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The major challenges for OTAs

The OTA business is complex and, as a business owner or manager, it’s crucial to always be on the lookout for new revenue streams and new ways of attracting customers to your website. The travel industry as a whole is going through some major changes which, of course, also has a huge impact on OTAs.

These changes and industry drivers, combined with systems complexity, add up to several challenges for OTAs. Some of them are general, while others are quite specific, depending on the type of responsibility you have in your OTA business or organisation.

General challenges

There are several challenges that OTAs must navigate on a regular basis. Among the most business-critical, OTAs need to figure out how to get the best fares and commissions from airlines. This naturally includes implementing the most optimal content-retrieving tools and systems, such as travel data consolidators and aggregators.

Another urgent issue OTAs face is figuring out how to maximise revenue per ticket sold. For this reason, OTAs need to seek out new sources of revenue streams through post-booking sales, and figure out how to generate them as efficiently as possible.

Conversion and optimisation

A Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) is measured on, and must optimise, KPIs such as:

  • Sales – Revenue, Airline Commission, Booking conversion
  • Revenue Management – Price competitive
  • Price optimisation in all channels including Meta

In order to deliver great results, it is absolutely critical to have strategies in place for optimising both revenue as well as booking conversion.

From cost to revenue

A Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) is measured on, and must optimise, KPIs such as:

  • Operations – Shifting focus from being a cost to a revenue source
  • Cost per call per employee – Increase the speed of service provided to the customer
  • Fees – Apply fees that comply with the market to increase revenue

COOs also face pressure to implement strategies to push down the average cost per call and lower the average handling time per call.

Working together in harmony

Oftentimes today, the driver of the strategic changes that can impact the entire company for the better is the commercial and sales department. However, gaining common ground and working towards the same goal can be a struggle.

Learn more how these two can start working together, by downloading our white paper “Success factors of a thriving OTA business”.

Published by Hanna