue management and personalization.
Platform AI is a technology developed by Reservamos SaaS and adapted to the eCommerce of bus companies. As a prerequisite to offering these capabilities, we concentrate on the interactions that travelers have within the eCommerce of a bus company, powered by our technology, and this is stored within ReservamosONE. This solution is a Data Lake that, in addition to functioning as a powerful business intelligence system, is one of the main inputs to achieve an optimal personalization experience and revenue management.
We understand that data on traveler behavior is a great competitive advantage for bus lines. That’s why we ensure that:
All the information generated by ReservamosONE belongs to the bus line.
The data is used only to: Improve the traveler’s experience on each channel and inform the line management to make the best possible decisions.
Through revenue management strategies, historical sales information from the bus line, competitor information, and each traveler are used to make the best possible offer, specific to each user; with the idea of maximizing the potential of the bus company’s inventory within its eCommerce.
By analyzing traveler behavior in the eCommerce of the bus company, Platform AI technology makes it possible to ensure unique purchasing experiences, driven by artificial intelligence, through which the eCommerce learns about the tastes and preferences of each traveler and connects in a more personalized and close manner, on the same eCommerce. These capabilities improve the likelihood that traveler will complete their purchase and increase their loyalty to the brand.
Special features of the first releases available on Platform AI:
Origin and destination prefilling
Origin and destination switch
Calendar optimization – Select today or tomorrow
Search-oriented behavior
Since the implementation of Platform AI, powered by the search widget, our partners have achieved a 3 percentage point growth in conversion on their e-commerce platforms. For a company with a traffic of one million users per month, this translates to 30 thousand new users completing their purchases through the company’s direct digital sales channel.
Platform AI is available to be implemented on the eCommerce of any bus company. The development of specialized technology to strengthen and optimize the online purchasing experience has led us to guarantee the digital success of leading bus companies in countries such as Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Brazil. And the constant support to exceed the goals of each company has positioned us as the technological ally of the sector.
When we talk about a payment gateway in the context of eCommerce, we are referring to an essential stage during the purchasing flow within an eCommerce platform. The payment gateway enables secure transfers of financial information between an eCommerce platform and the bank or payment processor.
Author: Analleli Villalón, Associate of Payments
When a traveler makes a purchase within a bus company’s eCommerce platform, the payment gateway facilitates communication between the company’s website and the payment processing system. Its function is to authorize the transaction and ensure that payment information is transmitted securely. Moreover, some payment gateways also offer additional security features, such as data encryption and risk management.
It is a key tool for ensuring secure and efficient transactions, ensuring that online payments are made quickly and securely, both for the traveler and the bus company.
But what should a payment gateway contain for it to be chosen within an eCommerce platform?
Here, we list 7 aspects that every bus company should consider when choosing a payment gateway:
Good Performance: It should handle approval metrics above the national metric and keep fraud rates in check.
Competitive Cost: The cost may vary depending on the demand model. If it is a gateway model, it is cheaper because it only processes the payment through the payment processor with the bank. On the other hand, if it is an aggregator model, the cost tends to rise because it includes a more complete service, providing the entire infrastructure for receiving payments.
Correct Risk Management: Autonomy, correct application of rules, and an updated dispute resolution process.
Short Response Times: For addressing questions or issues that may arise during operations, having quick communication and responses is essential.
Personalized and Immediate Attention: The attention should be tailored to the needs of the bus company.
Simple, Transparent, and Accurate Reporting: It is crucial to have correct, complete, and easily downloadable data for daily monitoring and monthly closures. This allows for greater certainty in risk management.
Friendly Technical Integration: Ensure that the documentation is clear and precise, aiding in generating minimal friction for the traveler.
With the help of this information, any bus company in the country can understand the points that Reservamos SaaS considers most important for an eCommerce platform to achieve optimal performance during the purchasing process. This includes having high approval rates and mitigating fraud rates. Although cost is a factor to consider, it is not the only variable to achieve the goal of increasing sales.
In some way, I feel that the future of our jobs will be similar to this Hackathon process. Lots of brainstorming and discussions about how we envision new solutions, leaving execution processes to artificial intelligence. It was one of the best experiences I’ve had at work. – Elías Matheus, CTO of Reservamos.
Author: Elías Matheus, CTO of Reservamos.
2022 was a year full of discoveries in Artificial Intelligence. Many technologies with unprecedented capabilities have emerged. However, it is essential to recognize that implementing AI entails significant challenges, such as job displacement, bias, discrimination, privacy, and security. At Reservamos, we are committed to being part of this transformation responsibly, and proactively addressing these challenges.
With this spirit, we organized the first AI-focused Hackathon at Reservamos in May. The goal was to explore tools that would allow us to imagine new future innovations.
The first step was to conduct virtual brainstorming sessions to identify the challenges we wanted to address and generate ideas based on technology. More than 100 proposals emerged from various areas of the company! It was a creative process where we discussed their needs and realized that there were many projects with common requirements.
Out of those ideas, we selected 15. On May 18th, we gathered physically in our offices in Mexico City, Monterrey, and Mérida, as well as virtually with more Reservamos team members located in other cities and countries.
A total of 36 Reservamos collaborators participated. We explored everything from content generation products, chatbots for more direct traveler connections, and projects for enhanced user personalization on websites, to internal tools for speeding up data analysis processes, API integrations, and quality control processes, among others.
Some examples we tested were:
Illustrations with Midjourney
Imagining new landing pages with dynamic content
Apps that help us summarize user feedback
And why is all this important?
With these demos, we can get an idea of the future of our industry and our organization. Undoubtedly, AI has the power to transform our technological ecosystem and improve the way we carry out each of our internal processes at Reservamos.
At Reservamos, we want to be part of this transformation. We know that artificial intelligence will be the key to being the ally that continues to drive companies in our sector to achieve great things with the help of the most effective tools.
Our role in the workplace should also be that of mentors so that young women interested in pursuing financial careers feel supported to break stereotypes and eliminate barriers.
Author: Pamela López, Head of Finance at Reservamos.
Throughout my professional life, I have wondered, how can I address the challenges I face as a woman to have a successful career. To be honest, I still don’t have a clear answer, but over time I have come to understand that it is a balancing act.
Today, despite the times we live in, it seems that gender still determines lower chances of success for a woman; we have been underrepresented and limited for a long time. Of course, there has been a growing recognition of the importance of diversity in the workplace, and the financial sector is no exception, but we still have significant challenges to overcome.
Women and Finance
According to a 2021 report by consulting firm Spencer Stuart, in Mexico, the percentage of women CFOs in companies on the Mexican Stock Exchange (BMV) index is 10%, while in Latin America, it is 12%.
The above does not detract from the impact we have on the financial sector. As women, we play a fundamental role, providing unique perspectives and experiences that can lead to greater innovation and success in problem-solving, more efficiently. By having a diverse team, it is feasible to propose innovative ideas and solutions, which ultimately drive business growth and success. According to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), if the gender gap in labor force participation rates in Latin America and the Caribbean were closed, the region’s GDP could increase by 16%, equivalent to $1.7 billion.
It doesn’t sound too bad, but how can we get to that reality? Our role in the workplace should also be that of mentors, so that young women interested in pursuing financial careers feel supported to break stereotypes and eliminate barriers.
It is vital not to lose sight that there are still many challenges to face in the industry, including underrepresentation in leadership positions, the gender pay gap, as well as the lack of balance between work and daily life.
Women, not only in the financial sector, are often paid less than their male counterparts, even when they have the same level of education and experience. This can make it difficult to achieve financial independence and directly contributes to the lack of diversity in senior leadership positions. The gender pay gap on average worldwide is 23%, while in Mexico, it exceeds 34%, according to reports by IMCO and Inmujeres.
The long hours and demanding nature of the industry make it difficult to balance our careers with our personal life. This can be particularly challenging for women, who often take on greater responsibility for caring for children or elderly relatives at home. Addressing these challenges is crucial to ensuring that the financial sector is diverse, inclusive, and reflects demographic needs.
Women, Technology, and Development
Technology is transforming the market in many ways, from the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to blockchain and digital currencies. These advances are changing the way the customer interacts and risk management operations.
The rapid evolution of the market demands that we adopt new skills, but also create the necessary mechanisms for technology to be a driver, not an obstacle, to women’s professional development. In this sense, women in financial leadership positions must lead the way in adopting digital platforms and services, exploring their potential to shape a more inclusive future for the financial sector, and accelerating positive change among customers, employees, and shareholders alike.
For all women pursuing a career in finance, I share some suggestions to develop and strengthen their skills and competencies:
Invest in professional development opportunities. Attending conferences, workshops, and training sessions can help stay up to date with emerging trends and best practices in finance and accounting. Continuous learning helps us bridge gaps and provides us with communication, critical thinking, and analytical skills.
Seek mentorship from experienced executives who can provide guidance and support as they advance in their careers. Mentors can also offer information on the skills and competencies needed to succeed in the CFO role.
Financial directors must create networks of peers and colleagues who can provide support and share knowledge and best practices. Networking events, professional organizations, and social media platforms can be excellent sources of connections and support.
Take on new challenges and opportunities. Gradually assume new projects or roles that require us to extend beyond our comfort zone to develop and strengthen skills and achieve greater leadership.
Undoubtedly, the challenges for women remain significant. Therefore, it is essential to continue working as a team to help more women develop their skills, establish support and mentorship networks, and not fear new challenges and constant learning. Only in this way can we not only achieve our professional success but also drive the economy of our countries.
