If you want a steady stream of online bookings, you need to have an emotive and a compelling home page that loads quickly.
The emotive aspect is the "wow" factor that immediately transforms the guest to the fantasy of experiencing your tourism product. The compelling aspects are what give them the confidence to book. Flaunt both of these features and you are lined up for success.
How do you create both an emotive and compelling home page? Here are the four key aspects to flaunt:
1. High quality photos - one of the best ways to get a message across quickly is pictures. Spend the money on getting professional photos taken. It will make all the difference to your marketing efforts. Think of a website that you like - I would venture to guess that they have clear, crisp and...
We're pretty excited to share that our friends at Feejee Experience are officially the Best Fiji Experience, receiving the AON Fiji Excellence in Tourism Awards 2010. It is awarded in recognition of their range of travel, accommodation and activity packages that were created to give visitors the opportunity to see and feel the real Fiji.
"We are genuinely thrilled to receive this award. It was tough competition with so many popular products, resorts and operators in Fiji who were finalists in this category," said Brad Rutherford, General Manager Tourist Transport Fiji & Feejee Experience.
"I believe it is our blend of giving guests the experience Fiji is renowned for - the sun, the amazing beaches, and adding the unique bonus ingredients like village stopovers, school visits...
When marketing a tourism product you need to stop thinking like you and start thinking like your customers. Thinking that your customers are like you is a common mistake which often results in tourism business owners thinking that website optimisation doesn't work or marketing in general is total fluff and doesn't get results.
Classic Case
We were working with a gorgeous "B&B" just north of Auckland that was owned by a lovely German couple. They desperately wanted to tap into the Auckland weekend getaway market and felt that they had done everything possible to get it. They optimised their website, offered a weekend package on their site and did Google Ad Words but to no avail. They were convinced that online marketing didn't work and came to us for other...
As the recent 6.3 earthquake struck Christchurch, it was Social Media that we turned to, getting messages and information out to family and friends across the globe within a matter of seconds. The online sentiment felt worldwide was one of tremendous pain; and messages of sympathy and hope for those affected blanketed our twitter feeds, our facebooks and youtube accounts.
An earthquake of this magnitude touches all facets of a community's economy and lives, and as Christchurch is one of New Zealand's key tourism destinations this will be a significant blow to "Christchuch" as a brand. Our strategic partner Dr. Mathew McDougall, CEO for the China based firm SinoTech Group, is a South Islander himself, and one of the global experts on Social Media Strategy and Analytics.
If you want to become an inbound operator creating itineraries for overseas clients coming to New Zealand, then below you'll find a couple of tips to help you on your way.
1) Get to know your product. This means doing the legwork, and getting out there.
Or you can cheat and go to TRENZ, but you're never going to know for sure if the brochures they're showing you are simply putting their product in the best light, or if they're for real.
If you've visited a product provider, and can report from first hand experience that their "Garden Suite" actually looks over someone else's garden, whereas their "Lake View Suites" do get views of the lake, but across someone else's roof, you're in a better position to be able to manage a client's expectations.
In August 2008 YouTube beat Yahoo! into 2nd PLACE for total US search queries, and that makes for one fairly compelling argument to get a video of your tourism product up on YouTube.
YouTube also happens to be owned by Google, so the higher your video ranks on YouTube, the likelier it is you'll also appear in Google search results, which of course now include videos.
But remember, although a professionally produced, high definition, TV advert-style production would be every tourism operator's dream, a video doesn't have to be all that; it could simply be a presentation of stills photographs of your tourism product saved as a .mov (movie) file, an AV clip, YouTube will still "see" this as a video!
You can create an AV clip yourself, by creating a PowerPoint presentation...
If you want a steady stream of online bookings, you need to have an emotive and a compelling home page that loads quickly.