Why You Should be Using Online Vouchers with iBooking

Adding online vouchers to your account is quick, easy, and simply makes sense. It’s more revenue, zero admin, and your customers will thank you for it.

We all know what a voucher is. It’s a great way to enhance sales and to give your customers another reason to buy from you. But vouchers can be complicated to merchandise, be complete and time-consuming to administer, and often require working with 3rd parties who have the customer reach to enable you to generate sales. iBooking has re-thought the process of selling, and redeeming online vouchers, and have integrated the complete process right into your iBooking account. Now, it’s simple to create, sell and manage voucher redemption. So how does it work?

We’ve built voucher sales and redemption right into the iBooking product. As it’s an integrated solution, there’s no duplication, no manual effort, and no worries about whether or not you can manage a rush of customers who all want to use your services at the same time! We’ve built three different voucher types right into your iBooking account.

Voucher types in your iBooking Account

• Voucher Codes – Create an unlimited number of codes, associate them with a value, and give out the codes as incentives, to add credit to offline payment cards, or for any other purpose – use your imagination!
• Fixed Value Vouchers – The most common type. Create fixed value vouchers such as $50, $100 etc. Your customers can buy and pay for these online. During purchase they can choose to send the voucher as a gift to a friend or relative.
• Flexi-Date Voucher – Allows a customer to purchase a voucher for a specific journey, tour or activity and send it to a friend for use on a specified date/time.

All 3 voucher types are enabled in your account when you’re signed up for the Voucher module.

So how do customers see this?

Once you’ve enabled at least one voucher type you will see a new menu bar in your booking engine. It looks a lot like this…

Your customer can click on the link to purchase and follow the simple steps to complete their selection, choose where to send the voucher, and complete the purchase. Just like with a ticket sale, you will receive an instant confirmation of the purchase and a permanent record of the transaction will be available in your account.

What Happens Next?

So you’ve made a sale and funds will be in your account [as the payment has been processed using the same payment gateway as on your main ticketing account]. In a surprising number of cases you may find that’s the end of the process. Up to 30% of sold vouchers are never redeemed! That may sound like free money, and it’s hard to argue otherwise, but I think it’s always better if the voucher recipient makes use of their voucher. It could create a new lifetime customer, and you wouldn’t question the value of that!

Here’s where the real benefit of vouchers in iBooking really comes into play. When selling vouchers via either 3rd party web sites or with basic voucher systems on your own web site, there is always an admin overhead in either fulfilling the sale, or dealing with redemptions. Typically, when a customer wants to redeeem a voucher they need to call or email. With iBooking vouchers, each voucher has a unique code, and the email includes a link to allow an instant redemption. With iBooking there is no need to deal with emails or phones calls. Just let your customer access the same live inventory as used by customers on your web site, by your staff, agents and affiliates. Your product database is always 100% updated in real time, so redemption of vouchers is as simple as dealing with bookings.