You’re probably reading this because you have an automated booking confirmation process, right? You take trip reservations over the phone. You write your client’s contact information and credit card details on a random piece of paper. Then you draft an email with the trip date, time, meeting location, and whatever they need to bring with them. We’ve heard this story hundreds of times. In fact, one of our clients, Ryan, at Atlantic Climbing School, realized he was working hours before and after business hours doing menial and mundane tasks like sending confirmation emails to clients. All the extra time spent...
Mastering Post-Trip Automated Review Requests: A Guide For Tour Operators
Automating post-trip review requests doesn’t have to sound as impersonal as you think. In fact, using a system that automates the review collection process frees up your time so you can offer a personalized experience to your clients. Many tour operators don’t like the idea of asking for a client to leave a public-facing review for them, which is why most of them fall short on their sheer number of reviews. If you’re one of those tour operators who shudders at the idea of asking a client to leave you a review, consider this: 65% of people left reviews because...
When you automate your content creation, you set your tour company apart from the others. In the fast-paced realm of the travel industry, where captivating an audience and maintaining a vibrant online presence is key, tour operators find themselves navigating a delicate balance between showcasing their unique offerings, offering amazing customer support, and efficiently managing their digital content. Enter the era of automation – a game-changer for tour operators seeking to streamline their content creation processes. In this blog, we’re going to explore the power of automating content creation across various facets of a tour operator's digital landscape, from social...
Automating internal communications becomes really important for tour operators because so many serious (and potentially fatal) things can go wrong that you need to be able to get the word out ASAP. Alternatively, internal communications is wrought with endless back-and-forth, countless steps, and never-ending to-dos. It kind of feels like once you get one thing done, another thing pops up. Forever. In this post, we’re going to cover what internal communication is, why you should automate internal communications, and how you can streamline those tasks. Table of Contents What Is Internal Communications For Tour Operators? Why Should You Automate Internal...
In this technology era, you have to find as many ways to automate tour reservations as possible—not just for tech-savvy clients, but for your overall time management. There’s no reason to continue booking trips manually (or using outdated software) when so many apps, booking software (like Origin), and tools exist to make your life easier. When you automate tour reservations, you save your and your clients’ time. You’re not wasting it by the endless back and forth confirming details, answering questions that should be obvious, or asking for signed waivers when the trip’s supposed to start. You eliminate the risk...
As a tour operator, you’re busy. And that’s probably an understatement. You don’t have time to work on those annoying and repetitive tasks, but you also don’t have the extra funds to hire someone else to do it for you. Instead, save your money and your time by using these different automation tools that will help overwhelmed tour operators like yourself. As we all know, tour guides and operators manage a million tasks to run their business successfully, and some of these tasks can become repetitive and annoying. Coordinating with clients, confirming reservations, and making last-minute adjustments takes a lot...
Tour operators can automate their sales process without a salesperson by using technology to their advantage and implementing different strategies. This leads to more tour bookings and spending less time selling them. This frees up your time, so you can get back to doing what you love (which is probably not taking customer service calls). Before we start, ask yourself these four questions. After reading through the different ways to sell more tours automatically, you can use your answers to develop an automated sales strategy: Why are your customers interested in your tours? How can you get them excited about...
As a booking and scheduling platform for the tours and activities industry, we’ve seen our fair share of tourism websites. A lot are still stuck in their original form, from when they were designed in the late 90’s or early 2000’s. Which is fine if that works for them, but it likely isn’t—and they might not realize that. How To Make A Good Website Design A good website is one that effectively meets its goals and provides a positive experience for visitors. All the best tourist guide websites have elements that we think make them stand out from the rest....
Automating social media strategy, creation, and posting is a surefire way to get more time back in your time while also creating a solid community of adventure-lovers around your company. Tour operators are already pressed for time and finding time for social media usually ends up last on the list—even though it’s a great way to get more bookings. We’ll cover apps to automate strategizing your social media. And yes, you need to come up with a plan for it. We’ll quickly cover SMART goals, Google Analytics, and Google Alerts. Next, we’re going to go over what apps you can...
From Views to Bookings: How To Optimize Tour Sales with CRM Automation
In today's fast-paced and hyper-competitive tour guiding world, you need to stay ahead of the curve by automating as many tasks as you can. One area where tour businesses can get more time back in their day is by automating their customer relationship management (CRM) system. By leveraging cutting-edge automation technology, tour operators can streamline their operations, enhance efficiency, and increase customer satisfaction. Automating your CRM lets you eliminate manual tasks and repetitive processes, which frees up your and your team’s time to focus on strategic initiatives. It helps you centralize and organize customer data, gives you a full view...
Automating your marketing efforts is crucial in today’s fast-paced world of travel and tourism. And tour operators need to find innovative ways to reach their target audience without having to hire an additional staff member to take care of it. That’s where marketing automation comes in. It’s a great solution for tour operators to help automate their marketing processes as a small business (or large business, even). In this post, we’ll cover the benefits and strategies that tour operators can employ to automate their marketing efforts, streamline operations, and drive remarkable success. Table of Contents What is Marketing Automation? Create...
Most of the emails you get in your inbox are probably automated. As in, someone made that email long before it was sent, used tags to customize it, and scheduled it to send when you’re most likely to open it. Email marketing is still a powerful way for guiding companies to reach their target audience and promote their tours to potential customers. However, managing email marketing is time-consuming and takes a solid chunk of effort to make it worth using. Fortunately, automating your emails can help you save time, increase your efficiency, and improve the overall effectiveness of your email...
Administrative, office work is the bane of everyone’s existence. It’s why there are actual roles at companies—so people who don’t want to do the admin work can pay someone else to do it. It’s especially challenging for small to medium-sized tour operators who don’t have the time to cover all the administrative work while also guiding or the money to pay someone else to do it. Even the big tour guiding companies who can afford front staff can benefit from automating mundane office tasks and instead, give their employees something more exciting to do. What you'll read: Hack #1: Automate...
“Moral of the story is, avoid this company at all costs unless you don’t mind being talked to like a piece of sh**.” Yes, this is what someone really said in a rant we found while researching this article. You know you can’t make everyone happy, but what do you do when a client leaves a scathing review out of nowhere? Knowing how to respond to negative reviews can turn a highly toxic, public-facing post into an opportunity to show what your tour guiding company is really about. How to respond to negative reviews Getting a negative review on one...
Starting a guiding business doesn’t stop when you print your business cards. You need to consistently market your guiding company to travelers so you can sell your tours and continue to grow. There are a lot of aspects to marketing and we’ve written about a lot of them. Peruse the following articles based on your interests or start at the top and move through them all in order. Most blogs have additional resources for a deeper understanding of a topic. Intro To Digital Marketing For Professional Adventure Guides Digital marketing strategy is meeting your client at the right place at...