Your website is usually the first impression of your business for a tourist. You need to get the basics for conversion right.
Why does conversion matter? You're probably spending marketing money getting visitors to your site so want to ensure they don't bounce or leave without booking. If people are not engaged, excited and supported on your website then why should they trust you with their holidaying experience. Getting the basics right will improve your booking conversion rates and show them that you put their safety and experience first.
Our tips for the basics to improve engagement on websites for tourism businesses:
Make sure that your website has a modern look to it and great images. This influence impressions, and first impressions matter.
The following business experienced more than double the bookings after a website upgrade, using exactly the same text content on the original site but with some professional images.
Out of all the activity providers that we are working with on average over 60% of their internet traffic is via mobile devices. This statistic is only expected to increase! It’s not just enough to make it mobile friendly, your booking functions also have to be mobile friendly, check these with users. To make it mobile friendly talk with your website developer, check with your users how they found the experience.
If possible make your products able to be booked online. There are some great booking management systems out there ( Rezdy, RTBS, Respax). Free Independent travellers tend to book their activities once they are in the country and often only a few days out. Booking systems with live availability allow travellers to book 24/7 and immediately, don’t be the one they can’t book with!
If your product is not suitable to be booked instantly online then find a way to communicate with your customers quickly eg. Install a website chat tool which allows hand off to your customers preferred messenger apps to keep lines of communication open, Yonder is the only tool in the industry which does this.
Make your website content great! Focus on the most important information your customers need to know in order for them to choose you! Be careful not to put so much on your website that they become overwhelmed and it becomes a barrier to booking! Keep content simple, inspiring and helpful. Yonder allows you to push status messages to inform website visitors about what's on that week, weather and other frequently changing content. You can also easily add videos, reviews and messages to be seen at certain places throughout your website and targeted to different types of website visitors so it's as relevant as possible.
Give your visitors a reason why they should book directly with you!! This might be a deal you offer, your getting booked out for the summer, the weather is looking good for the next week etc… Using tools like Yonder's targeted messages that are linked to your booking system does this effortlessly.
In this day and age people expect responses immediately. Adopt a live chat or chatbot depending on your budget (Read here an article about the differences between Live Chat and Chat Bots). These tools are the future of communicating with your customers. Live chat tools include Livechat, Yonder also does both live chat and chatbots specifically for the tourism industry.
