2025-02-24  • 10 min

Signs It’s Time to Change Your Booking Experience

YouLi - Powering Group Travel

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Ready to Relaunch Your Booking Experience?
Here’s How You Know It’s Time for a Change 

When you plan your trips or events, it’s easy to put all your efforts and focus on the trip/event itself. But what about your customers’ very first impressions after they make that commitment to join your trip or event? What happens during their booking experience? 

A frustrating booking experience for your potential customers is costing you time, money, and conversions. So how do you even know if your booking experience needs help? 

The answer isn’t always an obvious one, which is why we made a 5-point checklist so you can decide if it’s time for a change. Read on to see if you have any gaps or frustrations in your booking experience… and what you can do about it if you do. 

5 Signs It’s Time to Change Your Booking Experience 

Are you using the same form for every departure? For example, if you’re a multi-day tour operator who offers both domestic and international trips, you may need passport details for one but not the other.  

When customized forms are not offered, it leads to unnecessary customer confusion and more (unnecessary) follow-up work for your team. 

Wouldn’t it be nice to gradually collect details from your customers instead of giving them a long form to fill out that asks excessive, irrelevant information upfront?  
 
If you’ve noticed large drop-off rates during your booking process, chances are your customers are overwhelmed and they abandon registration, which means lost revenue for you. This brings us to Sign #3 that it’s time to change your booking experience, which is… 

Do you have fields in your form that could get filled out later or at a specific point in the process? One example we often hear about is dietary restrictions. Planners like to have this information from their travelers, but they’d rather collect it closer to departure. 
 
Rigid forms don’t allow this flexibility, and it requires more follow-ups on your end (or forms that are too long, leading to those drop-off rates). This causes incomplete data collection, fewer leads, and manual corrections. 

 
If your form isn’t personalized, customers may struggle to understand what information they need to provide.

For example, a student might need to provide different information than their parent. Another example would be when an Antarctic tour requires additional travel insurance coverage, but the form is the same for all departures, so your traveler is left feeling confused until your ops team reaches out after booking to manually update each person.
 
This confusion causes delays in the registration process or can even cost you leads. And let’s not forget your poor ops team, who spends half their time chasing guests to manually correct their forms! 
 
 

Do your customers receive a separate invoice after registration? If so, they may forget to complete the transaction. So what happens? You have an increase in unpaid invoices and your team has to… you guessed it. Do more follow-ups! 

The Ripple Effect on Your Teams 

As you can see, these booking form annoyances cause inefficiencies across different departments, creating unnecessary bottlenecks, wasted efforts, and lost sales: 

Additionally, if you have disconnected payment systems, your finance team has to put in the extra work to chase down payments and manage invoices. 

So what’s the solution? 

Over the last several years, multi-day tour operators and event planners have embraced a digital transformation, which has eliminated this negative ripple effect and allowed their operations to exponentially grow. 

YouLi software has been part of this digital revolution, helping multi-day tour operators and event planners sell and manage more trips and events with our booking software platform. Our booking features are flexible and allow you to customize each account per departure.  

Eliminate common frustrations across your teams with YouLi features that allow you to: 

• Reduce customer confusion by allowing different forms for different departures, with customizable required fields 
  

• Save hours of admin time with reusable templates that set standards for your team (and still allow variations as needed or required)
  

• Reduce bottlenecks and time spent following up with customers by auto-generating invoices
  

• Create automated pre-travel task triggers based on booking details so your sales & ops team can stop wasting time on follow-ups and focus more on selling and providing a stellar customer experience
  

• Integrate payments directly into your customer’s checkout flow, reducing the risk of incomplete bookings and unpaid invoices… while still allowing your ops and sales teams to manually register people
  
   

YouLi’s time-saving booking features are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to our group travel & event management platform. From our popular affiliate programs to flexible payment options to robust branding and first-class customer support... we are here to support your growth.

“As our business grows and continues to do new business and go to new places… YouLi’s been able to grow with us. They’ve helped us identify ways that their platform can assist us and make our processes more efficient, which is tremendous.”

– Matt Maszczak, Select International 

Curious to know if YouLi is the right solution for your business? Explore more, book a demo, or schedule a private demo if you are looking to exponentially grow your business this year.