How collaborating travel, accommodation and ticketing will enhance event experience?

Providing for your guests will be of utmost priority if you are an event planner. And unless you are planning to conduct a local or a single day event, the chances are high that your guests will need accommodation.

Making sure that there are hotel rooms available for the guests starts right from the beginning of the planning. So what you must do is, when you’re looking for venues, make sure that there are available amenities in the vicinity or at least close to the rendezvous.

Are there hotels near the place? If not, is the venue near any transit hubs such as a train station or a bus depot?

These are all questions you need to answer before making the first move.

But are these quite enough?

Well, no. That is just the beginning. For, this is just a facet of a multi-faced plot.

Even if your venue is located near a hub or there are multiple hotels nearby, you still need to check if there are enough rooms in these hotels to accommodate your guests. Also, you need to pay close attention to what’s happening in the city on or around the date you’ve chosen for your event. Holidays, conferences and music festivals are some of the factors that could make hotel space a problematic or premium commodity to secure.

When you start to nail down all the details of your event, your next step involves contacting the hotels closest to your venue. Major chains are a fantastic option – their national reputation will dictate the level of service your guests will receive. Furthermore, larger chains tend to provide a higher array of support services. Also, It’s essential that you do your homework and check for alternatives. While you may roll your dice when referring guests to local establishments, they could offer a pleasant, authentic experience.

Taking care of the travel is yet another aspect of the shindig. Just like accommodation, looking out for best deals and the availability of tickets to reach the destination are some of the significant details that you being a planner need to look into.

THE REAL PROBLEM:

We now clearly know that arranging for travel and accommodation for the guests involves a lot of mechanical labor. Each time you organize an event in a different location, you have to undergo the entire drill.

In fact, the time expended to figure out these travel and accommodation options could be put to better use. But, its imperative that as a planner one needs to get into the details of every aspect of the event.

Manually making sure that the travel and accommodation are well taken care of while focusing on the event gets tricky and is a tedious task.

Well, what you could do to make your life easier is to get a software to set up travel and accommodation inventory, manage and offer registrations along with tickets and registration forms.

The answer is “Explara.”

Explara offers an all-in-one solution for event planners; travel and accommodation being a part of it. Broadly, Explara helps you integrate stay and travel bookings with the event tickets.

It’s a simple three steps integrating process namely:

1) Create page

2) Add travel forms

3) Add stay options

All you have to do is create a page and add travel forms and accommodation inventory into it.

The product comes with a myriad of exciting features such as:
1) Room availability

Excel sheets and handwritten notes are long gone. The hotel information and the travel forms are thoroughly digitalized. Your attendees can now have all the info and collateral they need to make the best choices. Also, you keep track of your room availability and accommodation details on the go.

2) Branded Layout

The app allows you to customize the page as per your branding. The widget on your website as well as your unique page created on the app can be tailored to carry your colors and communication. This ensures that your attendees get a seamless booking experience.

3) Custom Travel Forms

Travel forms are a useful way of collecting necessary information from the attendees so that you can book their travel accordingly. You can also obtain any external data points by adding fields to your form.

4) Security

Payment and card details are to be dealt with high-grade security, and hence Explara assures that no info or data will ever be at risk. Personal account details can only be accessed the owner of the account.

5) Widgets

You can plug in the travel and data form into your website. The app is just a code and can be drag-dropped onto your site thus enhancing the brand experience. The changes that you make on the app will instantly be reflected on your website as well.

6) Facebook- Quickbook

Explara offers a Facebook widget as well. If your Facebook page has a huge fan following, you can get your attendees to book directly from the page. Also, the widget is customizable; you can change its look and feel as you will.

7) Report analysis

You can have real-time reports and detailed analytics on sales, buyer data, inventory levels and more on the dashboard. You can take quick, data-backed decisions on increasing inventory and travel packages based on your sales numbers.

Wrapping up:

Collaborating ticketing, stay, and travel is always the best option as it reduces time wastage. Also, integrating multiple facets of event management will only reduce errors that are more probable with human intervention.

What are your thoughts on collaborating different aspects of event management?

Try Explara for free. Book a 30-minute demo today.