5 Ways Tour Operators can Improve Booking Conversion Rates

5 Ways Tour Operators can Improve Booking Conversion Rates

All too often, tour and activity operators design their website in the hopes of attracting a mass amount of visitors. They employ the latest and greatest SEO tactics to remain visible in the search engine results, and invest in PPC advertising campaigns that drive site traffic. However, recent figures published by Tnooz indicate that a whopping 99 percent of travel site visitors abandon the website before completing their bookings. Rather than focusing on attracting as many visitors as possible to your website, you should narrow your efforts and prioritize visitors who will convert into customers.

What are Direct Booking Conversion Rates

The direct booking conversion rate is the amount of site visitors that actually book one of your tours and activities directly on your website. If your direct booking conversion rate is low, you’re likely wasting a lot of money on marketing that is attracting unmotivated site visitors. You will want to develop an online marketing strategy that is aimed at improving your direct booking conversion rate, as this provides you with the greatest return on your marketing investment.

How to Improve Booking Conversion Rates


1. Offer real-time availability.
Your site visitors need to know if there are open spots available for the tours they are interested in on the days in which they will be visiting. They are not going to put out the effort to contact you to see if you are available — they will simply move on to the next company that does have real-time availability on their website.

2. Include calls-to-action. Calls-to-action will link your website together and will create a seamless user experience for your site visitors. The most important call-to-action is the “Book Now” button, which should be prominently displayed on each landing page.

3. Use short, effective forms. Your online booking form should be as short as possible. Only ask for the necessary information that is required to book a tour, or you risk users abandoning your page.

4. Add TripAdvisor Widgets. These widgets can connect your TripAdvisor profile with your tour and activity website. Some widgets to consider include the review, awards and feedback widgets.

5. Invest in retargeting ads. These ads are targeted toward visitors who abandoned your site once without booking. They will see reminders for your tours and activities on their social media feeds and other websites that they visit, encouraging them to come back to your website and finalize their booking. These ads can be a valuable way to boost your conversion rate.

Your online marketing strategy should be designed to increase site traffic to your website, but it also should prioritize your direct booking conversion rate. You don’t want to attract just any web searcher to your website, you want to pull in the most motivated travelers in your target market segment. Don’t settle for a 1% conversion rate! Strive to raise it as high as possible and enjoy the benefits of direct bookings.

For more information on online marketing for tour and activity operators, download the Rezdy online marketing ebook today.

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