29/11/2011
Summer is officially here and for all of us in the tourism industry it means the start of the busy season. Being such a seasonal business, this is the time we all need to maximize earnings. Make every sale you can make, up sell when you can, give your guests the experience of their life so they tell lots of people about what a great job you are doing.
For us here and many of you as well, January is always our busiest month for bookings so now is the time to make sure you are ready for the peak booking season. With that in mind, we are signing up new businesses all the time to TXNZ but we had a great working example of the power of online bookings recently with one of our new partner businesses:
New TXNZ connected business: Tongariro Expeditions
Jared & Mandy run transport to the Tongariro Crossing and in summer get very busy. Previously they were running a manual system, taking bookings by email, writing them in a diary and having to process payments manually. All this for every booking.
Now live with TXNZ, customers search for departure dates & times then book and pay online with instant confirmation. Mandy receives the confirmation email and the booking automatically appears in frontdesk and best of all, money goes straight to the bank without any manual handling.
Since signing up just last month they have seen a steady flow of bookings and significant time savings, just what busy tourism business owners want.
"Getting our online bookings up and running with the Tourism Exchange has been a great move for us. Since going live 2 weeks ago we have seen a steady stream of bookings through our website, once I see the email I know it is confirmed and money is in the bank. The team at TXNZ have been great and supported us all the way." Mandy
TXNZ Online Marketing Tips:
Next in our series of Online Marketing Tips is how to make the most of your TripAdvisor listing. These tips apply to other review sites, but in our experience TripAdvisor is the undisputed #1 when it comes to travel review sites. We may not agree with everything about TripAdvisor but we cannot dispute their traffic volume and position in the market.
TXNZ Online Sales Tip #2: Five simple tips to "own" your TripAdvisor listing
• Make sure ALL your customers receive an email with a polite request to write a review, with the link to your listing embedded in the email text. If you are doing a great job people will be happy to help you by writing a review. If they don't want to or are too busy they won't but you will find more reviews appear on your listing if you do this.
• Assign this task to a staff member or assign time to do it yourself. Make it a regular part of your work week and keep at it. Remember, the more reviews the better and new reviews coming up all the time will increase your ranking and make your business look "active" to potential customers.
• Use great comments on your own site and have a visible link to your TripAdvisor listing. You can download the links from TripAdvisor so use one of their widgets to make it look professional.
• Make sure you or a staff member regularly reads reviews and responds where appropriate. ALWAYS respond to a negative review with a polite, empathetic reply.
TripAdvisor can be such an important part of your online business, travellers the world over use and trust the reviews. Keep the reviews coming regularly and watch yourself rise in the ranking, more traffic to your site from TripAdvisor and those online bookings coming in!
