It’s summer time (at least in this hemisphere), and hundreds of millions of people are already planning their vacations. Except travel industry people, who aren’t going anywhere, as they have to help all those millions plan, book and enjoy their holidays.
It’s a competitive industry, travel, and one where employees have to juggle tons of facts in order to help their clients – being able to help them find picturesque villas in South France, exciting off-road routes in the Australian Outback and cheap rooms to let in Santorini.
They also have to be proficient with several kinds of booking systems, international visa requirements, necessary vaccinations, and several other things besides. Even the ticket agent has to master an arcane set of rules and procedures for booking tickets.
This is where eLearning comes in, and in today’s post, we’ll take a look at how travel agencies can leverage an LMS platform like eFront to boost their productivity and efficiency.
While certain details change, most of the use cases for eLearning in the travel industry are not that different from any other business.
Let’s go through them:
Employee orientation
Employee orientation is the task of introducing new hires to your working environment and giving them the basic information they need to start being productive, including your company’s operating procedures and policies, restrictions and guidelines.
If your travel agency hires new people frequently, automating employee orientation is one of the best investments, and eLearning software, such as the eFront learning management system (LMS), is your best option for this.
With eFront you can organize your orientation material in accessible units, incorporate video, audio, images, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations etc., and integrate material from third parties (YouTube, Wikipedia, RSS, etc). And for helping you access your new hire’s progress and understanding of the material, it also includes tests, quizzes and auto-grading.
It also tracks orientation course attendance, something that can serve as proof that your company has informed your employees about company policy, sexual harassment laws, etc., in case of a legal dispute (of course, as law differs around the world, consult your legal team before relying on this).
Training
Travel industry trends change frequently, employees are often re-assigned to handle different accounts, departments or destinations, and there are always new hires.
All those things make training necessary. eLearning makes it easy and cost effective, enabling you to train your employees at their own pace, without business disruptions and with total clarity into their progress.
With regards to the last item, eFront provides a comprehensive reporting system that gives you quantifiable information and statistics for your employees’ attendance, progress and understanding of the material.
And if your training material changes frequently (new destinations, new travel bundles to sell, new booking methods, catering to a new market in another language, etc.) an eLearning based solution will help there too.
You can update all your courses without wasting paper and dead trees, re-use and expand content as you see fit, and share courses between different departments or branches. And with eFront’s integration with content markets such as OpenSesame, you can even buy ready-made professional grade courses in thousands of topics.
Knowledge retention
In every business there are a few employees whose experience is crucial for its day to day operations, or for handling some special crisis scenarios that occur once in a while.
An eLearning solution can help you store this valuable information in a formalized and easily accessible way that is safe from changes in your personnel and can be studied and taught to new hires.
Of course you could just put all that into a document management system. Putting it in an LMS though, ensures that it’s not just some documents sitting on a server, but that you can also use use it as training courses for your employees, leveraging all of your LMS’ eLearning features.
Conclusion
If you work in the travel industry you probably know Greece as a popular tourist destination, with great beaches, nice museums, and friendly people.
But it’s also the place where eFront, the industry leading LMS platform, is developed, which, like Greece, is a very good fit for the travel industry.
eFront has thousands of satisfied customers, including several multinational companies. It frequently trumps the competition in industry reviews, and is renowned for its ease of use.
Take it for a test drive today and see for yourself how a modern LMS can help you take your travel related business to the next level.
