Home Travel Marketing How Sales Departments in the Travel Industry are Dealing with Innovation

How Sales Departments in the Travel Industry are Dealing with Innovation

How Sales Departments in the Travel Industry are Dealing with Innovation
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4 min.

The world of travel tech is very dynamic, making it hard to catch up with the latest developments. Hotelmize entering a partnership with Juniper is one of the latest developments in the sector. To help you catch up with what it implies and what it means for the travel agencies, we’ve invited Astrid Kastberg, Europe Commercial Director at Juniper.

Juniper has been helping travel companies, including travel agencies, airlines, tour operators, hotel wholesalers, bed banks, and OTAs since 2003. The company specializes in providing travel companies with the technology solutions, such as the Juniper and Cangaroo booking engines, they need to improve operational efficiency.

Let’s see Astrid’s insights on current developments in the travel tech niche and how Hotelmize and Juniper integration can help travel agencies meet the future head-on.

Why is Astrid Kastberg a go-to person when it comes to travel tech?

Astrid’s background is quite diverse. She has experience in wholesales, accommodation, and B2B distribution. She was with one of the largest players in the industry for over eight years before joining the team at Juniper in 2017.

Astrid was initially interested in hotel management up until she discovered the exciting world of distribution and intermediary. For the last four years, as part of Juniper’s team, she has been helping agencies in the travel sector identify and pursue opportunities for efficiency improvements through technology. She has been the Europe Commercial Director at Juniper since 2017.

Keeping the sales team motivated during the pandemic

One of your 2020 work challenges was maintaining the sales team going forward during the pandemic. The most exciting thing about working in the travel industry is to go out, travel, and meet new people. That’s what most travel tech specialists do. However, the pandemic had many people in lockdown, and travel was suddenly off the table.

Astrid shared that she and her team reinforced a positive strategy internally that helped Juniper come on top of the pandemic. Celebrating the small wins reminded Juniper’s team that things can still happen and that the game is not over. They regularly held weekly meetings, and everyone on the team could easily catch up with others.

Was innovation part of your Commercial Strategy?

During the pandemic, many travel companies, including the travel tech companies, addressed the challenges through innovation and partnerships. 

During 2020 there were excellent examples of how tech-based companies joined together to support their mutual clients and enable each other to leverage the latest tech to achieve operational excellence, grow and expand.

In its efforts to reach more travel agents, bed banks, and hotel distributors to help them increase their profitability, Hotelmize and Juniper successfully launched their new partnership. It means that all Juniper clients now have access to Hotelmize on a plug&play basis. A quick reminder – Hotelmize is a fully automated solution offering post-booking price optimization and room mapping tech to enable hotel distributors to maximize profits.

Juniper, on the other hand, focuses on becoming a tourism technology partner to its clients. Juniper offers the best online solutions that can be custom-tailored to reflect the specific needs of every business in the travel industry.

With solutions such as Juniper and Cangaroo Booking engines and Juniper hub, travel agencies can expand their business, increase sales, and achieve unparalleled operational efficiency.

How can agencies in the travel sector benefit from Hotelmize x Juniper integration?

All current and future Juniper’s clients can now simply plug and play Hotelmize solutions and start increasing profitability hands-free. It doesn’t require any changes in the workflow.

Thanks to the Hotelmize prediction algorithm, Juniper clients can now see when the room rates will be the most affordable in terms of reaching the most optimal profit margins. It uses a sophisticated efficiency algorithm that helps users find opportunities with the maximum profit potential.

Hotel distributors are operating in a very price-oriented niche. So it is a game that distributors can lose just over a few cents. However, Hotelmize can help distributors benefit from the unique added value it brings. With Hotelmize price predictions, distributors can capture more than 35% more revenue. And the best thing about it is that it is entirely automatic.

Where is the tourism sector currently headed?

During the Hotelmize Talks interview, Astrid shared her predictions on how the tourism sector will look down the road. With the pandemic subsiding, she expects the things to start going back to as they were pre-pandemic. Astrid believes that the travel markets won’t be price-oriented. This will allow distributors to offer other values instead of being solely focused on being price competitive.

If you find all of this interesting, you should know that you can easily keep up with the latest developments in the travel industry. Feel free to subscribe to the Hotelmize Youtube channel, where you can watch all Hotelmize talks interviews.

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Mize is the leading hotel booking optimization solution in the world. With over 170 partners using our fintech products, Mize creates new extra profit for the hotel booking industry using its fully automated proprietary technology and has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue across its suite of products for its partners. Mize was founded in 2016 with its headquarters in Tel Aviv and offices worldwide.

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