Insights

You as a small package tour operator have been facing competition from big travel companies. These companies use all form of advertising such as Facebook ads, AdWords , twitter ads to attract more customers. Spending just few bucks on online advertising will not make your online campaign effective. If you are in similar situation, then this blog is for you.

This blog will teach you to promote your package tour without spending any money online. We will concentrate on 5 effective ways which would be more leads.

Involve in travel meet up

There are many travel meetup which happens in the city every month. Most of these travel meetups are listed in meetup.com. This is a most popular site which lists all types of events in the city and good part is it is social.

You may not physically attend the meetup. However it’s good if you can. Alternatively you can engage people in the travel meetup group. Leave comment about the destination or theme you server to the people. This will give you some good traffic and enquiry on your website.

With the increase in use of internet by both new and old generation travelers, customers are find information online. This has made classical offline travel agency to disappear from the market.On the other side, this changing behavior has created lot of space in the online travel industry.

To enchase this market shift, Travel entrepreneurs are coming up with the fresh ideas to fill in the market with new possibilities. Of course the existing tour operator and travel agents needs to get online to catch up with the trend.

The changing market need raised the need for technology specifically designed and developed for travel industry. As a Freelance Travel Technology Developer, I fill in this need by developing and implement travel portals, travel CMS, travel CRM, travel marketplace etc.

If you are reading this post, then you may be looking out for one such developer. Click on the link below to discuss more about your requirements.

Being a freelancer web developer from past 5 years, I have worked with many clients and projects. While I have enjoyed working on all of them,I also found myself following different process for different project and clients. Most of the time would go away into following process and billing, I believe Toptal has a proven modle and make my business operation smooth.

Of course, before signing up with Toptal,I have managed to read many reviews about the service and found most of them to be positive. This is one of the thing which help me to strongly consider the Toptal.

I would post more about the Toptal after I gain experience with it. Keep an eye on this space to read my experience with Toptal. You will find at least 1 post every month after I start Toptaling…

After reading tones of API success stories,many business & enterprises have started building their own API. While this sounds good, it also create problems in future if the design of the API is not well thought of. This blog throws light on the API design specifically for a business process.However, if you are very new to API and willing to start from level zero, then understand core principle of REST API before reading any further.

Resource is a central part of the API. Resource identifier, Resource representations, API operations everything are built around the resource. Anything is a part of a business can be seen as a resource.Virtual entities such as customer or vendor, non-virtual entities such as subscriptions or orders, business process such a employee on-boarding can be seen a resource.

Getting started with example

For the explanation point of view, lets select a employee on-boarding as a business process. We consider 4 different activities what business perform while on-boarding a employee.

• Creating employee
• Assigning a pay manager
• Creating a user account
• Create a email Inbox

All the above activities are performed in a sequence and are interrelated. For instance email inbox cannot be created without creating a user account.

When it comes to development time, API first approach will take more time to build a product. With the intention to get the product faster to the market, every entrepreneur ask them-self  the question in the title of this blog.Even though answer is know to be YES in the corner of our mind, there is a natural curiosity to understand more about it before convincing our-self.

I have gone through this stage of flickering mind and have found convincing answers and explanations. This blog  discuss about being API from day one and making our own product a client of that API.

Let’s split the question in two and discuss them separately.

Should I build a API early ?

With the decrease in mobile device cost and internet, most business find their customer engaging more with mobile apps than desktop sites.With this shift, it is clear that business need API from day one. However not all products needs to be over mobile – at-least at the beginning . Even with this scenario , I would suggest to go API first. Private API have proved to have ROI and value addition for business.

Many business in past have  demonstrated their API success.On the other hand, I have also seen failure of API. The lesson learnt from these observations are worthy.If a business have intelligent API strategy then it move towards success else it get back to the point where they are at beginning.

Business has to ask them-self : Private or Public or Partner ? All of them expose company’s data asset in varying levels. Company’s long term business strategy must  guide to find  answer to this question. This blog post throw some light on practical business possibilities with all of them.

Private API

Business starts it’s API journey with private API.

• They help to facilitate integration of the different application and system used in the company.
• They improve the internal operation
• Reduce the cost
• Make business decisions based on real-time data

Read my another blog post to understand Top 5 business benefits of private API

Many business today have discovered different revenue channels through collaboration with their partners and 3rd party services.Such collaboration is made possible by opening up company’s data asset via API.

While partner API is essential for growth of the company, building them needs efficient planning and good start. One such good start is building a private API first.

Companies have turned towards API first approach with a vision to build strong revenue stream after few years.Hence one may feel API is not worth investing from way beginning.But the reality is on the other side.This blogs share few thoughts on immediate benefits of private API.

Also read: A drive into the core principle of REST API 

How many of you take breaks often during work in your office ? Statistics say 1/4th of the workers do not take breaks other than lunch.Breaks improve the productivity at the work. Short breaks can increase concentration, alertness and work speed.Get to know more about advantages of taking breaks in below info graphics

 

Click to Enlarge Image

Freemium model is used as an effective go-to market strategy among Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors. This is a marketing tactic where the vendor has both free and premium version of their product. The ultimate goal of the vendor is to convert the non-paying customers to paying customers.

Many startups founders especially with a technology background consider this as best model to enter the market. Of course the psychology of free among the users helps company to build substantial traction. The product or service will have more signups and get mentioned in blogosphere and social media. Everything looks great for few days from launch. However, at times the things may go wrong!

Freemium has significant risk associated with it. If not managed wisely; it may lead to increase in overhead, negative product positioning and finally lead to overall failure. This blog helps to understand risk factors of “Freemium Model” in SaaS Software.

Being online wasn’t a great investment few years ago. Getting tied up with as many travel agents would get more leads for package tour operators. This worked well for many tour operators. Even after sharing a small amount of profit for getting leads, the tour operators were in a good state. Unfortunately as the internet evolved, this formula became less effective.

New set of people called “Travel aggregators” evolved in the industry. These are Internet Company with all information about the tour. Like travel agents they acted as a ticketing agents with one big difference – They built a brand around it. As the brands awareness among the people increased, tour operators were forced to get tied with these internet companies to stay in the business.

This change proved the potential of internet to tour operators. All these days tour operators didn’t invest much on brand building. Now this is the only formula to stay profitable in the industry. Even today many tour operators do not have an idea on how to take their business online in order to attract the customers. This article will focus on the minimal solution required for tour operators to get online.