It’s Back to School Time and for many tourist service providers the summer peak has passed and revenues have started to decline. But wait there are steps you can take to delay this decline. Read on!
Are in the business of providing services to tourists? Perhaps you are a tour guide, an activity provider, or operate a tourist attraction? If so, you will be aware of the cyclic rise and fall in visitor numbers or bookings at various times of the year. The tourist industry has its high season and its low season, however, it would be a mistake to simply throw your hands in the air and say that there is nothing that can be done about it. There are some things that, as a business owner, you can do to delay the decline in your revenue, and to influence how low it falls.
While overall tourist numbers may be starting to decline, there are still plenty of tourists around – they just don’t know about your business. The questions to ask are therefore:
- How can I make the falling but still significant number of tourists in the country aware of my services?
- Even during the low season, there are still a lot of tourists in the country, just not as many as in high season. What can I do to get more of their business?
- At the start of the next high in the tourist season, how can I get my bookings to rise earlier?
Successfully answering the above questions, and implementing an action plan based on the answers could significantly increase your annual revenues. The range of possible answers will depend on many factors specific to your business type and location, however I hope you find the following suggestions useful:
- Have a brainstorming session with your staff to identify possible answers. Don’t judge them while eliciting the suggestions, just list them. Once you have listed all ideas, group them, discuss them and rank them. Decide which ones you want to implement.
- Ask your customers. They see things from a different perspect to you and your staff. Ask them while you have them face-to-face or via e-mail.
- Can you make your service even more appealing to your visitors at these off-peak times? Can you add extra value? If you change your standard service offering in favour of the visitor, you should try and raise some publicity about that in the media so that potential visitors get to hear about it. Changes could include a price reduction incentive or including some little extra (e.g. tea or coffee, an extra tour stop, giving participants a souvenir etc.)
- If the general climate rules out your activity or service for several months each year, can you substitute some other activity instead of shutting down completely? For example, substitute a land-based activity for a water-based one during the winter months. Maybe a change of location would suffice – for example use of a lake instead of the sea for kayaking.
- As for high season, ensure that visitors to your website can book and pay online 24×7. In this age of the Internet, people expect to be able to make their bookings when it suits them. They could be researching ideas online in the evening, outside office hours or over a weekend, and want to wrap up the whole booking process there and then. We recommend the Booking Craft event booking and ticketing system which enables you to place a booking form on your web pages with a simple copy and paste.
- Incentivise website owners, travel writers, bloggers and complementary service providers to list, mention or promote your service offering on their web sites and to their customers. Your potential customers are visiting their websites, reading their content, engaging when them on social media. Wouldn’t you like some of them to be referred to you? Consider joining an affiliate/referral network which is free to join and where content publishers can sign up to your referral program get rewarded for sending you web visitors when they a booking.
I hope you found the above suggestions useful. If so, please use the social media links below to share this article on your social media channels. Do also get in touch with your success stories.
Thank you for reading and sharing.