Rezgo Supports Importing Expedia Confirmation Emails

By now you have probably heard about one of our latest features, the ability for Rezgo to import Expedia confirmation emails. For many suppliers, however, who do not have a commercial relationship with Expedia (yet) this feature seems a little hard to understand. If you’re a supplier and you are not reselling through Expedia, or some other third party aggregators, this feature will have no impact on you. That said, for suppliers who do sell through third parties, this feature is one more step closer to managing your tour business more efficiently. Let’s first review how the booking process works with most third party aggregators:

1. Traveler books an activity on the third-party website.
2. Traveler pays using their credit card and third party either pre-authorizes the traveler’s credit card (if the activity requires supplier confirmation) or charges the card automatically.
3. If the booking requires confirmation, then it is marked as pending and an email is sent to the supplier to confirm that space is available. If the space is available, then the supplier approves the booking and the traveler’s card is charged and the booking is confirmed. If space is not available or if the supplier fails to confirm within a specified amount of time, then the booking is canceled and the customer card and the payment is voided.
4. If the booking is confirmed, the supplier receives a confirmation email (or even by FAX) with the details of the booking. This email varies from each third party reseller but generally includes the passenger names, what they booked, and some contact details. In most cases, this information CANNOT be used for marketing purposes and is considered to be owned by the third party.
5. The supplier has to hand enter the information from the booking into their reservation system or keep track of the booking some other way including adding the passenger to manifests, booking reports, etc.
6. When the customer arrives to take your tour or activity, they will give you a voucher from the third party reseller. This voucher should coincide with the confirmation email that you received from the third party.
7. Depending on the reseller, you may be required to either generate and mail an invoice withe the vouchers that you collect or use a specific extranet (or website) to enter in your voucher numbers.
8. Sometime later (between 30 and 60 days) you’ll receive payment from the third party.

So, how Rezgo help make this process more efficient. Well, you can already see that this process is very manual and if bookings are not tracked properly could result in over-bookings or missed customers. There is not a lot that is within your control in this process except for one very important step and that is the tracking of the booking after it has been received via email.

When the email confirmation is received in your email inbox, you forward the email to your unique Rezgo email address. Rezgo looks at the email, pulls out all the important information, creates a booking for the appropriate tour or activity, and updates your inventory automatically. When the customer arrives for the tour, you now have a record of the customer in your passenger manifest and the booking shows up in your booking reports.

You can get more details about how to set-up your Expedia email import on the Rezgo support site.

If you are interested in reselling your tours/activities through Expedia, you can find out more on this FAQ page of the Expedia.com site.  Be aware that they can take up to 30 days to contact you back to you IF they are interested.