6 proven steps to increase profits, without extra work or paid ads
Travel Business Owners, the idea is to work smarter, not harder.
Here is a simple strategy that you can implement in your Travel Business to sell more, on higher margins, without working extra or investing in publicity.
?? If you don't have enough time to read in details the entire article, skip until the end where you have a summarised version of the process??
1. Build authority
Every time a new prospect comes in contact with your business, it's your job to make them trust you. They need to be certain that you can handle their request or that your solution is the perfect fit to their problem.
One easy way to build authority and position yourself as the go-to solution is through reviews or testimonials.
After every trip or experience your client had with you, send them an email or a text and ask them to leave you a review.
Focus on gathering reviews on the channel that brings you most prospects.
Google Reviews, Facebook Reviews, Website Reviews, Video or Photos Testimonials that you can use to leverage your services.
Look at the picture bellow: do you think a new prospect will choose the first agency, with only 7 reviews or the 3rd one, with multiple reviews, but under 4 stars, or the middle one, with over 540 reviews, with almost 5 stars?
Make it easy for your clients leave a review. Send them links, pre-configured templates, instructions on how to leave the review etc.
And don't forget to incentivise your client. In return for a testimonial, give them a voucher with a 10% discount on the next service or a fixed amount for a specific deal (Example: $100 off on your trip to Bali).
2. Analyse data
Every business owner who leverages data and statistics takes better business decisions.
For example, knowing which destinations clients book more in summer helps you create packages based on their needs for the future year.
OR
Which extra services most clients need (insurance, car rental, visa) tell you how to upsell more.
Make sure you gather this information in your client database:
1. **Customer Demographics**: Data on customers' age, gender, location etc. help you understand your target audience and tailor marketing efforts accordingly.
2. **Booking Patterns**: When customers tend to book their trips (seasonal trends, lead times) helps you optimize pricing strategies, promotional campaigns, and resource allocation.
3. **Preferred Destinations**: The most popular destinations among customers guides you in designing new tour packages and promoting existing ones.
4. **Travel Preferences**: accommodation types, transportation choices, and activity preferences can help you in creating personalized travel experiences.
5. **Purchase History**: Keeping a record of customers' past bookings and interactions helps provide personalized recommendations and build long-term relationships.
6. **Communication Engagement**: Monitoring how customers engage with email newsletters, promotional messages, and other communications provides insights into their interests and responsiveness to marketing efforts.
7. **Customer Feedback and Reviews**: Storing and analyzing customer reviews and feedback helps identify areas for improvement and showcases the your commitment to quality service.
8. **Loyalty Program Participation**: Tracking customers' participation in loyalty programs and their engagement with loyalty rewards can indicate the success of retention strategies.
9. **Abandoned Bookings**: Analyzing instances where customers start but do not complete bookings can provide insights into potential barriers in the booking process.
10. **Referral Tracking**: Keeping track of customers who refer friends and family to you can help measure the effectiveness of word-of-mouth marketing and reward loyal customers.
3. Create 1-to-many services
Knowing where customers want to travel can help you in creating a service that fulfils many needs at once.
Travel agencies differentiate themselves by booking platform through customer support, care for details, personalized planning etc.
Often forgotten, one great service consists in GROUP TRAVEL or GROUP EXPERIENCES.
Travel businesses have access to negotiated rates on hotels, flight discounts, deals on insurance or transportation.
Analysing past customer data help businesses create outstanding travel packages or experiences that can be sold to many customers.
For example:
5 days retreat in Phuket, all inclusive and planned by the agency. A business can easily handle 50 past clients in such a retreat.
Here we come back to the principle:
a. Understanding what our clients need.
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b. Creating the package once.
c. Distributing and selling the service multiple times.
4. Promote new services
As a Travel business owner, you have already a customer database that you can reach out to and present your new services. Sometimes we are talking about 2.000 past clients or even up to 50.000 old customers.
How can you reach to all of them and still provide a personalised experience to the ones interested in your new service?
Let's say you've created a GROUP TRAVEL PACKAGE for 5 days in Alicante, Spain and you can accommodate 100 clients.
The easiest way to introduce your new package is through email or the communication method you've used in the past to reach out to your client (WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, Text etc).
You don't want to sell the package in the first email, you just want to raise their interest.
?? Schedule a launch event, a live or recorded webinar where you talk about the experience.
a. Start with who is the experience for (families, business owners, spiritual travellers, etc).
b. Describe in detail the experiences and the planning of the trip.
c. Mention the theme around the trip.
d. Create scarcity by mentioning the limited amount of travellers you can accommodate.
e. Make an irresistible offer (pre-booking for a small amount of the price, pay in instalments etc).
f. Make the payment easy (use pre-configured links on Stripe, PayPal etc).
This is a great method to create a service once and sell it multiple times.
5. Turn your customers into raving fans
Once a customer purchased a service for you, make it easy for them to share that on social media or with their friends and family.
Humans have the tendency to brag or show others what they do, especially on social media. Use this aspect to your own (and your client's advantage).
Create ready-to-use posts for your customers such as service description (what's included), photos, hashtags, experiences etc. Make your clients tag you on the stories they post or when they talk about their upcoming travel experience.
And the biggest motivator to turn clients into promoters is money.
6. Automate referral programs
Most of the travel business I've worked with kept track of the referrals on paper or manually on Excel lists.
This method could work if there's a new client coming from referral every day.
If we are talking about tens of new prospects or clients every week, this process can become inneficient and not being able to track the new referrals.
Use COOKIES for referral IDs that you can store in the payment link when a new client buys from you. Use the referral ID to track the sale to the person who recommended your service in the first place.
Then, you have the option to decide how to incentivise your promoter. Either through a fixed commission, a voucher, a discount on future travel.
SUMMARY of how to be in the 1%
BONUS: When a customer shares his upcoming experience on their social media, the newly generated prospects will come in contact with your business and check the reviews and testimonials from past clients. This will make them trust you even more.
Using automated webinars, you can present your services to the new prospects, without you having to explain them 1-to-1.
You have a system that works for you 24/7, with little input from you.
Go check our 30 ideas and strategies that you can implement in your travel business here.
Let me know what you think about the 6 steps to Bringing your Travel Business to the 1% in the comments section. Peace!