Your customers want you to give them a price online. It may be time for you to give it to them.

54% of Americans prefer to shop online vs. in person, yet 90% of them believe that the online shopping experience could be improved.

Now, before you go and say, “well, that isn’t our customers,” listen to this. Of that group of over 263 million American online shoppers, 37.4% are between the ages of 25-44. While it is still easy to say that passenger ages are older than this for many charter operators, those who book the charters are trending more and more towards those who choose to shop online over any other way.

The group transportation industry has long lagged behind our sister industries in terms of the online experience for our customers. If you think back 50 years, booking a motorcoach was in line with most industries. If you needed a flight, you called a travel agent, and they used their tools to get you a price and help you book. If you wanted to rent a car or book a vacation either at a hotel or a private rental, you called someone, told them what you needed, and they, at some point, got back to you with details and a price.

Fast forward to today, and all of the industries mentioned above have moved to instant pricing, except one. It is hard even to imagine a time when you couldn’t just hop on the internet, see flight prices, book an airline ticket, schedule a hotel, or rent a car.

In contrast to these changes, group transportation, particularly the charter bus industry, has lagged behind. However, our process from 10, 20, 30 even 50 years ago is remarkably similar to today. While our means of communication may have changed slightly to include less fax toner and USPS postage, the process is quite similar. Call us, tell us what you would like, let us figure out what it will cost, and we will get back to you.

As someone who has booked charters and run a small motorcoach company, I understand all the reasons why this is the case. A 4 day charter with all of the associated complications and complexities is a far cry from booking a ticket on a plane going from point A to point B. But, like you, I know that the smallest of changes to a charter can dramatically change the price and, ultimately, the company’s ability to deliver it.

The main problem is that customers, for the most part, don’t know that, which leads to consumers who are confused by a seemingly outdated and overly complicated process that isn’t in line with what they feel the shopping experience should be.

Combine this with the fact that motorcoach companies have been held back by legacy technology built without any meaningful customer-facing tools, and this traditional sales approach has become stuck without any hope of moving on.

That was until now.

It is reported that 74% of shoppers search online before taking the next buying steps. Be that going to a store or making a call to the company. What is interesting about this for motorcoach companies is that this is what has lead to the broker websites that plague our industry.

Broker sites usually do very little well. They don’t showcase safety protocols; they don’t provide great galleries of motorcoaches, talk about the customers they serve, or anything else that motorcoach companies spend a lot of their online real estate focused on. What they do well is they provide transparent pricing, which is often up to 30% higher than their operator counterparts. They also allow easy navigation, quick quote information gathering, near-instant pricing, and personalized follow-up.

If you are like me, the thought of this makes my blood boil. Brokers represent themselves as transportation providers only to take bookings and then beat up those operating the equipment to increase their margins.

But what the presence of these brokers proves without a doubt is that opportunity for operators to transform their online sales process and give the buyers what they want in a way that makes the broker’s efforts irrelevant. This new chapter in our history starts with instant online price quoting.

Before you say that you could never do instant pricing… there are some things you need to know.

First, instant price quoting should never be something you use for 100% of your quotes. There will always be complicated quotes that need a salesperson’s attention and skilled eyes to get right. There is however many quotes that come in on a day-to-day basis that are reasonably straightforward. Pick up here, drop off there, come back later, and do it all in reverse. A large share of your quotes falls into this category, from business transportation to weddings, schools field trips, to military moves. For Dattco in Connecticut, which has been using online price calculations for nearly a year, these simple quotes represented over 80% of their total quote volume.

Second, you will get to set the boundaries between uncomplicated and complicated. Instant quoting works, but how it works for you will be different than it will be for another company. Where you draw the lines between easy and complicated can be customized, so you and your sales teams are comfortable with when a price goes out and when a salesperson reviews a price before it’s sent.

Third, your customers want prices available online. Every aspect of our lives today revolves around our online experiences. COVID has seen massive growth in this sector as well. E-commerce grew 32.4% in 2020 alone. Online Toilet paper sales were up over 800%, and online grocery sales increased almost 300% from pre-pandemic levels. Consumers are shopping online, and when they run into barriers such as not seeing a price, they tend to abandon the search and look elsewhere.

Forth, it works. Our tool has gathered over 50,000 charter quote requests online and delivered real-time pricing to most of those. During that time, over 5,000 customers clicked a “book now” button requesting that the quote be made a booking. No haggling on price, no price match requests, nothing. Just a customer wanting to book based on the prices they saw.

SalesDriver is a widget that lives on your website that allows your customers to input their charter requirements and delivers real-time pricing to the charters you have decided it should. It will enable you to create a dynamic pricing strategy that considers dates and times you are traditionally busy as well as flex pricing based on dynamic fleet availability and correctly applies that to the quote to maximize profits. Studies done by our customers showed that individual salespeople were spending between 3 and 6 hours a day less building and managing quotes and were able to spend that time doing meaningful follow-up and sales.

Your customers want to be able to shop, get quotes, and buy from you more easily. We can help you deliver that with a tool built for the charter industry by industry experts. A tool that is currently helping operators of every size, in markets large and small, drive more dollars to the bottom line. Let us show you how.