By now, you’ve probably been told that you need to personalise your customer experiences to increase bookings. But one thing that’s often left out of the personalisation conversation is that the tour sector has its own rules.
For one, customers don’t tend to buy tours in the same way as they buy food, clothes, or other everyday items. This means there’s significantly less data to work with and personalisation needs to take a different form.
Travellers can also look for quite different tour products every time they shop. Maybe they’re ticking off bucket list items one year, and the next they’re travelling with their kids.
Based on this, here are five ways to personalise your travellers’ experiences effectively, so that you can increase your bookings (and ultimately your profit).
How to personalise the tour booking experience:
It sounds simple, but setting up your website to provide the easiest tour booking experience is step one. When travellers come to your site, they should be able to explore the tours on offer without hassle.
Bear in mind that helping travellers in the research stage of their journey is just as important as providing a simple booking process. With travellers spending more than five hours looking at travel content in the 45 days before they book a trip, there’s a chance that people will explore your site, compare options elsewhere, and then come back again. When they return, a tailored section – one that allows them to resume their search, for instance – could help to make that final conversion.
This website set-up can be challenging, which is why many businesses decide to partner with on-site personalisation experts like Mr Zen and Wild Dog Design.
Personalisation can help you deliver a better traveller experience, while also helping you to maximise profit. By analysing travellers’ research and booking data, you can learn more about them to make more profitable decisions.
One way of doing this is to analyse your on-site search data. With the right search tooling on your website, you can map out the most and least popular booking dates, which allows you to make informed decisions around them. Another way is to track changes in booking behaviours. An example of this, as we discuss here, is how many families have lost interest in traditional peak periods. In response, some tour operators are promoting their shoulder season availability more heavily, specifically to travellers with the freedom to book outside of school holidays.
Don’t forget you also may be able to feed this on-site search data into your reservation platform, so that you can track whether your strategies are converting more people.
Another personalisation tip is to create a customer portal, allowing travellers to log into your site to manage their bookings, update their details, and make payments. The more you encourage them to log in, the more data you collect, and the better visibility you’ll have over their overall customer journey. You might do this by holding all tour-related communications in this hub, so that travellers need to log in for updates.
That said, try not to force customers to log in if they don’t need to – such as during the research stage. It may have been a few years since they last accessed their account, so they may not remember their details. Provide subtle prompts, but don’t go overboard. Modern login methods (like allowing customers to log in via their social media accounts) or simple one-time passwords can really help customers when they rarely log in to a system.
Upselling is a great way to increase your profit, but it can improve the booking experience for travellers too.
Imagine that a traveller has just booked a ski trip for themselves and their family. Using what you know about them, you could send a personalised email with suitable car hire options, insurance packages, and ski clothing for their children’s age group.
This could increase their spend with your partners, and therefore your commission and profit.
Once a traveller has booked a tour, you still have opportunities to personalise their booking experience. Upselling is one example, but another is to tailor your communications.
For your finance teams, this might be by sending timely reminders to the customers who have opted to pay in instalments (and reducing the risk of late or missed payments).
For your marketing teams, this may be by sending personalised packing tips and weather updates in the lead up to the tour, keeping travellers engaged and hopefully increasing the chances of them booking with you again.
Personalising the tour booking experience doesn’t have to be complicated with the right tools. A booking platform that can integrate with third-party apps through Zapier, n8n, Activepieces and other workflow apps will give you the data and infrastructure needed to improve the entire booking journey.
For more on how to increase your tour bookings, download our free whitepaper, Travel in 2024: Trends and tips for sustainable success. In it, you’ll read our insights on where to direct your attention financially, how to build a business safety net, and why it's time to invest in travel tech.
