E-learning takes off as travel agents discover ‘selling clever’.
Statistics show a huge growth in e-learning in 2009
- 100% rise in training members - now 26,000!
- 200% rise in web traffic - year on year
- 71% agents say they have sold/recommended more as a result
- 15,000 courses completed so far in 2009
Reports from this year’s ABTA Conference said that consumers purchasing travel are now ‘buying clever’. Leading e-learning company Online Travel Training (OTT) reports that UK travel agents are now learning to ‘sell clever’ too, with a massive jump in online learning amongst UK travel agents as they train themselves up with suppliers’ product training on their computers.
Registered users of OTT’s web portal www.onlinetraveltraining.co.uk have more than doubled from 12,500 in October last year to more than 26,000 now, with users joining at a rate of more than 1,000 a month – mostly travel agents actively involved in selling the travel products concerned, as well as students studying travel and tourism.
With a library of more than 60 online product training courses now live and another 20 in preparation, OTT offers the widest choice of travel e-learning available to travel agents on the web. Users follow the modular courses online and download a certificate upon successful completion of each course.
“OTT helps suppliers create their product training courses on the OTT web portal, which travel agents can then use on the website for free” explains Operations Director Bruce Martin. “After they have undertaken a course they are become much more confident in selling the product – 71% of agents in a recent survey said that they had recommended a product or made a sale directly as a result of taking an OTT training course. And 94% rated the OTT website as good or very good”.
Nearly 15,000 course completions have already been recorded this year, with each course typically attracting many hundreds of users and one airline course already attracting over 1500 course completions.
Product suppliers, too, rate the e-learning site very highly. Attraction World, for instance, explains: “The online training is like having an extra staff member in the team, We can now train agents regardless of where they are in the country, and being able to learn at their own pace and at a time to suit them means that no one misses out on a sales opportunity due to lack of training”. And one reason Qatar Airlines won a recent airline of the year award was ‘the launch of a new online training programme for agents’ – again, on OTT.
Last quarter’s website traffic on OTT (28 July – 28 Oct) shows a massive jump in activity on the website with over half a million page views (up 300%) and site visits up 200% year on year, with average time on the site per visit up 10%, as users spend more and more time undertaking the training courses available.
Attracted by the fast-growing audience OTT is able to deliver for their e-learning programmes and the Management Information available on users, more and more blue-chip companies are signing up to create their courses on OTT or feature their existing e-learning programmes in the library of courses available on the website, including blue chip brands such as Virgin Atlantic, Worlds of Discovery, Avis & EasyJet.
OTT has also been chosen by Advantage Travel, the GTMC and Lufthansa City Center (worldwide agency network) to run their in-house product e-learning programmes for their networks of travel agents in both the leisure and business travel markets. ANTOR and ETOA have also names OTT as their preferred training partner.
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For further information including Google Analytics & statistics please contact Bruce Martin on bruce@onlinetraveltraining.com / 0207 923 6440