Essential Online Tools for Travel Agents

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Travel agents often have to wow their clients in the corporate sector with an ideal and beneficial business trip experience. Such expectations come with the demand for the right tools. A good travel agent must, therefore, have the right tools to deal with analytics, travel insurance, bookings, risk assessment and expense management.

Booking tools

Travel agents often need to find the right flight, accommodation, and local travel arrangements in time. To boost these booking services, it is essential to use online tools, as they are fast and save on costs. A streamlined booking of flights is possible using such technologies as FlightTrack 5 available on the App Store and Google Play. Through this app one can become a first-call travel agent. This tool allows a travel agent to book flights seamlessly and save their clients from panicking due to delayed flights or over the change of plans at the last minute of travel. The right booking tool is key to a satisfied tourist. A good booking tool is thus necessary to have a travel agent.

Risk management tools

A travel agent needs to ensure the clients safety throughout their trip. Such protection comes with the need to have the right risk management tools. An accurate and up-to-date risk management system that ensures that the passport details and every tiny detail of the trip are well taken care of in time. A worldwide presence, for example, is one way of ensuring that the agent works seamlessly to deal with the clients needs. To manage duties across the global front, it is important to have such online tools such as Toggl that makes it easy to stay on track and ensure the efficiency of the travel system. The risk management may also cover insurance and language barriers, says Martin Hall, Director of Risk Management at SolidEssay. By having a global insurance cover package, a travel agent can secure their clients in every corner of the globe.

Communication tools

Communication in this global economy is quite important for travel agents. They must find ways of always being in touch with their staff and clients. Travel agents, therefore, need to have essential communication tools to alert them of any changes in safety guidance or itinerary within the travel destinations. One online tool that can enhance communication is the use of UberConference. This app is a conference call app that gives the travel agent an opportunity to make real-time communication and transactions across the globe. “Moreover, communication can be improved through Google apps for work, says Amanda Hayes, Communication Director at ConfidentWriters. This Google apps package contains an email system, online storage, shared calendars, and video conferencing tools. These apps are essential for collaboration and sharing of ideas within an organization. Travel agents can develop a G-suite that contains all these applications, get the employees to sign in to a similar forum and seamlessly share documents and ideas through these platforms. These online communication tools, therefore, promote communication and bring the world closer to the travel agent. He or she can, therefore, organize with much ease by using these tools.

Analytics tools

When soliciting for travel agents, clients often have too much in mind such that they cannot deal with the pressure of accounting for every element of the trip. It is, therefore, the role of the travel agent to find the best services at the right price to minimize the clients expenditure. The travel agent, therefore, needs an online foreign exchange tool, excellent tourist attraction sites, hotels, and conference centres across the globe. The latter is attainable by using Mention application to understand tourist attraction sites that others post as well as Google Maps to get the real bearing of such sites.

Travel agents require such online tools to manage the various elements of tours and travels such as expense management, travel insurance, bookings, risk assessment, communication, and analytics.



Author bio:

Paul Bates is an editor at SwiftPapers educational platform for students. Also, he was always into education and thats why he started Paper-Research, educational portal with examples of academic papers. Paul helps international students at EssayTask, a US-based service that provides tutoring help.

An Informative Q&A on Latest in Enterprise Database Trends 2019

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When it comes to technology, trends come and go faster than we can think of it, but it is found that many concepts in terms of database management may stay longer in power, which has the ability to impact business organizations and integrate them. All the database admins and organizations want to stay updated with the latest or upcoming trends in database management to take the best advantage of it at the first point for better management of their business.

The top 2019 database trends can be listed as:

Databases which bridge between SQL and NoSQL

Cloud Databases and Platform as a Service (PaaS)

More focus on Security

Automation of database management

Lets review these in detail first.

Bridging the gap between SQL and NoSQL

As can see, the trend in database administration now is more versatility. Database solutions dont restrict to a single database, but instead of it, the overall structure bridge SQL and NoSQL by offer the best of both worlds.

Cloud databases / PaaS (Platform as a Service)

Developers are now largely pushing their enterprises into the cloud and weigh their trade-offs with private and public clouds. They know how to effectively migrate to cloud services and coordinate with them based on their existing infrastructure. In terms of database administration also, the cloud offers many opportunities and benefits. Shifting to the cloud doesn't need to compromise on the organizational priorities. Instead, it is all about adding more products and services for the overall growth of the organization and to meet the business goals.

More security oriented

Data security is not a new trend, but increasing events of database breaches further reiterates the need for more secured database administration measures. For this, businesses tend to work hand-in-hand with the IT security partners in order to ensure that all your enterprise information is kept safe. Database administrators need to work closely with the security team in order to reduce the internal weaknesses of an organization which make your business data vulnerable.

Automation

Another emerging trend in terms of database management is the process of automation. Automation makes database administration much simpler in terms of patching, provisioning, upgrades, maintenance, updates, and also in terms of smoothing the project workflow. In fact, as RemoteDBA.com points out, for the time being, automation trends seem to have confined usefulness as the database management still requires a fair human intervention to succeed.

An expert Q&A on database management trends

Q: Given the enterprises are becoming more and more budget conscious, how security can be of concern over the cost?

One major threat raised by the majority of the database administrator in terms of operational data management is the risk involved. On choosing a vendor, from the entire SME to corporate, the primary concern is about the reliability of the vendors. Security capabilities of the provider are critical in terms of making a choice.


We now read stories about firms who suffered financial losses due to their database being compromised, which not only end up in the business loss but also impair their reputation and reliability. Compared to the downsides of data infiltration, the cost of data security is fully worth, and any savings one may gain from choosing the cheapest solution may ultimately end up in additional cost in terms of security breaches.

However, with the increasing demand, the database cloud costs are largely getting standardized across the global market, even though the server-less mode of delivery as offered by FaunaDB Cloud, etc. are disrupting it. The major database vendors now differentiate their solutions based on their capacity to mitigate risk, availability, consistency, security, productivity, and durability.

Q: More people prefer open source data solutions. So, what are the benefits of it?

The shift in open source database management model is so intriguing to the businesses. As adoption is now moving aggressively on to the cloud, the old model of service and support is diminishing now. In this case, also, it is more about risks. Users now don't tend to choose a database which will need support. They are looking for databases which work without fail all the times at any environment. These are called self-managing systems which are just coming up in the cloud, which delivers a "no-ops" experience than the existing DevOps model.

Customers tend to go for open source databases as they dont largely trust the vendors and off-the-shelf solutions to meet their unique requirements. In this model, they have the choice to manage their database in depth and also fix the issues all by themselves to avoid any sort of lock-in periods. Nobody wants a database company or the cloud providers to get involved in the database business.

Q: Even though it has significant benefits, why many of those stay away from open source data stores?

Even though it offers significant benefits, many of the products out there are still not so good, especially in terms of enterprise risk management and integration needs. The products which are existing for long and already matured are primarily based on the legacy architectures, which may create some operational overhead to the administrators on migration. The most advanced ones made for the multi-cloud environment are much immature now. In case of mission-critical workloads, the customers may have to work with trustworthy vendors irrespective of a licensing model.

One unique way to work on this issue is by using managed cloud services. It will leave the operational overhead to the vendor instead of making it the customer's burden. Those systems which still remain proprietary as AWS will further modify open-source products which they build upon so that the customer is locked into the code and the infrastructure. Databases based on public cloud are mainframe model, and AWS is said to be the new Oracle in DBA.

As we can see, the major differences between the conventional and cloud-based databases primarily come down to the risk vs. overhead. Corporate of the coming years are least interested in things which impact the correctness in terms of data recovery and transactions. They have a focus on productivity and enterprises are largely willing to invest more in terms of getting new features and reducing the risk down the scale.

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