I once had an entire month of vacation time to take. A glorious but uncommon luxury for me, so I wasted a whole lot of that time planning a complex trip. I could afford to have a travel professional take that work out of my hands, but no… I was Ms Independent Traveller! I had more money than time and good sense. I knew exactly what I wanted, just not how to get it.
In my defense, I was living in a foreign country and wasn’t sure whom to approach to help make logistical sense of my confusion of travel plans: from experiencing Poland in springtime to visiting friends in England, collecting stuff in storage in Dublin and visiting the geese in Galway, and I was dying to visit the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. I also needed visas. I was an idiot. But a passionate one.
It used to be that people were ticking things off their travel list… Now people want to do it…because they have a personal passion.
Scott Wiseman
And like Ms Independent Traveller, most modern travellers demand to be treated like individuals. That human touch goes beyond the simple reassurance of a face to talk to or a voice on the phone. (If anything happens to me, who’ll take care of me??) Travellers want to know whom they’re dealing with, what values that travel company represents and what qualifies them to provide memorable experiences. They’re after transparency and customer service on steroids.
Industry trends point to steady growth in global tourism over the last 5 years with particular interest in the emerging economies in Asia and South America. According to IBISWorld this growth is expected to continue as the global economy continues to strengthen. Plenty of business to go around then!
Are your business objectives aligned with traveller demands?
Let’s consider how you can:
build client loyalty for repeat business
develop strong brand identity
expand market share
keep pace with competition
develop tourism
be profitable!
Building loyalty. To earn repeat business, you need loyal clients. Loyal clients are happy clients, whose ’emotional’ requirements and demands have been met. They want that tender loving care (TLC): more of your time and personal attention; better access to you; sincere, open communication; ability to relate to your company. The answer lies in the relationship you cultivate with your clients.
Aligning this objective with what travellers demand means, for one thing, circulating client information efficiently throughout your company, so that clients don’t suffer the indignity of repeating themselves if they happen to speak to different employees. Travellers aren’t robots and they don’t want robotic, scripted responses when dealing with your company.
Treat them with humanity, recognise their unique interests and communicate this to them throughout with personable interaction and messaging.
Engage them with personalised e-mails, regular but non-invasive newsletters with relevant updates, and social media (SM) attention.
…personal interactions have always been a hallmark of great service, consumers now see these interactions as a critical cornerstone of memorable brands.
SKIFT
Cultivate loyalty by creating a community for travellers, where their input is valued, where they get reassurances from other travellers that they’ve thrown in their lot with a trustworthy brand. Present your staff to the world on your website and in SM: produce a company video or get your staff to take turns posting blog entries. Make that emotional connection between brand and traveller by putting faces/voices to the names. Show who does what at your company, offer backstories; and so humanise the purchasing experience for the client from start to finish.
Keep those happy clients coming back for more.
…knowing the individuals behind a travel brand is a far more powerful way to build an authentic relationship with customers…
SKIFT
Developing your brand. Image is everything – perception and communication of your brand impact directly upon your business. Your products reflect your brand; so the way you promote them both should be visually appealing. Travellers want to identify with the style and design of your brand; so these need to be consistent across the presentation of your offerings and your marketing platforms. Don’t lose your client’s trust with bland, dull imagery and conflicting design styles as if you don’t really care how you’re perceived. Choose a flavour and stick to it.
An honest brand exposes itself (almost to scrutiny) because it’s fearless and proud of what it represents. The same applies to partnerships – do your partners share your values? Any specials and value-adds incorporated into your offerings should stick to the script: if luxury is your core offering, don’t confuse clients by hooking up with an activity company that transfers them from their 5 star lodge in a shared minivan when they’re expecting private chauffeur-driven luxury transfers. (Devil’s in the details!) And for goodness’ sake, don’t try to fake it.. Portraying a brand as something different from what’s actually on offer simply attracts the ‘wrong’ kind of client.
Compatibility is integral to any relationship-based business such as yours.
If your brand’s to be trusted, hustle to get those favourable reviews written about your company, products and customer service. Remember, you’re selling a traveller’s experience of your brand. Today’s YouTube generation googles how to do just about everything – tempt them with a snackable video testimonial or get some choice UGC to evangelise your brand. It’s the best way to answer the demand for a brand travellers can respect and trust to represent their interests.
You’ve heard of Content Marketing by now: that powerful, non-selling strategic use of content purely designed to benefit, inform and entertain travellers.
The modern traveller tends to be better informed and educated, more sophisticated and conscientised than tourists of old.
As with your SM presence, the content you use needs to convey your brand, messaging, company personality, associations with causes or charities.
If you can convince, reassure and to an extent seduce travellers with what you promote, if you’re seen as reliable and consistently altruistic, that’ll score you major brand brownie points.
Market share. For a bigger slice of the pie, compete for business in other geographies or develop products in other experiences; get your expertise up to a competitive level. Research which areas travellers suffer a shortfall. One area might be the availability of content and/or services in different languages. This could be a good time to invest in a French-speaking consultant if you’re hoping to target the francophone market. And have your content translated too. Outsource what you can’t do yourself. Join industry-specific communities on SM and gain valuable knowledge about destinations you haven’t yet visited.
Facebook, LinkedIn & Google+ groups can be a great venue to ask burning real-time questions & research destinations, vacation packages, best practices, events & agent resources.
Host Agency Reviews
To gain a bigger market share you’ll require more time at your disposal. When you work smarter and faster, you can sell more in less time, and spend more time with more clients. Technology will earn you that time. But to really hit your mark with modern travellers, gift them the freedom to customise. The demand for a more personalised travel experience originates from travellers having complex or unusual requirements that don’t match up with anything existing in the market. Fill that void with your expertise and time-saving tech.
Successful travel professionals will be masters at crafting personalized travel experiences.
Amadeus
Competition. Keep tabs on your competitors. Find out what they’re doing, learn from them, then do it better. Make your operations more efficient with the intelligent use of data analytics (to make your products more relevant and attractive to travellers), collaborate better with your suppliers, and share expertise within your company. Why should travellers buy from you and not your competition? Because you use smart technology to gain insight into what consumers are looking at, so you can anticipate their interests. Because your suppliers provide their best content and specials, which you incorporate into more impressive presentations. Because you share knowledge acquired during trade shows, educationals among your entire staff. Because you pioneer technical innovations like mobile payment options that make buying travel easier.
Then there’s working with the frenemy. Collaborate with suppliers of accommodation, activities, day tours, restaurants, etc. that operate in the same areas and cater to the same clientele you do, in order to differentiate. Attend trade shows to meet potential partners as well as clients, and share ideas. Coming soon is the World Travel Market in London – check out those stats. How better to keep an eye on your competition!
Finally, your competitors are all over SM – why not you? It’s an investment: zero presence means zero engagement with potential clients. You risk being left behind if you fear technology or doing things differently, if you’re not bothered to find out how Instagram and Pinterest are relevant to travel. SM requires analysis and with detailed planning, can pay off handsomely for you.
A poorly managed social media strategy can hurt your brand. Reporting facilities…will allow you to track, manage or alter your strategy in line with your goals.
OnQ
Developing tourism. Travellers want the epic experiences they dream of, not forgettable, mediocre ones. They want sound infrastructure and seamless logistics. They want convenient access to accurate destination, activity and accommodation information. And the modern traveller demands new kinds of tourism (eco-tourism, sustainable tourism, responsible tourism, spiritual, volunteer, educational, well-being, and more). To seal the deal, they demand an empowering purchasing experience.
So listening to your travellers is vital, using their feedback to improve upon products and services makes business sense, providing the freshest, most relevant travel content is logical, and learning from peers all aid our evolution as tourism professionals. Reinvesting in the talent pool entails hiring young tech-savvy graduates as they tend to adopt and adapt to new technologies quickly. Combine their technical proficiency and affinity with the millennial crowd, with your mentoring to lay some good building blocks for the future of tourism. Travel professionals who see the big picture, understand that developing a healthy trade serves everyone. How well we integrate new ways of doing things now and respond to the demands of the travel consumer will ensure that they’ll always want to travel, because we’ve given them what they want.
Profit. The business bottom line: do more in less time with the resources you have. Start by identifying the technology that will empower you to be more efficient in your business practices, then upskill your staff accordingly. Give your staff opportunities to learn and grow, and possibly profit share; so they have a personal stake in the company’s success. Happier staff takes better care of clients – that’s precisely what makes a happy traveller.
Is your website hitting the mark? Ensure it is responsive and relevant, and that all your communications drive traffic towards it. It can be hard to be objective about your website, so get an outsider to assess it.
User experience should be standard consideration – making the buying experience easier means thinking like a traveller, not like a travel professional. And beware of catering exclusively to your traditionally tech intolerant traveller.
Some argue that they…have little to no use for a website. This attitude is a little short sighted – how will you attract new customers and service tech savvy travellers down the track?
OnQ
Fortunately, most of these better business practices have crossover benefits for different traveller demands. For you it means making a few strategic changes for multiple benefits. According to Tnooz, the tools have changed but not the business objectives. For most of us, the raison d’etre is a true love for travel and the value it adds to life. But we’ve got budgets, staff and profit to consider. We want to grow. We want to stand for something because what we create and send out into the world becomes our legacy. Sound lofty and sentimental to you? Guess what: your travel audience has never been more emotionally-driven.. From where I’m writing, it seems like a match made in heaven, for travel.