Tourism Content Writing: Promoting a Tourism Business Through Blogging

If you’re a travel professional and you own a travel business, investing in tourism content writing is an idea worth considering. For that purpose, you will need a blog on your website.

So how do you create a successful blog to attract more visitors to your destination?

I’m going to try my best to keep it short to give you a few tips and tricks when it comes to starting a travel blog to promote your tourism business.

The first step is to create your website if you haven’t got one already. You can use WordPress or Wix, for instance.

Steps for an effective tourism content writing strategy

When you have a registered domain, you can promote your tour offers and services online, accept online bookings and so on and so forth. But to make all those efforts efficient, you definitely need a tourism content writing strategy and a blog.

Setting up a blog

There are a two ways you can do this:

Creating your own blog inside your website or
Using blogging platforms

The first option is to create a blog that’s integrated into your website, you can do that in a subfolder, for example “www.mytourbusiness.com/blog”. The second is using platforms such as Medium, in that case all you need is to create an account and start publishing.

Though, I recommend you go with the first option. Why? Because your goal is to promote your tourism business website in order to attract visitors and potential clients.

Decide on the topics

Before you rush into tourism content writing, consider what would you write about.

Have in mind the target audience for your travel blog.

What would they like to read about?

Is your destination best visited at a certain time of the year or do you offer different activities all year round?

Here’s a title for you: Best Time To Visit ________. You can write a lengthy blog post just about that for starters.

Additionally, you can use your blog to showcase your company, services, as well as show off your experience in the field.

Take into consideration what kind of services and tours you’re offering. Check out what your competition is doing.

Take this as a travel content writing example, if you’re offering boat excursions on the Adriatic coast, make sure you offer quality content that relates to what your business does. Use the blog post to inform travelers about the Adriatic coast, tell them what’s so interesting about visiting the Dalmatia and its many islands. Talk about what they can experience and see if they decide to take your tours.

Create an editorial calendar

Step up your game. Write down all the topics you think of and create an editorial calendar.

You can use Google Sheets or another app to keep track of your blog posts and topics, I use Notion for example. Devise a plan and stick to it.

As you go and keep a track record, you can tweak a few things along the way—for instance, how often are you going to blog. You might start with once a week and see how it goes. It really depends on the type of travel business you run.

Tourism content writing is all about storytelling

I’m pretty sure you already know this by now, but it’s doesn’t hurt to go over it again.

Every destination has its own unique story. Even your tour business has a story which you can use to establish your brand.

The thing with stories is that they get tourists interested and curious to find out more about a place they’re going to be visiting. It sheds new light on a destination.

Storytelling is an old yet powerful tool to promote your tourism business, so better you learn how to tell a good story.

Before you start with tourism content writing, you need to recognize who you’re writing for and what is the story you want tourists to hear about. This means you need to do your research. Get to know the history behind your destination and places of interest. Take notes on every single detail you can get your hands on.

What is it that brings people to a specific destination? Use that to your advantage.

Let’s take the island of Hvar in Croatia as an example. It’s known for its extraordinary beauty, history, lavender fields, olive oil, the oldest theater in Europe, etc. There are also a lot of legends and tales about Hvar, such as the origin of the Tudor family in Milna on Hvar. Or take the island of Brač with its mystical tales about how dragons ruled the island.

Typewriter representing tourism content writing

Write about hidden gems, coves, architecture, historical events, local cuisine, etc. Tell tourists how exciting this particular place or activity could be.

Name all the reasons why they should come and visit.

You can always use the historical data and folk tales to make your destination or tours more tempting. However, don’t get carried away and start making things up.

If you’re a tour guide then you might even know all those stories by heart, you just need to put it in writing.

If you don’t want to reveal the whole story right away, save the best parts for the tour and give people only a sneak peek.

By telling a story, you’re basically presenting your storytelling talent and the power to grab people’s attention with interesting topics. Also, travelers get to meet you and your brand by following your blog. They get to virtually meet you and how you do your business before they actually book anything.

Time to blog

1, 2, 3, GO!

Sounds simple enough, right?

You may think that tourism content writing is easy and that you can carelessly open up a Word document and start typing.

That’s not always the case. Sometimes it’s best to check out a few best practices before you get started.

Decide on the language you’re going to use. Or you going to write in your mother tongue or in English? It all really depends on your travel blog target audience.
Have a proofreading tool, such as Grammarly. You don’t want any typos to sneak up on you, now do you?
Be sure how to model you post. Tourists want information that’s easily digestible, credible, and timely.
Use plenty of headings and keep your paragraphs short and interesting. The goal is to spark people’s curiosity.
Have in mind that longer content ranks better as long as it’s relevant and useful to your audience. Spend as much time promoting your content as you do creating it.
Always include a call to action and make them perfectly clear. For example, tell people to subscribe to your weekly newsletter, book a tour, read related articles, etc. It doesn’t really matter, just decide on one CTA and don’t make people think what they’re supposed to do after they read your blog.
Don’t overwhelm potential clients with information. Prioritize your content. It might be a better idea to blog periodically but offer quality content than blog randomly about every little thing that pops into your head and has no actual meaning to your target audience.
Write persuasively. After all, the main purpose of maintaining a blog is to promote your tourism business, which means selling (tours, excursions, accommodation, tickets, and others). You’re selling an experience.
If writing is just not your cup of tea, you can hire a freelance blogger or a freelance content writer to be in charge of your tourism blog. Or… you can make an arrangement with a travel blogger to come up with a guest post from time to time. (further reading: How to Make sure Travel Bloggers are Right for your Tour Business?)
When running out of ideas, don’t panic—you can always turn to customer reviews and build an interesting post, especially if they’ve attached quality photographs when taking your tour.

Don’t forget that it’s OK to be honest and don’t be afraid to show your vulnerability. Your clients will appreciate the honesty. That’s pure travel content writing.

Does SEO apply to your tourism content writing?

The answer to this question is yes.

If you’re using WordPress, you could try a plugin called Yoast which takes care of everything you need at the beginning. However, it doesn’t hurt to know at least a thing or two about SEO for tour operators.

First things first, a single blog post isn’t enough to rank for a certain competitive keyword. I’ll be upfront with you guys, matching the exact phrase is becoming irrelevant.

And no, I’m not saying you should ditch SEO altogether. Focus on user intent rather than wasting your time with stuffing your blog posts with keywords. Keyword stuffing is dead. I repeat, keyword stuffing is dead.

Nowadays, you must focus on building multiple keywords into one blog post if you want to see any real results. This is called keyword clustering and you might want to read up on that after finishing this article.

There are plenty of tools you can use to measure and optimize your blog’s performance. Here are some powerful tools to help you with SEO:

Share your blog posts on social media

Ok, so your tourism content writing strategy is finally taking off, now what?

You share it on your social media accounts! Honestly, I can’t stress enough just how important it is to have an online media presence and share your content on the Internet with your travel blog audience.

Sharing tourism content writing social media

For a detailed guide on this matter, check out this blog post:

How To Use Social Media To Promote Tours

Enrich your blog with prominent visuals

Make sure you use quality photographs, preferably your original ones and not stock photography. By adding amazing photos and videos (why not) you can strengthen the effect of your blog.

Tour operator taking pictures for tourism content writing

Photographs help you tell your story. How else are you going to promote your tour business if not with the help of great content AND gorgeous photos?

Implement an online booking button

Blog posts offer a great opportunity for you to add a “Book Now” button so your customers can book your tour, activity or service directly from your website while they’re reading your blog post.

Use Orioly to add a customizable BOOK NOW button to your website and get bookings 24/7. The advantage of this is that your customers can then book directly on your website at lower rates.