Travel Agency Front and Back Office Systems

Almost every travel agency in the world works with a Front Office or Back Office application and in many cases with a single tool that acts both as a Front and Back Office application for the travel agency. The Front part refers to the management and administration tasks and activities that are related to customer. The Back part refers mainly to the accounting related activities of the travel agency sales/purchasing figures.

Classification Categories

Most travel agencies work with a wide variety of decentralized applications. These applications' usages can be classified into the following categories.

• A website normally considered as a door way to the outside world/consumers
• One or more GDS (Global Distribution Systems)which is used to handle online reservation/booking of mainly Hotel, Flight, Car products from different suppliers
• A Front or Back Office application or a single application that acts as both Front and Back office application which in turn does the following:
  • Retrieve information from the GDS
  • Combine the information from the GDS with some extra information such as the customer details, passenger/traveller names etc.
  • From here, the system can create travel documents such as travel plans, invoices, credit notes and vouchers

Ideally a Front Office application, ought to be able to communicate with the GDS and at the same time allow the creation and maintenance of the website as well.

Importance

A travel agency without a Front or Back Office application is most likely not able to do business effectively. It could easily be compared to two people writing a letter where one uses a type writer and the other uses a computer and a word processing application. With the amount of information handling required within a travel agency, and the tight competition between travel agencies within the local or global market, manual management and administration of these tasks is next to impossible without a tool that combines Front Office and Back Office tasks of a travel agency.