Tourists

Selling to tourists is often as much about their planning as it is about the journey. The operator’s website becomes an essential shop window where passengers can plan their entire holiday or day trip. This can mean researching the destination for things to do (museums, concerts, zoos etc.) checking hotels or holiday homes where they might like to stay, and perhaps planning additional travel connections such as buses for getting to the ferry, or planning car parking for a day trip.

Booking and travelling

Once the customer has decided when they want to travel and what they’d like to do when they get there, it’s time for them to book. In BOOKIT products can be sold either with allotment or free sale. From land-based services such as hotels and event tickets; to travel for passengers, vehicles and extras like pets and luggage; and onboard services such as meals, spa treatments, cabins and seats.

Before your passengers are due to travel, you could always do a bulk-SMS or email send out to all your booked passengers. This could be to ask them to pre-check in online (airline style), to send them some information about arriving into port, ID checks, it may even be to send them an offer for a cabin upgrade.

Passengers arrive at the terminal for check-in (automated or by personnel), here they will be able to check-in their luggage, receive all their necessary printouts, and make any amendments, (pay outstanding balances, tie their booking to a friends to receive neighbouring seating or cabins) and embark onboard the vessel.

Once your passengers arrive at their destination port, the journey need not end there. You may want to email them to ask them if they were satisfied, send them a promotion for a future trip, or invite then to join your loyalty scheme.

Tourists – additional tools and features

As well as the core functionality available in BOOKIT, there are modular tools and features which can be added as required. Some of these are ideally suited to operations for tourists, and holidaymakers.

Holiday booking

Often tourists are looking to book not only their travel but accommodation and activities to do on their holiday as well. BOOKIT has excellent capabilities for selling hotels, B&B’s and holiday cottages, as well as selling tickets to events, festivals, museums zoos and lots more.

Payments plans

If you are booking a holiday for a family with a vehicle and a cabin and meal vouchers, it can become expensive. In order to help people in their booking you might want to offer payment plans, where customers can split up their payments as they can when booking holidays via a travel agent. BOOKIT has various alternatives for this.

Campaigns

Marketing campaigns can be essential to attract customers to choose your service. In BOOKIT you can define discounts that can be activated automatically, manually or with a coupon code.

Would BOOKIT be a good fit for your operation?

We recognise that every operation has its own uniqueness and every ferry operator has individual needs. So, if you would like to talk to us about how BOOKIT could work for you, please leave us your contact details and we’ll be back in touch with you soon.

Destination Gotland

Destination Gotland are Hogia’s oldest customer, buying their first reservation system from us in 1994. The current (4th) version of BOOKIT looks very different now, but Destination Gotland have been with us throughout contributing to the evolution of BOOKIT as it continuously develops and improves.

The island of Gotland is arguably one of the most sort after tourist destinations in the whole of Scandinavia. From the old medieval city of Visby, to the world class beaches and idyllic countryside, Gotland is a very popular holiday destination. Destination Gotland provide a year-round service to Visby from 2 ports on the East Coast of Sweden (Nynäshamn and Oskarshamn) and seasonally from the more southerly port of Västervik.

Destination Gotland are one of BOOKITS most advance users when it comes to automation. Their fast summer turnaround times of loading and unloading 1650 PAX and 550 vehicles in 40 minutes means they need to optimise efficiency everywhere possible. Booking and check-in via the BOOKIT API (or self-service check-in kiosks for those with no internet access) sends your boarding card and onboard wi-fi code to your mobile device. Passengers then arrive at the terminal and pass through airline-style gates before checking-in their luggage. For passengers in vehicles, ANPR (automatically number plate recognition) brings up the booking to be checked-in by staff in the booths, greeting drivers by name and quickly processing each customer. Booked passengers can be contacted at any time with advice, disruption information or offers via SMS or email.

Campaigns form an important part of their operation. They primarily market the island not their service. So, the great campaign and coupon set up in BOOKIT is constantly used to try and entice holiday makers to visit the island.

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