12 Tips for Tour Companies Going into 2021

According to the World Health Organization, global travel restrictions are currently forecasted to be lifted around April 2021. Tour operators need to be ready to go to provide meaningful experiences for travelers and attract new visitors. Here are ten tips for tour companies going into the new year:

1.       Assess and re-vamp your programming. 2020 has provided tour companies – whether inbound, outbound, domestic, international, receptive, or ground tour operators – the opportunity to assess current programming. What tours work better than others? What attractions make the most sense to visit, when? What packages attract the most visitors? What timing works and in what seasons? These are all critical questions, but even more important is actually spending the time to re-vamp the programming.

2.       Re-segment your audience to make sure come opening you will target the right people. Is your target audience domestic or international visitors? Where will they be coming from? Are you looking for a specific age range or type of visitor? Given many of the changes we have seen due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to align on any changes to your traditional target market.

3.       Refine the brand identity: Now that you have aligned on your visitors going into the re-opening, it is important to align on a brand. What is your new mission, vision, and branding (types of content you will produce, visuals, etc)? How does that connect back to your visitors?

4.       Build marketing collateral, now. Marketing collateral from 2019 and 2020 has likely gone stale. It is critical for tour companies to keep brochures, websites, pamphlets, and marketing material refreshed and tuned to 2021 challenges, like hygiene, sanitation, travel planning and risk.

5.       Get a newsletter going if you don’t have one already. Newsletters are quick to stand up, easy to design, and important to obtaining meaningful analytics on your visitors. Tour companies can obtain insights on past tour participants, tour regulars, and other stakeholders (partners, funders, etc). The best newsletter services for small business are MailChimp and SendInBlue.

6.       Pick your most effective social media platforms to keep active. Prior to your destination re-opening and to your tour company beginning to organize tours again, you need to drive up attention. Invest in platforms that allow for more visitor engagement - like Instagram - and get into a 2X daily rhythm of posting with effective hashtags, captions, images, and tags. Posts on other platforms like Facebook and Twitter daily. Use applications like HootSuite or Loomly, which have free or inexpensive plans, to schedule and plan posts in advance.

7.       Get your review sites up to date by reaching out to past customers. Send one consolidated email (or Facebook or Whatsapp message - whatever your preferred method of communication is) to your past customers to let them know that you are slowly re-opening post-pandemic and that you would love their help in giving you a review on your Google Business, TripAdvisor or other webpages.

8. Get Referrals from Past Customers In addition to requesting reviews from past customers, create a quick survey for them to fill out to refer friends of theirs that may have travel on their mind for 2021. Use your re-opening as an opportunity to refresh contacts.

9.       Build an action plan and roadmap for your destination. This is important to do in two respects. The first is to get a sense of sequence of actions. You won’t necessarily know about timing to a tee because different locations will have different re-opening timeframes that depend on different things. However, you can get a sense of the important actions you can do now - like getting your website refreshed with new keywords, or re-evaluating your pricing - to get ready for re-opening. In addition, you can confirm the activities you must do once visitors begin to come back to your destination. Secondly, it will be important to nail down specifically what steps you will take to adapt your business to 2021 challenges including hygiene, sanitation, travel planning and risk. You must make those steps clear in your marketing but also actually do them.

10.       Ensure that you are in close connection with local authorities and governments to get latest up to date news on re-opening plans. Much of your roadmap will have to do with your destination’s re-opening timeline. Keep in contact with your contacts in government to understand what steps you need to take to prepare for re-opening and also what the general estimated timetable is for re-opening.

11.   Prepare staffing structure. Make sure you have enough staff to get up and running at at-least 50% your 2019 capacity for the estimated date of re-opening. You want to be prepared, but financially efficient.

12.   Build your marketing campaign. All of these aspects - from strategy to social media to branding to operations - will be critical to your marketing campaign. Develop a marketing campaign focused on 5 things - audience, key messages, mediums, impacts, and status - and keep that updated on a daily basis. For example, if you have to invest in creating a promotional video now for Instagram to be ready in 2 weeks, lay out all of the steps needed to make that successful for your intended audience.

To learn more about online marketing for tour companies, check out this site for more information on how to get started.

Feature written by Trove, tourism development and destination marketing agency.