Five easily actionable tips to improve conversion on tourism business websites

Converting lookers to bookers is an ongoing challenge for tourism businesses small and large. When you consider, on average, 98% of website visitors don’t convert on their first visit* (and 70% won’t return at all) that’s a lot of untapped opportunity. *Wordstream 2023

Of course, there’s a multitude of reasons why your web visitors don’t convert; you’re offering is too expensive, low intent on behalf of the web visitor (just looking), lack of crucial information on your site, lack of inspiration on your site, poor navigation pathways to book, too many pain points in the booking journey (like long forms) or simply a lack of trust to proceed with booking and payment.

This article is geared more towards SME tourism businesses with minimal resources and provides tips that will help convert your web visitors to bookers and, crucially, won’t require much if any investment.

1. Fast-loading site

Up to 70% of your visitors will be browsing on a mobile device, many using a network, so having a fast-loading site is critical in reducing abandonment by mobile sessions. Page load speed is also a key SEO criteria; Google heavily weights speed as a determinant of your page rank, i.e. how prominently your site will rank against relevant search terms. Consider the following actions to assess page load issues and speed up your site:

• First of all, establish how fast or slow your site loads using Google’s Lighthouse Speed test.?https://pagespeed.web.dev/. Look for the red flags and, if you use a web developer, discuss and address the issues arising (will usually be too many and too large media files or far too much code bloating pages)
• Install an image compression plug-in. If you publish a WordPress site, then Cloudflare or Smush are examples of such plug-ins (there are hundreds of such plug-ins; most have free plans and are easy to install). Then bulk-compress all images in your web media library (and run a before and after speed test to assess impact).

Google ‘Lighthouse’ Speed Test

2. Trustworthiness

Your site should be littered with trust signals that reassure visitors of the quality of your offering. The world’s leading review platform, Trustpilot, estimates that sites ensuring customer reviews remain visible throughout the buying journey, i.e. from product page to cart to check-out, can see a +24% increase in conversion. To consider:

• Leverage existing (and positive) reviews added by customers to your Google Business Profile and/or Facebook. Some plug-ins will gather your Google or Facebook or TripAdvisor reviews and surface them on your website via a widget. Good examples are Revu, ElfSight, Taggbox and TrustMary; the latter has a free starter plan. Sidenote: some review widgets provide Google with the correct data (schema) that associates your page with the 5-star rated reviews, which in turn supercharges your SEO and site visibility

Review ‘togethering’ widget (Taggbox)

• You can also install a review widget on your site that directly gathers rated reviews, i.e. customers add their review onto your site rather than via a 3rd party platform like Google Business Profile or Facebook. You can do much more with reviews published directly on your site. A good example of a plug-in for this feature is judge.me, which is compatible with Shopify.
• Audit all accreditations and awards your business has achieved. Think creatively. Gather the award or accreditation symbols (logos) and create a credibility panel to embed on your site. It could live in page footers and where it shows on your About page, link off to the awarding body’s website. Web visitors will see this as a further example of your trustworthiness and Google will value these ‘citations’ and enhance your site rank

Note TripAdvisor accolades on Pybus Point Lodge site (a global 2022 Webby award winner)

3. Keep In Touch Prompts

Make it easy for your web visitors to leave their email address to be kept informed of news and offers. You might publish a monthly e-newsletter and send it to previous customers and new prospects; so sign-ups on your site get added to the audience list receiving your e-news. Let’s expand on this:

• Be sure you have a ‘keep in touch’ option on your contact form; a radio button (checkbox) with a consent statement
• You can ALSO add ‘Keep In Touch – Get our E-news’ simple form to your website footer
• Consider adding an exit-intent pop-up on your site (example below), you’ll have seen this before on e-commerce sites. You go to mouse-off the site and click to close the browser and the pop-up entices you with an offer and an easy route to leave your email address (example below). Not difficult to install on a site. An example of a WordPress plug-in for exit intent is?Popup Plugin for WP?

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Exit intent pop-up on Roger Federer’s sportswear site

4. Book Now

This is very obvious, but place your Book (or buy) Now call-to-action button prominently in your top menu navigation and ensure it’s consistently prominent throughout pages on your site. To consider:

• Ask your developer to ‘anchor’ BOOK NOW as a sticky (permanent) block in the footer of the mobile version of your site
• If you’re selling accommodation, then your very prominent CTA button should be ‘Search Availability & Book’ – this might also be a search availability widget placed on your home page and individual ‘property’ pages

Anchored CTA buttons on mobile sites

5. Upsell – People Also Bought, Booked or Looked At

If you control most aspects of your buy-online journey, i.e. cart, check-out and buy, then you can add an upsell feature that encourages would-be buyers to add-on experiences or other products. Equally, if you’re selling accommodation, your booking platform/software might offer you the facility to add-on simple upsells like welcome hampers or pets. There are many plug-ins/widgets you or your developer can easily add to your site that provides upsell or cross-sell prompts. It’s a great tactic to keep would-be customers on your site and explore further alternatives.

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Upsell enhancements for hotel room booking

Most searched for cities (momondo)

Author: Ewan Colville , Board Director of Argyll and the Isles Tourism Cooperative, MD of digital marketing agency Sunstone and a founder and partner of AITC member Love Argyll