Car Rentals: How to Get Integrated with Tour Operators?

What is a Tour Operator/OTA and Why do I need it?

Car Rental is a crucial part of the travel industry. Integrating with leading tour operators is not an easy job. Integrating with giants like Expedia, Rentals car, and Booking.com takes time. But as we know Hard work works harder than luck! Once the integration is done it could bring a big stream of reservations, that will impact your business.

What are the requirements for tour operators’ integrations?

Before getting integrated with a tour operator, it’s important to know if you are ready for getting integrated with the tour operators.

So there are a few things that will prepare you for that day.

Above all, prepare your company profile. To gain trust it’s important to provide a very good company profile, which means having a good website, something that can give them proof of your company that your company is not born yesterday, but you are in the market with the intention to stay. Prepare your numbers, how many reservations and fleet you have, locations, and good financial information.

After, the location, where is your location? The people that will visit tour operators, would be people that are traveling for leisure or for business. So it’s important that your location is a for example, in an airport, in a train station, in a city or a tourist place.

On the other hand, if you are in the countryside it’s different. If there is not anything special in that countryside, although, if you have a very good rental business, 500 cars or a thousand cars. It will be more difficult to get integrated. Instead, if you are, in a big town in a big city or at the airport, Tour operators would be interested to have an integration with you.

Moreover, prepare and provide the training to your team. They have to be ready to manage a bigger flow of reservation, of people. And also you need to be prepared for managing better prices because you will sell a lot from the tour operators.

Last but not least, the vehicle rental system you are using. You will need a car rental system that is already integrated, otherwise, it will take a lot of time.

How MyRent is helping me?

MyRent has more than 25 integrations with leading tour operators around the world. The most sensitive and crucial parts are price lists. MyRent apart from providing an exchange of data about your vehicle availability to TOs, will also provide you all tools you need to have good integration. But what are the most important ones?

•  Rates– Tariffs or rates are very important and directly connected to your company’s reputation. Myrent allows you to apply different discounts and rates for different places. As well as, to define seasons and applicable locations. If you are managing the rate in a good way, not too low, otherwise you will lose all your margin and you can lose money instead of gain. And not too high, otherwise people will not rent your cars and then you should be ready also to get the reviews, the reviews from people that we rent the cars that will check, will compare your business, with the others with other bigger players may be, and they will leave a review on the web on the tour operator, website, or trust pilot website for example.
• Online Booking– To integrate with TOs, you will need a good website and online booking engine. MyRent provides the real-time exchange of vehicle availability and rates between software and your website.
• Overbooking– MyRent allows you to deal with overbooking efficiently. You can manage free sell and stop sell when needed.

How I can Sign-up for Integration with Tour Operators?

Once you are sure that you fulfill all the requirements, you can research the TO website you want to have integration with and contact the person in charge by providing company profile.

Register as Supplier– visit the website of tour operator you want to get integration with and contact them. For example, Expedia is receiving through supplies sign up form.

LinkedIn Contact– You can use also LinkedIn, to see who is the person in charge of this tour operator in your area and connect with them instantly.

Ask the other Car Rental– you can ask car rentals in your area about how they got integration and what process they have done. In this way, you will be able to know what to expect and how to be prepared.

Trade Fairs- do not underestimate this opportunity to meet the persons you have searched and contacted online. You can directly speak with them and the suggestions.

Ask your software house-  your software provider will know the names of the people, ask them to provide you with the contact/emails of the people who work for tour operators you are interested in.

Face-to Face-You can ask them for a meeting and you can go to visit. It’s important the human interaction because they have to trust you and be sure why they will choose your company. Let’s consider that when they will do the integration, they will have a cost because it will require time it will require that the developers of your system and developers of their system will be in contact for doing the test and integration and so on. So they will do it if they see a return on the investment, they could ask you the cost for the integration.

What can be reasons of getting rejected?

It is quite probable and there are a  lot of reasons for it. For example.

Location– maybe you are a very good company, but they already have lots of players in that location and it may be some tour operator can refuse because of the agreement that they already have.

Trust– reviews of your company on different portals, as well as your assets and system you are using summed up, will play a crucial role to gain their trust.

Too many players- Tour operators may reject as well because they are having trusted collaborators in your area, with whom they already made an agreement to have a limited number of car rentals in that certain city. Therefore, they can decide to not integrate this year.

If You need Help, MyRent is here

Your business’ success is always top of mind for us. So if you have any questions on how to get integrated with Tour Operators, or anything else, we’re here to help.