Tour Provider’s Cheat Sheet – Win Customers with Authentic Photos [Infographic]

Travelers’ authentic photos are the most efficient free promotion for tour providers. Millions of travelers go to top social platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, to find vacation inspiration and validation of their booking decisions. Even more of them are engaging with travel related posts – commenting, sharing, liking, disliking and so on. This is what every tour provider needs to know for using these trends to their best advantage.

Today, over 22,000 images is being uploaded per second on top social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, including many from travelers. Modern travel marketers recognize the immense power of traveler photos. They use them to power marketing efforts.

Traveler-generated Photos are the Best at Communicating to Prospective Customers

Here’s why:

1. Nothing depicts your tour brand name more authentically than your own guest photos. They claim your authority and set you apart from any other tour providers.
2. Other people photos inspire new bookings more than guest reviews do. They are your visual review.
3. Photos you generate from your guests help you understand their preferences. You will see what they notice and like best at your tours. This will help you shape your future offerings around their best experiences.
4. Travel companies that use their guests’ photos experience increase in bookings, ROI, fan engagement with social media. They are more in tune with their guests.
5. People interact 5 times more often with visual than they do with traditional text.
6. Content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images.
7. 92% of consumers around the world say they trust earned media, such as word of mouth and recommendations from friends and family, above all other forms of advertising.
8. 67% of travelers trust more the user content than the brand’s content.

The difference is in the authenticity that they seek. Brand’s visual content often sounds too “salesy”. Polished photos with perfect people, just enjoying your tours and their perfect holidays don’t seem real. Something always goes wrong on a journey. You spill coffee all over your shirt, it’s raining, your kids are nagging, somebody gets a huge mosquito bite or something else happens.

Attract New Customers to your Tours with Authentic Photos

Your guests expect you to show them something real and actual. Not a posed model and not an altered interpretation of reality. This often makes them feel cheated and not wanting to come back. Authentic photos showing real people with your real tour guides on your actual tour, that’s something they trust and relate to. Anything fake is not cool nor appealing.

So people want authentic experiences showing real guests at your tours. Otherwise, they might not trust what they see on your website. This pushes them to search up for original traveler reviews and photos on TripAdvisor and other travel sites.

Why else is that not good for a tour provider?

Your business suffers because of a booking delay you experience in such situations. It forces you to share your earnings with other travel sites.

Move that around.

You are good at capturing the features of your tours. Your guests are good at capturing the moments when interacting and having the best of their time! You cannot be everywhere at the same time.

With photos generated from your guests, you get a quick access to visual content. They upload photos to social networks every day. People interact with visual content 5 times more often than they do with traditional text. This strategy drives new bookings and sales for your website.

“I think that emotional content is an image’s most important element, regardless of the photographic technique. Much of the work I see these days lacks the emotional impact to draw a reaction from viewers, or remain in their hearts.”

Annie Leibovitz, 1949

Tour Provider’s Guide to Collecting their Guests’ Photos

We created a one-page infographic to help you learn how to collect and use your guests’ photos. These photos will drive new bookings to your website. You can download it for free:

Collect these authentic photos and worry no more whether your website is inspiring sales. You can be certain that it builds trust in your services and brand. And that it is seamlessly navigating the visitors to find and book your tours.

Until you collect your guests’ photos, it’s OK to use some stock photography. “Stock” is not a popular word, we know. But there are some excellent photographers, capturing real people, doing real things at authentic locations. It is OK to use authentic photos they are sharing. We wrote about this more and selected best in the breed free stock photo sites for tour operators. Coming soon!

Reach out to us if you’d appreciate some help! If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact us or share it right here.

Finally, if you liked this article, share the love with your colleagues!

ORIOLY
on February 3, 2017

by Lidija Šomodi