Bookings and traveller profiles kept with consent
How the Travel pack follows a booking from enquiry to travelled, and what a traveller profile holds, including passport details kept with consent.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Travel businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Launching soon. The Industry CRM add-on described in this article is launching soon. This article describes it as it will work at launch.
In a busy travel agency, the state of every booking lives in three places at once: the consultant's inbox, a spreadsheet that is updated when someone remembers, and a chat thread with the client that includes a photo of their passport. When the consultant is on leave, nobody else can tell which enquiries were quoted, which trips are paid and which tickets are still to be issued.
Passport details are the part that should worry you most. They are sensitive, they are needed again every time the same client travels, and in many agencies they are scattered across phones and e-mail.
The Travel & tourism pack in Achekam's Industry CRM gives each booking one record and one status, and keeps the traveller's details in a profile held with their consent. Here is what each holds and how a booking moves.
What the pack keeps
When a business switches the Industry CRM on, it picks one of twenty industries, and that pack sets the words on the screens, the record types, the pipelines, the workflows, the documents to request and sign, the reminders, the starter catalogue, the ledger accounts and the home-page counts.
The Travel pack keeps two kinds of record:
- Bookings, each with its travellers and its itinerary legs. A two-week honeymoon with flights, a transfer, three hotels and a game drive is one booking with several legs, not five separate files.
- Traveller profiles, which keep a traveller's passport details and preferences, with the traveller's consent.
When an enquiry is converted, the customer and the pack's main record are created together, and that record's workflow starts. The consultant does not retype the client's details to open the booking.
Traveller profiles, kept with consent
A traveller profile exists so that the second booking is easier than the first. The passport details are there when the next flight is booked, and so are the preferences: the aisle seat, the dietary requirement, the hotel chain the client prefers.
The pack keeps those details with the traveller's consent. That is the right way round. Before you store anyone's passport details, ask them, explain why you keep them and for how long, and record that they agreed.
A few habits worth setting as office rules:
- Ask each traveller, not just the lead booker. A parent can tell you their child's passport number, but an adult travelling companion should agree for themselves.
- Keep passport details in the profile and nowhere else. Delete the photo from the chat once the details are recorded.
- Review profiles of clients who have not travelled with you for a long time, and remove what you no longer need.
The privacy law in your country sets your obligations; the pack gives you one place to keep these details, rather than many places nobody oversees. In South Africa, that law is the Protection of Personal Information Act, which sets the conditions for lawfully processing personal information.
The booking stages
Every booking sits in one stage at a time:
| Stage | Where the booking stands |
|---|---|
| Enquiry | The client has asked; nothing is priced yet |
| Quoted | A price has gone to the client |
| Booked | The client has accepted and the trip is reserved |
| Ticketed | Tickets and vouchers have been issued |
| Travelled | The client has been and come back |
| Cancelled or lost | The booking ended without travel |
The descriptions are how most agencies would read each stage; the stage names are the pack's own. Because every booking is in exactly one of them, the question "how many quotes are waiting for an answer?" has an answer on the screen.
Cancelled or lost, and why it is worth recording
A booking that ends in Cancelled or lost is not a failure to hide. It is information. An agency that records why it lost quotes, and why booked trips were cancelled, learns where its prices sit against competitors and which suppliers cause trouble.
Make a habit of noting the reason when a booking moves there. Price, dates, a visa refused, a client who went elsewhere: each points to a different fix. A cancelled trip that was paid for also needs its money sorted out, which is a separate job from moving the booking.
What moves a booking forward
In the Industry CRM, a record cannot move into some pipeline stages until set conditions are met, such as a customer being named, an amount being set or a signature being done. The kinds of condition a pack can use also include a workflow stage or a whole workflow being finished, a particular task being done, or rows filled in on a sub-form.
For a travel agency that is a useful discipline. A booking that will not move forward is a prompt to ask what is missing, and the answer is usually something the agency needs anyway: a client's name on the record, an agreed price, accepted booking terms. The pipeline then shows bookings where they really are, not where an optimistic consultant has dragged them.
Prices and statuses in the pack are typed in by your staff from the supplier, not fed in live; prices and statuses typed in from suppliers explains what that means in practice. The steps a booking goes through between quote and tickets are covered in from trip questions to tickets and vouchers.
Before you switch it on
Decide two things first: which open bookings go in on day one, and how you will ask existing clients for consent before their passport details move into profiles. Then make the pack, not the spreadsheet, the place where a booking's stage changes. For what happens just before and just after the trip, see pre-departure checks and supplier commissions.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
