You noticed some new, not very satisfying booking numbers when it comes to your tours and activities. The decrease in the online booking. If you are not sure why your tour and activity business is losing customers, look into your marketing strategy and customer service.
Also, take a closer look at your website.
To help your tour and activity business grow, you have to be able to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. For example, when they’re in the mindset of booking an experience, you need to do whatever you can to attract and engage them, walk them through the booking process, and finally complete the sale.
I have listed 5 reasons why your tour and activity business is losing customers and how you can win them back!
Your website is the first impression you make on your potential customers. 40% of customers abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. If the website takes too long to load, you will lose a few of your potential customers right there. If they are patient enough and wait for the website to load, the second thing that will turn them away is – difficult navigation and unstructured information about your tours. They simply won’t understand clearly what you’re telling them!
Win them back with…
Act like you are a customer on your own website. Does it load fast enough? Is the Book now button visible? Are all the needed information about your tours and activities easily accessible? Is the information you’re trying to convey condensed and easily digestible?
Having a well designed and a user-friendly website has to be your first necessity. I am talking here about a responsive and professionally made website with calls to action in place that users can find and book your tours and activities in a few clicks.
Apart from that, visible customer reviews on your website and integrated social accounts (TripAdvisor, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest profiles) can tell more about your business and your customer’s satisfaction. These sort of things make your website visitors to book or not to book a tour with you!
Travelers visit your website to learn more about your tour and activity offer. Weak content and lack of information will cause losing customers. They want to know what to expect and determine whether the tour or activity is the right fit for them.
Win them back with…
Information like time, place and the price are important, but, above all, travelers want to read about the experience they get on your tours. Tour businesses with websites that tell a story can often engage travelers. Don’t hesitate, read the storytelling tips from our blog post.
These tips will help you get to know your audience and make them interested and feel connected to what you’re telling them. Posting authentic photos and videos from the tours and activities is a plus.
According to Online Review Survey Research 2016, 84% of people trust online reviews as much as they trust a personal recommendation. If you noticed negative reviews on your online profile pages like on Facebook, TripAdvisor and other, it is most likely that your tour and activity business is losing customers for that reason.
Win them back with…
The thing is – you can not expect all customers to be satisfied. You have to track online reviews and keep your brand values in place. Respond to a negative feedback quickly and offer up a solution to make up for it. Sometimes you can just apologize and then highlight what you do right!
But don’t let that stop you with trying to win this customer back. Really listen to what they have to say and do your best to sympathize. When other people see how you treat your customers, they are more likely to book your tours and activities.
If you embrace reviews – positive and negative – they can help you make your tour business even better. It will show you the things you need to work on. Over the time you will turn negative reviews into positive and stop losing customers.
Sure, you have a social media account or even two, but are you active? The travelers are online, searching through the Internet and social media platforms for new adventures.
When they stumble upon your Facebook page or Twitter profile, they want to see you are present and active. Means, no posts from the last year tours that you even don’t offer anymore. Your potential customers are checking out your Facebook page or Twitter profile to learn more about your business and determine whether they even want to book with you.
Win them back with…
Social media is all about raising awareness of your tours and activities. To engage with your potential customers you have to post frequently (once a day if possible). Post interesting and diverse content with compelling visuals (authentic photos from tours, videos, infographic, etc).
To save time and money you can use social media automation with an online tour booking system. You can schedule your social media posts for future publishing at a particular time in any day of the week.
Engage with your customers by posting traveler generated photos from your tours. Respond to all comments and messages in the inbox to show your customers that you care about their opinion.
Poor customer service, whether that’s in the form of a lack of follow up after a booking, or you failing to answer your customer’s emails or phone-calls, can turn people away. Remember, when there’s a lack of customer service, it’s usually caused by a lack of customer focus.
Win them back with…
Quality customer service is extremely important. It is one of the key aspects that will affect your sales.
Train your staff to deliver exceptional customer service —from the moment the customer contacts you by phone or talks to a staff member in person, to the point that they leave after a tour or activity.
As a tour and activity operator, you can go above and beyond the call of duty by making sure every customer phone call gets a response within 24 hours, over-delivering on experiences by offering complimentary gifts or freebies at the end of the tour, and following up with customers to find out what they liked or didn’t like about their experience.
Keep in mind – your customers are the reason you’re still in business, and your job is to serve your customers to the best of your ability.
Maybe now your tour and activity business is losing customers, but if you go step-by-step through this 5 reasons I am sure you can win them back.
Now, I would like to hear ideas from you about winning back customers?
Hope you are going find this blog post useful and feel free contact us or share it on a social media.
ORIOLY
on July 19, 2017
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