Travel tech for ferry operators
Three critical things to maintaining a successful ferry or tour boat business are time, money, and customer satisfaction. Ferry booking software is important in saving you and your employees time and maximising your ROI. Happy customers tell their friends, so it’s essential to think about your customers’ experience. With the right ferry booking software, your customers can focus on the memorable time they have sightseeing on your ferry or touristic boat instead of a frustrating ticket-buying and verifying experience.
In today’s travel landscape, digital, contactless, and accepting advanced bookings have become a must-have for tour boat operators to remain competitive and relevant. Acquiring the right sales, distribution, and ticketing solution to support your evolving needs requires research, reviewing each department’s needs, and a grasp of your growth plan. Also, read our article, A guide to choosing your travel tech supplier for more insights.
With that in mind, let’s explore why ferry boat ticketing software is crucial and how to choose the best one.
Successful touristic boat operators use ticketing systems
There are many advantages to ticketing systems for your tour boat business, particularly the ability to connect to OTA (online travel agency) sites. OTA’s are a valuable tool to make advance sales, reach a wider audience, and enable smart ticketing. This tool will increase your ROI with minimal effort if connected seamlessly. Good travel tech software will need to be customisable for your specific needs. It must be easily connected with the OTA’s, websites, and other software you need for your business while also being quick and intuitive for your employees.
Connecting all your sales channels – OTA’s, your website, on-street sales, and partnerships – has the added benefit of freeing you and your employees from the demands of manually updating your inventory and giving you access to accurate ticket sales counts at all times.
Plus, managing group bookings with ease and confidence will open up more opportunities to drive additional sources of revenue. Lastly, having a travel tech provider that offers cross-selling functionality and bundling of products increases your offerings, finding additional creative partnerships and sales.
Adding devices to make sightseeing boat operations smoother
After finding your ideal tourist boat ticketing system, the next step is to add the right devices to streamline your processes. There are two areas where using devices will increase your efficiency and decrease hassle for your employees: ticket sales and embarkation.
You want your sales agents to spend their time making sales, not wasting time on booking. Let your customers be in control of making their bookings while freeing your staff to make more sales. Use POS and self-service kiosks to increase sales and make bookings easy for your customers and staff. In addition, if it becomes necessary to refund a customer or a group of customers, devices can also make refunds a smooth, fast process, freeing your staff up to deal with other problems.
Christopher Smith, one of Palisis’s dedicated Customer Success Managers, describes the refund process for a Palisis customer. He says
“Ferry boats need flexibility, just because of the size of the vessel, the number of passengers they carry, and the fact that if there’s adverse weather, they may have to cancel. If they’ve got 100 customers coming back for refunds, they need to be able to quickly refund by the touch of a button. With Palisis, all it takes is a quick scan to get a refund, and they’re off the boat within moments, as opposed to manual refunds or having to call up a complaints line. We can offer that ease of use for them.”
Christopher Smith, Customer Success Manager at Palisis
When it is time to board the boat, tourist ferries must be able to handle large crowds quickly while minimising losses, especially during peak tourist season. If your tour boat operators still use eye validation, you could be losing valuable time and money. Investing in scanners or other handheld devices means your customers will embark quicker and spend less time standing in line. Using a hand-held scanner with a ticketing system also decreases fraud from ticket pass-back or copying tickets.
Customer support is crucial for busy touristic boat businesses
Once you have your software and your devices in place, it is vitally important that you have the support and training to use them effectively.
Tour boat operators cannot afford to spend valuable time with a confusing or ineffective process. Especially for larger ferries, you may need to train 20+ employees per location and can’t afford the downtime it would take to learn a new system and train on your own. A good travel tech provider will come to you, train all your staff, and have you selling productively on day one. When you have questions, you will need someone to answer them quickly, any time of the day.
Christopher recently set up a new customer account and described the type of customer service Palisis provides that is unique to the industry. He says,
“Palisis offers the full 360° system with the channel manager, booking system, hardware, and background support. A customer last week asked if I could come to them and train for three days that week. I cleared my diary, went over there, and spent three days training. A lot of companies won’t do that.”
Team Palisis onsite during the training and onboarding of Mersey’s Ferry operations in Liverpool.
5 questions ferry operators should ask travel tech providers
When you are ready to look at your tourist boat ticketing system options, here are some questions to ask that will help you decide which one is the best fit:
- What integration capabilities do you have, specifically around customising for our needs?
- Tell me what your training and customer support looks like, and who can I call as a current customer reference?
- How will your booking system and devices help me with crowd management in peak season?
- Explain your APIs and connectivity—how will this increase my revenue?
- Walk me through your mobile device options for taking payments and granting refunds.
If flexible development is important to your tour business, hear from our customers, “Additional development is the thing that I’m looking forward to next. I’m sure everybody will have listened and produced something that resolves most of our concerns. It will be great because I think it’s being produced by people who genuinely listen to what the issues are,” shared Keith Spicer, Managing Director of City Sightseeing London.
If this sounds like the kind of solution your tour boat company needs to make your business flourish and run more smoothly, you can find even more about what a booking system with Palisis can provide for tourist boats. Contact us today to get started.