The travel industry has changed alot since the beginning of the pandemic. Now that things are finally beginning to resemble a pre-pandemic world it’s important to recognize that some changes to traveler behavior most likely won’t return to the ‘before times’. One of those changes that we believe will be consistent is greater flexibility with cancellations and travelers willing to pay to have peace of mind around their bookings. The guidelines and concerns around the pandemic were changing so frequently that even as the world has moved significantly forward the anxieties around things changing last minute still linger.
Our sister company TripShock introduced changes to their cancellation policy and a flexible trip protection plan over a year ago and they have seen a strong uptake and low claims. The data show that many travelers are happy and willing to pay a small premium to have the flexibility that trip protection can offer and they rarely use it (i.e. ‘insurance’).
With that data in hand and requests from our WaveRez partners for a feature that can enable that functionality we developed an update to our options feature set. We are happy to announce that we now offer a ‘paid percentage based option’ that allows watersport operators to provide their customers with a selection upon checkout that is calculated via a percentage of the sale. This can be used for more than just trip insurance (e.g. dock fees), but we’re going to use the ‘trip insurance’ example in this article as we believe it exemplifies this new feature.
An important consideration as we were engineering this new feature was that every watersport business would not use this feature in the same way so it was critical to make it flexible. We intentionally left much of the specifics around the feature open to customization; the option name, tool tip (description), % amount, and value name can all be generated by the tour operator to fit their needs. It can also be set to internal use only if desired.
With that in mind we’ll put forth an example of how this feature could be built out for a WaveRez partner:
Option Name: Trip Insurance
Tool Tip: Trip Insurance is a non-refundable policy that allows you to cancel your booking prior to departure for any reason. You will be fully refunded of your rental costs, booking fees, taxes, & pre-paid tips if you have to cancel last minute.
Value name (selection box text): Include Trip Insurance
Value %: 10
The example trip in focus will now present the customer with a Trip Insurance selection option upon checkout, where they can add or decline the 10% extra insurance option.
Most watersport businesses using this type of feature keep their current cancellation policy intact and self- fund this type of trip protection for their customers who want it. In general, most customers who cancel do so in the standard cancellation window, along with regular weather cancellations that every operator deals with. Thus this feature tends to be a driver for the monthly bottom line when it’s implemented. Below is a simple example of the monthly potential from implementing this feature. Keep in mind that every business is different and will need to make their own decision on whether this could work for them, and if/when implemented, keep track of how it’s performing to ensure a positive ROI.
Example of Trip Insurance Monthly Revenue:
Sales: $100,000/month
Avg. order: $500
Orders: 200
Trip insurance take rate: 15%
Orders w/ trip insurance: 30 (200 * .15)
Trip Insurance rate: 10%
Approx trip insurance rev @ 10%: $1,500/month (($500 * .1) * 30)
Would an extra $1,500 hitting your bottom line each month be meaningful? We believe so, especially when you consider that generating it is basically overhead- free (outside of an hour or so of set up).
We look forward to seeing how our WaveRez partners implement this feature and how their bottom lines can improve using it. Please feel free to contact support@waverez.com to learn how to set this up for your trips or schedule your free demo for a walkthrough!
Below are some images on what the feature looks like on both the back end of WaveRez, as well as the customer facing booking portal:
Feature Set Up:
Step 1
Step 2
Booking portal view upon checkout:
% based total reflected upon final checkout page:
About the Author
Greg Fisher
