Home Based Travel Agents Best Tool For Business

AgentNet VAX has evolved into more than just a booking system.

VAX now offers six major areas of utility for Home Based Travel Agents. The obvious one is its booking engines: vacations, the most popular engine; the just-enhanced cruise to-be-introduced hotel booking engine. But it’s also an agent research tool, thanks to it’s content, which is provided by Frommer’s tourist boards, and convention and visitor’s bureaus. It also contains up-to-date hotel information about all the properties that can be booked through the many tour operators that participate in VAX. This content includes virtual tours.

In addition, each vacation provider has it’s own little "cul de sac," where the provider maintains an extranet for all of its travel agent tools, as well as product-specific information. This means that the provider doesn’t have to maintain a separate extranet. It simplifies life for providers and makes VAX a rich vacation marketplace for home based travel agents. Last year VAX introduced dynamic "hot deals," and travel agents can now shop for these deals across multiple vendors. Searches can be performed by date, origin and destination, or users can shop by specific provider if they want to drive business to that provider.

In addition to all this, VAX has its new Agent Center, which was introduced last September. The Agent Center is designed to be a community for travel sellers, where they can find out more about VAX’s virtual U, its educational training classes. One area still being developed is a toolkit for home based agents. VAX also includes educational resources that agents at home might not have access to, as sales resp don’t visit residences. There’s also an opt-in email section through which agents can sign up to receive emails directly from vendors and VAX.

The VAX reservation management tool allows agents to make a booking, and then come back and manage that reservation, be it modifying it or getting a particular tracking number on a particular quote.

At the member services area, agents can look at their reservation history and look at commissions and payment history. The member services area offers support, too. Agents can call for support, as there are filters that can speed the diagnosis of a particular problem, so when a member of the support staff calls back, he or she can resolve the problem faster.

VAX plans to integrate the hot deals: section with a link that will allow visitors to jump automatically into the dynamic booking engine to book one of those hot deals immediately. Each booking engine has five general areas: search, availability, pricing or quote, booking, and confirming and checking out.

These booking engines also have powerful search capabilities, with advanced filters. VAX’S advance search capabilities are really underused and so this is an area that agents should examine closely to make sure that they’re maximizing their return on the time they spend in VAX.

An initial search can return a large number of components. To expedite the process, narrow the search by adding other criteria, be it in the hotel component, the air component or some other feature. "If you’re in a hurry or looking for something specific, you could use this to really narrow down what you’re looking for.

VAX’s air tool has powerful availability capabilities, and return up to 100 flights. Agents can see up to 50 hotels if they wish, but can also set a user preference or an agency preference. That means if agents are selling preferred suppliers, they can set their preferences to default to those suppliers.

When VAX underwent its redesign in September, designers worked hard to accommodate agent request for an easy to scan screen. That means making pages cleaner and faster to read. If site visitors want more information on a particular hotel or destination, they can click on that hotel or destination in order to learn more about it.

Since many agents do their work face-to-face with customers, VAX removed the set-commission screen popup from the booking flow. But agents who don’t have a customer sitting right next to them can simply click on an option to display the set-commission function.

If agents are talking to clients on the telephone, they can price their vacations and email them quotes. VAX has what it calls a "suitcase," and so if agents have priced several itineraries for clients, they can put the quotes in that suitcase as a convenience for all. That means if clients can call back and ask for the second option, agents can immediately access it, complete with a tracking number.

"Agents are always looking for ways to do prices comparisons between different itineraries,especially if a travel agent is booking an operator like Funjet, where you have 15 different air carriers and so many different combinations that to be able to save itinerary in a suitcase feature is powerful."

In the availability area, VAX has added the ability to show features added. For example, users can view additional room categories and perhaps see that while they are booking accommodations for $250, the next category is just $100 more. That information is carried over to the client’s shopping cart at the end of the booking, and provides one last opportunity to help you sell that client. At, checkout, clients can see that the ocean-view suite will cost $100 more, and when they see that number next to the cost of the entire vacation, it can look quite affordable.

The entire availability sections is very fluid, with a refined search tool on every screen. That means that if clients want to change airlines or hotels, they can do so through a mini-search tool on every page, meaning that agents don’t have to start all over to change one component of a vacation.

Before giving a final quote, travel agents should add in their commission. VAX has set-commission function, and it actually recommends that you display what could be called your professional service fee to your clients. Agents should be proud that they’re providing an added-value service to clients

Booking is also simple. Because of the trend of groups of families and friends traveling together, VAX allows agents to add up to four credit-card payments for a group so that different members of a group can pay for the trip.

The VAX air tool is G2Agent. When visitors click on the air tab, they are taken to a page that has the look and feel of VAX, but it’s really G2Agent. It’s customized so that the workflow is as similar to the overall workflow for VAX in general.

VAX is launching a hotel-only booking engine this month. It will have even more advanced search filters designed to give travel agents more options to use when searching for hotels. As always, however, it will feel like other parts of VAX. The new section will be similar to the hotel section in the vacation-booking engine, but it will have more inventory.

In addition, VAX has just upgraded its cruise-booking engine, which was launched in January 2006. It has enriched the cruise content and enabled travel agents to see their commission and cruise line reservation number at the time of booking. VAX pulls cruise content from a variety of sources, then manipulates it to display it in a way that it consistent with the rest of the content that VAX provides. Ten cruise lines are available.

VAX is the desktop of choice for travel agents working from home. The VAX mantra is to be the travel professional’s best friend. VAX’s goal is to design a tool that continually evolves in order to help Home Based Travel Agents be more successful.