How To Sell Tours Through Your Website
For set departure tour operators, your website is the heart of your travel business and how to sell tours. It’s the place where customers can find you, learn about what you offer, book their trips, and stay engaged. Your website is a representation of your unique brand and personality, and you want to leave a good first impression and encourage browsers to become buyers. However, many tour operators are not capitalizing on the business and sales potential that an optimized website can provide. Things like bad user experience, clunky booking forms, and outdated web design can be real detractors for travelers looking to spend on their next big vacation.
Given the increase in consumer demand for easy online booking, it’s a smart move to do your travel business justice and give your website the refresh it needs to attract new customers and grow. Whether you’re a small, boutique tour operator or a well-established company, optimizing your website for tour sales can significantly impact your bottom line. Given the travel industry’s digital transformation, the importance of direct bookings continues to increase, with smaller tour operators looking to take advantage of the next wave for tour and travel businesses.
Let your website be a doorway and not a dead end for potential customers. Here are some best practices for how to sell tours effectively through your website.
User-Friendly Design
A clean, intuitive website design helps visitors easily navigate your site and find the information and content that they need. Your site should make bookings easier, not more difficult for customers. Consider focusing on a few key features:
Mobile Optimization: Ensure your website is mobile-friendly. With a significant number of travelers making trip bookings on their smartphones, responsiveness on mobile is a must-have for any tour operator website.
Simple Navigation: Use a clear menu structure, and make sure important pages (like tours, about, contact) are easily accessible. You want site visitors to be able to quickly find what they are looking for and make a booking.
Fast Loading Time: Today, everyone expects to have what they need at the click of a button. Optimize images and other elements to ensure your site loads quickly, as slow load times can deter potential customers.
High-Quality Visuals
Pictures and videos are powerful tools in selling experiences and adventures. It’s a good idea to invest in high-quality visuals that showcase the beauty and excitement of your tours so that site visitors can envision themselves on the trips you offer.
Professional Photography: Use professional photos to highlight key attractions, happy customers, and all of the unique aspects of your tours.
Videos: Short, engaging videos can give potential customers a visual and realistic preview of what to expect, helping them envision the experience.
User-Generated Content: When you have permission to share photos and videos from real travelers, you offer authentic and compelling testimonials that can often make more of an impact than any stock photos or overly-edited footage ever could.
Compelling Tour Descriptions
Your tour descriptions should be detailed, engaging, and informative. They should answer all potential questions a customer might have and give them a clear picture of what their travels would entail. This is a fantastic opportunity for tour operators to differentiate themselves, too.
Highlight Unique Selling Points: Emphasize what makes your tours unique or special compared to others, especially for popular destinations.
Helpful Itineraries: Provide an itinerary summary to give customers an appealing and descriptive impression of the tour. Hint, hint: If you’ve been wondering how AI can assist your travel business, creating tour descriptions is a great place to start.
Customer Reviews and Testimonials: Include reviews and testimonials to build trust and credibility. Find creative ways to incorporate them into your existing content or web pages for visitors to see.
Easy Booking Process
Better website experience = more tour sales. Don’t let your website get in the way of closing sales; simplify the booking process to reduce friction and increase conversions. As your main channel for sales, your website should make booking a breeze. You want the booking process to be fully integrated, as few clicks as possible, and ideally keep customers within your experience (that you worked so hard to create!)
Clear Call-to-Action (CTA): Use prominent and persuasive CTAs that guide visitors toward booking a tour. You want the “Book Now” button to be highly prominent and clickable on any page!
Multiple Payment Options: If possible, offer a variety of payment methods to accommodate different preferences. At the very least, make sure your existing payment options are clear to buyers.
Minimal Form Fields: Keep it short & sweet. Only ask for essential information to avoid overwhelming potential customers. You can always collect additional passenger details in the future to add to your customer relationship management (CRM) system.
SEO Optimization
If attracting new business is a goal, it’s important to take your website’s search results seriously. Optimize your website for search engines to increase visibility and attract more organic traffic. Small efforts can go a long way. We’ve got our own SEO best practices here, too.
Keyword Research: Use relevant keywords related to your tours, destinations, and travel experiences. There are many tools like Google and SEMRush out there to identify these.
Meta Tags and Descriptions: Write compelling meta titles and descriptions for each page to improve click-through rates. The goal is for search engines to be able to identify your pages when someone is searching for a particular topic.
Quality Content: Regularly update your blog with informative and engaging posts, case studies, guides, and testimonials related to travel and your tours. Content is a huge web traffic driver, so you want to position yourself as a leader in your industry.
Engaging Content Marketing
Think you don’t need to have a blog or resources? Think again! Use content marketing to build a connection with your audience and establish your brand as a top authority in the industry. With the importance of social media and travel influencers increasing, content is a main gateway to more trip sales.
Blog Posts: Write informative blog posts about travel tips, destination guides, and behind-the-scenes looks at your tours. This is a great descriptive way to give potential customers insight into what traveling with you would be like.
Email Newsletters: Keep your audience engaged with regular newsletters featuring special offers, new tours, and travel stories. These are easy to put together and can really pay off when it comes to keeping your business relevant and memorable.
Social Media: Promote your tours and share engaging content on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. Travel is one of the most exciting things to share, so take advantage and share your memories and adventures for others to see.
Customer Support
There’s no doubt that customer demand and expectations for travel are on the rise. Offer excellent customer support to assist potential customers during their decision-making process. It’s a surefire way to stand out from the competition and leave a lasting impression.
Live Chat: Implement a live chat feature to provide immediate assistance and answer questions in real-time. Not an option? Try a “Contact Us” form – just be sure to give prompt or automated responses.
FAQ Section: Include a comprehensive FAQ section to address common queries. This is an easy way to save time on simple answers and provide customers with the information they need to make a purchase decision.
Contact Information: Make it simple for customers to reach you by providing clear contact information. Include details like your email, social media links, or phone number.
Leverage Analytics
One of the best ways to keep your website healthy and ready for selling tours is to track analytics for any issues or trends. Analytics can give you reporting and insight into what pages are driving sales and what improvements you can make to boost trip offerings.
Track User Behavior: Use tools like Google Analytics to monitor how visitors interact with your site. You might be surprised at what gets the most attention!
A/B Testing: Conduct A/B tests on different elements of your site (like CTAs, landing pages, etc.) to determine what works best. Sometimes something as simple as a background color or the wording of a form can make a big difference.
Adjust Based on Data: Continuously refine your strategies based on the data collected to improve user experience and conversion rates. You want to have a clear understanding of your website’s status to avoid missing any business.
Implement the Right Tour Operator Software
One of the best things you can do to sell more tours through your website is to have integrated tour operator software that simplifies and automates your workflows. Having the right tour operator software is essential to reduce the need for disparate systems and streamline the booking and tour management process.
There are three main options for tour operator software to integrate with your site:
Have a “Book Now” button on your website link to a separate landing page, that would open in a separate browser tab.
Benefit: You don’t have to create a full itinerary landing page for every trip, often benefits those with many trips and those doing more FIT.
Have a “Book Now” button on your website open an embedded booking flow that is “powered by” an operations and booking platform.
Benefit: Have full control over your trip presentation, customers never leave your site, and you don’t have to worry about building a checkout flow with integrated payments and passenger information forms.
Embed a full itinerary landing page into your website that is created by an operations and booking platform.
Benefit: You don’t have to create a full itinerary landing page for every trip and you don’t have to make itinerary changes to multiple places.
Selling tours through your website requires a strategic approach that combines user-friendly design, compelling content, effective marketing tactics, and the right technology. By implementing these best practices, you can enhance your website’s performance, attract more visitors, and convert them into loyal customers. Remember, your website is often the first impression potential customers have of your business—make it count!
Looking for more than just a website update? Softrip helps tour operators with how to sell tours through their website and how to manage their entire business in one system. See how it works!
