As many of our readers are frequent users of our online booking and property management system, Resbook, we will be releasing some really helpful tips to help you understand how this online booking software can help you grow your business, and convert your website visitors into guests.
First up, we will go over adding specials to your rates in Resbook.
To access Specials in Resbook, head to Admin > Stock Configurations > Rates > Select the room type > Select the rate to which you wish to offer the Specials for.
Click on 'Create Special'.
Note: You should have already set up rate periods for your room type before you can create specials.
You can offer 3 different types of specials for your customers:
1) Pay a certain amount for a specified number of...
Question 2: I'm told I am getting a lot of traffic to my site, but I'm not getting many enquiries. What's going on?
This question is all about converting the eye-balls on the page into actions, and often happens when there are barriers which are preventing someone moving from a passive viewer, to being inspired by your product, and placing a booking.
Google's website analytics and webmaster tools are two useful and totally FREE programs which you can use to answer some of the following questions, make adjustments and measure the impact and results.
Would you ever plan a grand and glorious wedding and then not send wedding invitations?
Or perhaps organise the perfect birthday for your five year old son and then not invite any of his friends?
It sounds silly, but many new tourism businesses do just that.
Planning, time and loads of money is spent building a stunning accommodation, going through all the resource consents and even sign-writing the car but then when it comes time to open, no one shows up and the owners wonder why people don't want to enjoy their amazing properly. Simple answer; No budget was allocated for marketing; you forgot you have to invite people to your place.
A successful marketing strategy for a tourism business can be built on five easy steps. It will provide the foundations for marketing...
The growing on-line community is rapidly becoming THE marketplace to compete within.
Increasingly savvy browsers can hunt out the exact thing they are looking for, compare you against your competitors and find the price they want.
What this means for suppliers of a commodity (from accommodations to activities and rental cars to wine) is that you need a website that keeps it really simple, with information that is easy to find and an accurate portrayal of what you provide (or be at the mercy of an upset customer on TripAdvisor, Facebook or Twitter!) .
You have probably heard it all before, but the reason you keep hearing it is because it is vital to your business! Your customers are online, looking at your site and if you don't look after it, you could be losing potential...
Question 1: My web company keeps telling me I get great organic traffic, but I don't know what this means.
Common search engines include Google, Yahoo, MSN among others!
Website traffic is the visits to your site.
There are lots of different kinds of website traffic, each being a different the path that a visitor might take to get to your site.
Organic traffic is essentially someone who has arrived at your website by searching on a search engine, this could be Google (which is the most common) or one of the smaller search engines which often appear on your analytics like yahoo, bing or conduit.
Someone finds your sites through an "organic" search, or via a search engine based on the relevancy of their search to your site, their own location, the...
First we all had printed brochures and flyers to share the wonder of our tourism business with others.
Then everyone acquired PC in their home and we needed a website to reach those people researching their travel from home.
Soon a website wasn't enough and a booking engine became a necessity quickly followed by the need to have a channel manager to distribute our rooms/activities on a myriad of 3rd party travel websites like Wotif and Booking.com
Now, you are "so last year" unless you have a mobile website. Really?
The answer is yes.
Travel website traffic via the mobile web has increased by a staggering 72% between August 2011 and January 2012 accounting for a total of 17.4% of all website traffic in the industry*.
