# Ancillary revenue for travel agencies

Adding a bag costs your agency an agent and a phone call, and earns nothing. Turn post-booking servicing into self-service, agent-assisted, and paid.

For a retail travel agency or a TMC, ancillary revenue starts by making
servicing pay. Adding a bag or a seat today means an agent on the phone to the
airline, at a cost with no revenue attached. A post-booking cart turns that
request into self-service for the traveller, or into a short web task for the
agent.

## Servicing is the only part of the job that only costs

The economics of a retail agency and a TMC are not the OTA's economics. You are
not fighting for a click. You already hold the booking, the relationship, and
often the corporate contract. What you also hold is every request that arrives
after ticketing, and those requests are the part of the operation that has cost
attached and nothing else.

A traveller wants a bag added. An agent picks up, opens the booking, calls the
airline, waits, confirms, and writes back. That is real staff time, in a business
where staff time is the largest line on the page, spent on a transaction that
brings in nothing. Do it a few hundred times a month and it is a department.

**Definition:** Deflection is the share of servicing requests that resolve without a human.
It is normally measured as a cost saving. The interesting part here is that the
same deflected request can carry a sale, which is not how a support metric
usually behaves.

|  | An agent calls the airline | A post-booking cart |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Who does the work | A trained agent, on hold | The traveller, or an agent on the same screen |
| What it consumes | Minutes of staff time per request | A short self-service flow |
| Revenue attached to the request | No | Yes |
| Needs a trained agent | Yes | No |
| Written back to the reservation | Yes | Yes |
| Available outside office hours | No | Yes |

## The same request, without the phone call

[Diagram: A traveller who already holds a confirmed booking is shown only the offers that suit that itinerary, adds them to a single cart, pays once, and the booking then reflects the purchase without anyone at the agency handling it.]

From a confirmed booking to a purchase reflected on it, with nobody at the agency in the middle.

The traveller who wanted a bag added gets a link. What loads is a cart holding
only what is valid for their itinerary, at the price the airline filed for it.
They pay once. The purchase is written back to the reservation, so your agents
never touch it and the booking your team looks at is already correct.

That is the deflection half. The other half is that the request stopped being
free.

## A revenue line out of a cost centre

Three things change at once, and the third is the one agencies usually miss.

1. **Self-service takes the routine requests**

   A link in the confirmation email, in the itinerary document, or in your own portal. Seat selection and extra bags are the two that generate the most contacts, and they are the two that resolve most cleanly without a person.

2. **Agents work in the same cart, not a different system**

   For the calls that still come in, and for the corporate traveller who will always ring, the agent uses the same screen the traveller would have used. Nothing about the booking has to be re-keyed, and no new GDS skill is involved.

3. **Service itself becomes something you can sell**

   Priority support is a paid tier that gives travellers a faster route to a human. It is the clearest version of the whole idea: the thing you currently give away for free, priced, and sold through the same cart as the seat and the bag.

4. **Refund protection turns a risk conversation into revenue**

   A non-refundable booking becomes refundable under defined circumstances. Travellers are already asking your agents about this, usually at the moment they are thinking hardest about what could go wrong.

## No retraining, because there is nothing new to learn

[Diagram: DepartCart sits between the partner's existing post-booking experience and the reservation, adding relevant offers, a cart and a single payment. The partner keeps the pages and the booking flow it already has, and replatforms nothing.]

It attaches after ticketing. How you sell and ticket does not change.

The reason a servicing improvement usually fails in an agency is that it lands as
a new system, and a new system means training, a fallback process, and six months
before anybody trusts it. This one attaches to the booking after ticketing. Your
sales process, your ticketing, your mid-office, and your reporting all keep
working the way they do now.

For the traveller it is a web page. For the agent it is the same web page. The
accuracy underneath it is the part worth checking, because a seat map that shows
the wrong cabin is how you turn a deflected request into two contacts instead of
none.

- **63** Airlines with researched layouts
- **474** Cabin layouts
- **49** Aircraft types
- **114,182** Mapped seats

## What else belongs in an agency cart

Seat selection, extra bags, refund protection, and priority support are sold and
fulfilled through the cart today. The category is wider, and the cart carries the
wider category in the same offer-and-fulfil shape. Travel insurance is a natural
fit for an agency that is already having the duty-of-care conversation. Delay and
disruption cover speaks to an anxiety the traveller has once the money is spent.
Airport transfers are the point where an itinerary stops being air only, which is
the same reason they matter to a cruise or a rail leg. Those are categories the
platform is built for rather than a price list, so the honest next step for any
of them is a conversation.

**Aside:** The [OTA page](/solutions/online-travel-agencies) covers the same cart from the
other end of the market, where the problem is a lost second sale rather than an
expensive one.

## Work out what your servicing calls are costing

Bring a month of post-ticketing contacts and we will walk through which of them a cart would have resolved, and what those requests could have earned instead.

[Talk to us](mailto:hello@departcart.com)

## Frequently asked questions

### Do our agents have to learn anything new?

No new GDS training. Agents work in the same cart the traveller sees, on a normal web screen, and the purchase is written back to the reservation automatically. The skill being replaced is a phone call, not a booking skill.

### What happens to the calls that still come in?

They get shorter. An agent handling a request in the cart is doing a short web task instead of waiting on an airline queue, and the same request now carries revenue rather than only cost.

### Can we charge for service itself?

Priority support is one of the four products sold and fulfilled through the cart today. It gives travellers a faster route to a human and gives the agency a revenue line out of what is currently a pure cost centre.

### Which bookings does it work with?

Bookings held in Sabre, with ancillaries sourced through both ATPCO filed content and NDC. Seat maps and bag offers come from the airline for that specific itinerary, so an agent is never quoting from a stale table.

### Does this replace our mid-office or our servicing tools?

No. It runs after ticketing, on top of the booking you already hold, and it changes nothing about how you sell or ticket. Most agencies start with a link in the confirmation email and add the agent view once the volume shows up.