Navigating 2023’s busy season
Our team has been enjoying the energy and excitement in this final push before the official start of many of our customers’ busy season—beginning with the Easter Holiday weekend. This is also when many travellers start planning and booking their vacations for the summer months. Last month at Arival in Berlin, all indicators suggested steady growth and increased demand for our sector this year, with operators discussing demand being similar to or greater than 2019 numbers.
9 most common conversations with tour operators in easter
Here are the 9 most common conversations we are having with customers preparing for the seasonal launch. We invite you to use this as a final checklist as you head into the weekend.
- Has your new pricing strategy filtered out to all distribution channels, including extending your timetables and ensuring no expirations in mid-season? Do both your online and offline partnerships and sales channels have updated tour listings?
- Per new agreements, are there commission rates that need changing for 2023? Make sure you’ve updated commission rates for all partnerships in your Palisis backend system.
- Technology is what’s going to make the season run smoothly, are your devices updated and integrated with e-commerce solutions and APIs to distribution partners, along with being connected, and charged—ready to handle the increased volume of customers?
- Prepare your staff, making sure your team is well-trained on all products, customer service policies, and safety protocols. Review initiatives with past employees to make sure everyone is up to speed and ready for the increased customer demand this season. Do you have new employee or contractor details to enter into the system?
- Have you expressed gratitude to your team and communicated the details of your incentive programs? Are the programs motivational to the crew?
- Are your marketing efforts kicked off? Consider email campaigns, social media campaigns, Google search campaigns, and traditional marketing tactics such as features with your local visitor centres. Do you have a pulse on your competition?
- Have you put automation in place? Remove the manual processes and start using the Palisis email marketing feature. Operators are improving the customer experience with simple automated email reminders of the location and tour start time or requesting an online review after their experience.
- How are you monitoring customer feedback this season? Staying on top of customer reviews, use of your branded hashtags, and social media tagging—are all ways to understand customer sentiment. Responding to customer inquiries or concerns on social media is a key part of customer service and will help build trust and loyalty.
- Have you made last-minute tweaks to your tour packages assessing which are in the highest demand with your target market? Thinking about your ideal customer/ traveller, revisit, update or modify the packages, ensuring they appeal to the right audience.
Our team of Customer Success Managers are here to step you through the final preparations and avoid any glitches in what is poised to be an impressive and successful season ahead. Additionally, our team of experts are here to offer data analysis, troubleshooting, or share best practices based on experience working in the tour and activities sector for years.
Lastly, have you read our 3-part series on Dynamic Pricing? This will help you think through additional strategic options allowing a fluctuating price point that targets different purchasers at various times, with the same product optimising profits based on availability and demand.
- Dynamic pricing 101: What you need to know
- Dynamic pricing and customer satisfaction: How to strike a balance
- Dynamic pricing for tours & activities: The path forward