 If you visit any online travel agency like booking.com, Kiwi, Expedia, you'll notice that the user flow is almost the same, no matter what system you have. Travelers enter destinations and dates, choose among several options, and go straight to booking and checkout. But things that you see are only at the front stage. A lot happens behind the curtains. Hi everyone, my name is Andrey Chebotarov, and I'm a travel technology competence leader at Altecsoft. And today I'll talk about the hidden part of a typical online travel agency – its back office. It may be called an admin panel, a need office, or a operational center, but will stick to the term back office, because I like it better. A back office is an interface or a handful of them that allow OTA staff to do their work. So it kind of reflects the day-to-day duties of people involved in running this business. First, there are managers responsible for travel products and suppliers. Suppliers provide OTA with flights, hotels, packages, tours, while product managers make sure that these products are sold successfully. The managers define commissions, sales strategy, customer acquisition approaches, they also go directly to suppliers to negotiate deals. You'd also meet travel agents. Despite the idea that OTAs are automatic, you still need people responsible for the booking process and travelers to themselves. In some larger OTAs, there will be a group of customer support workers. But more on that later. Okay, these three groups are the core staff that operate back office systems. But let's not forget that travel agencies have finance departments, marketing, analytics, product development teams. Some have people responsible for travel content management, images, descriptions, you got the idea. Right. How do all these guys use the back office? And what exactly does happen inside of it? Imagine a traveler looking for a flight. When she clicks the search button, an OTA search engine shortlists several results. If you've seen my video about search engines, you know, it's not that simple. These results aren't just the top generic products that the GTS sends. This set of flights and airlines gets found by certain rules. For example, an OTA has contracts with several flight consolidators. And for the given city pair, best deals come from, say, Monday or Skybird. The engine will look for these specific deals in those consolidators that have the best prices. To make it happen, the back office should have a search rules interface and travel product managers use it. They define which suppliers you should reach to fetch results for specific origin destination and some other factors. Rules can define which travel agents I need to use. As you know, a single OTA may have multiple IDs with different deals tied to them. The same works with hotels. If we have great deals in London by hotel beds, we want to look at hotel beds for them. So a search rules interface allows travel product managers to configure where the search engine should look for flights or hotels. Right. Besides the search results themselves, travelers check prices. And the price that the traveler sees on the website is a combination of base price that an OTA gets from a supplier and the commission. By the way, check my previous video to learn more. Product managers have their interface for commission rules. Basically, commission rules interface allows these guys to configure how commissions get applied to different suppliers, origin and destinations or different travel products. Okay, let's say then the traveler has booked the flight. Here's when a travel agent starts acting. Travel agents and customer support workers would use a booking office. The interface contains all the information about current bookings. With this tool, a travel agent can check details on the reservation, make sure that the payment is valid and the airline has sent a ticket. Here you can also cancel a flight, change dates or rebook a flight with another carrier. All these actions must be supported by a booking office software. And obviously, a booking office allows for reserving flights and hotels manually, in case a traveler calls the agent directly. Some people just don't trust technology. Okay, there's another reason to call an agent directly. Some travelers can grab a seat for a cheap private fare that the OTA can't display on their website, but still sells them over the phone. But a booking office itself isn't enough. It doesn't cover communication with travelers, especially when something unexpected happens. You know, someone gets stranded in the airport because their connected flight is cancelled, or your travelers arrive at the hotel and the staff says that their room is already occupied. The first thing a traveler would do in these circumstances is try to connect with the travel agency. Travel agents and customer support must have means of communication with people, a help desk. Some travel agencies would have dedicated customer support division and a call center, and the back office system would have an integrated voiceover IP to communicate with travelers by phone. Also, help desk may have integrated messaging application to let travelers write directly to an agent using a mobile app, or say, Facebook Messenger, or even email. Once a traveler has detailed their problem, travel agent or customer support will assign a task in a help desk menu. For example, if you need to cancel a flight, it can be done in a booking office that was just discussed, or directly in a GDS terminal. But there are some specific requests that an OTA can solve with their software. For example, a traveler needs late check-in, or asks for a transfer from the airport. In this case, support or travel agent will have to go to a supplier's extra net or a GDS panel or even call a supplier directly. Great. Another thing to keep in mind, all traveler details and the history of all interactions get saved in a CRM. All businesses have CRMs today, and OTAs aren't that different, because loyal customers are the most valuable asset. Traveler name, their booking history, personal details, communications all start in a CRM and used by travel agents and customer support. OTAs may have a bespoke CRM tailored to their needs, or they can integrate existing ones like HubSpot or Salesforce to their back office. A CRM helps send promotional emails, use personalization and maintain coherent relationships. Okay, 5k things. Commission and search rules, a booking office, a help desk and a CRM. But what about the rest of the people working in an OTA? What do they use? As you've guessed, they also have their own software that can be integrated into core back office, or used as standalone tools. A marketing team would also use a website analytics tools like Google Analytics, a meta-search interface, a network interface and so on. Since marketing is also responsible for a website content, they use content management system or CMS. CMS isn't necessarily connected with the booking office, even though the booking engine on the website would directly communicate with it. Another optional thing, but still critical for some travel businesses. Some OTAs may work with small suppliers that don't have their APIs or other interfaces to send data. It means that such an OTA may have people responsible for adding this supplier content to the platform. They upload images, add descriptions, set prices, configure packages and so on. In this case, a booking office would have supplier and content management tool. Finally, if an OTA has an analytics and business intelligence division, they may source different data from a back office to generate reports. You would meet here popular BI tools like Tableau or Power BI. Then the reports can be used by travel product managers, marketing and C-level executives. But what about large-scale OTAs? Well, things may be much more complex with these guys. Add here, extra net management interfaces, integrated reports, analytics and even decision support systems for revenue managers. Integrated finance management, dynamic travel packaging engine, a whole lot of stuff. But most small and mid-size OTAs have those key tools that I've described. Okay, I hope it was useful. Let me know what you think in the comments below. Give this video a thumbs up. If you want to contact LTCHsoft, please check the video description below. And see you in the next one.