5 ways to customize LACRM as a travel agent

Less Annoying CRM, as a customer relationship manager, plays a key role in storing and maintaining the relationships you share with your clients. Some customizations that will help optimize it for your travel agency include:

1) Create custom file fields for documents that you collect from all of your clients.

There are multiple ways to store files in LACRM: on a contact, on a pipeline, or as a field. The variety of options is intended to allow you to pick the best way to manage your files depending on the type of files you are storing. With travelers, there are a whole host of files you could save (itineraries, scanned passports, invoices, receipts etc.), and creating a field for the most common ones is an easy way to organize your files.

Here's a tutorial on how to create custom file fields.

2) Use sub-calendars to organize the type of follow ups that you do.

Sub-calendars allow you to manage different types of events and tasks throughout the day. While the most common way to use sub-calendars is to separate your work events from personal events (via a "Work" calendar and a "Personal" calendar), an easy way to customize this for your travel agency is to use it to organize the different types of follow-ups that you do.

By separating your tasks/events out based on type of follow-up (e.g. pre-trip, during trip, and post-trip follow-ups), you can more easily see the type of work you'll be focused on on any particular day.

Here's a tutorial on how to create sub-calendars.

3) Store specific trip itineraries on the pipeline instead of the contact.

There are 3 places you can create custom fields: a contact, a company, and a pipeline. When it comes to storing trip itineraries, it might be tempting to either save the file directly on the contact, or create a contact file field (like you would in point 1 above). But this gets messy when you have a client who books multiple trips -- you'll end up searching through file names trying to find the right itinerary.

The best place to upload and store a specific trip itinerary is on that specific trip's pipeline item.

Whenever you plan a trip for a client, you attach a Booking pipeline to them, and within that Booking pipeline is where you can store information specific to that booking. Uploading the itinerary onto that pipeline instead of on the contact means that in the future, any time you need to see any information about one client's summer trip, you can pull that up easily in one place.

Here's a tutorial on how to create custom fields on your pipeline.

4) Create a custom contact-link field to track bookings with multiple travelers.

Oftentimes you'll need to manage a trip with multiple travelers, and the best way to keep all the information consolidated into a single Booking in LACRM is to create an "Other Travelers" contact-link field. A contact-link field allows you to link one Booking pipeline to more than one person at a time so that you can keep track of everyone who is going on the trip.

Instead of saving traveler names in notes, on pieces of papers, or attaching pipelines to all your contacts, you can see all your travelers for one trip in one place.

The bonus here is that it'll also link this booking to all your traveler's contact records so that you can hop from person to booking, to any other traveler in that booking.

Here's a tutorial on how to create custom fields on your pipeline.

5) Bookmark frequently accessed reports -- like a report of upcoming bookings sorted by Departure date.

There are a whole slew of reports that you can create in LACRM depending on the type of booking you want to see, departure dates, travel locations, and so on. But depending on how you do your follow-ups or how you reach out to your clients, you may need to frequently access the same type of report each day.

LACRM doesn't have a dedicated "Saved Reports" tab (it's on our radar as a tool to build!) but what can help in the meantime is to run the relevant filters and sorting options you need (for example, only your active bookings, sorted by departure date) and then bookmark that report in your browser. This way, whenever you need to access the same filters/sorting you can just open up that bookmarked URL to pull up the most updated report with those settings already turned on.

Here's a tutorial on how to save a report in LACRM.

I hope these tips help! LACRM is designed to be customizable for whatever kind of tracking or contact management that you need to do. Feel free to contact us if you have questions on how to further optimize your LACRM account for your travel agency!

Interested in using LACRM for your travel agency? See how it works here.