How to Attract Current Travelers to Your Tour Company

As a tour operator in 2018, you’ve probably created your digital marketing strategies, hopefully with the help of Rezdy and TourismTiger’s blogs. You have a social media presence, a mailing list, maybe you run ads to target potential travelers with Facebook’s Trip Consideration ad feature.

But tourism advertising isn’t all about digital marketing. In order to target current travelers who are up for a spontaneous adventure, you’re going to need to get off the computer.

Here are some tips on how to appeal to current travelers:

Partner with hotels

There are a couple of ways to get hotels to advertise your tour company to their guests. If you’re looking for the cheapest option, try offering free tours to the concierge desk. That way, they’ll be familiar with your company, hopefully will have had an amazing experience with you, and will be likely to recommend you to hotel guests when talking about fun things to do during their stay.

Another way to partner with hotels in your area, though a bit more expensive, is to design a great map of your town or city. Make sure the map marks all the best tourist locations, and of course, your tour company’s headquarters with a little blurb about it. Design a great enough map, print thousands, and give them to the hotels. If it’s a great map, hotels will give it out to their guests. That way, the hotel doesn’t have to print their own, and all their guests will be walking around town with a map that has your tour company on it

Flyers

Local coffee shops and ice cream parlors are big tourist destinations, thanks to TripAdvisor and Yelp. Find out which ones are most likely to be frequented by tourists, and see if they have a bulletin board inside. Put up a flyer about your tour company. Make sure it is eye-grabbing and informative. Also, make sure it is clear from the flyer that you are able to take last minute bookings, that way those who see it will feel sure that you can take them on.

Offer a ‘Tours For Tips’ service

‘Free’ walking tours are a controversial subject, but offering a ‘pay what you want’ tour can help capture a new market. Try offering, in addition to your regular tours, a smaller tour that is donation or tip based. Make sure your guides wear t-shirts or hold signs that say your company name and ‘Free Walking Tour’ or ‘Tour For Tips’, so travelers will know what they’re seeing, and can enquire online or in person to schedule a walking tour, or even just join the tour if they want. They don’t need to make a big commitment to take the tour, and if it’s a quality tour with a great guide, they’ll likely end up giving a good tip at the end, or booking a normal, paid tour with the guide at the end

Mobile Friendly Site

If you want to appeal to travelers that are already on their trip, then you must optimize your website for mobile use. If your site is only easy to navigate on a desktop, then you’re going to lose a lot of people who are currently traveling who didn’t bring their computer with them. All TourismTiger sites are mobile and tablet friendly, so if you need help in this area, just get in touch.

While you might be doing everything you can to get travelers to book with you before they even take their trip, don’t forget about the spontaneous travelers, who land in a destination without a plan of what they’re going to do. Try these tips to get those travelers to book with you.

TourismTiger specializes in web design exclusively for tour operators. If you’re interested in getting a new, sales-focused website, get in touch.