A big problem for a lot of tour businesses lies in the transition from traditional to modern forms of marketing and advertising. We are talking strategies for touring companies. One would expect that at a fundamental level, touring businesses originally received most of their clients through word of mouth, since the majority of people would be unwilling to spend a few thousand dollars on a vacation or tour without consulting their friends first about the quality of the possible tours available.
It turns out, however, that the arrival of the internet as a communications medium has completely reshaped that market because now online reviews are possible and new types of marketing and advertising strategies center around selling consumers on the allure of an experience they’ve never had before. Touring companies are now facing a crisis on several fronts in the form of big increases in demand, learning how to market to a broader audience, and scheduling tours to accommodate an unprecedented number of guests. Here are some ways that your touring business can maximize its appeal in this volatile and often unpredictable online environment.
Handling Large Demand Increases
If you’re a touring company with a website or any major sort of online presence that has only been recently established, chances are that your demand will spike as your company is now visible to an international audience. There are a number of questions that you should consider when faced with this situation like “How can I handle this current level of demand?” and “How can I deal with further demand increases in the future if my marketing campaigns pay off?” Solutions to these issues will require you to consider the technical infrastructure behind the requests your site is receiving if you want to scale.
One big issue with handling large demand increases is that you won’t know whether or not those traffic increases will be permanent, seasonal, or simply due to the result of a random spike of interest on that particular day. What you do know is that you will lose out on valuable demand if your web page happens to load just a few seconds slower or if it’s unavailable altogether. Is it possible to adapt to these spikes in demand and site traffic without paying too much extra overhead?
As it turns out, there is an innovative solution to this very problem. When streaming sites for popular sports like basketball or football have their championship series, demand is expected to skyrocket. However, these sites obviously do not simply crash because of the massive spike in visitors over a short period of time, and it would be too expensive for them to running a service expected to handle this level of demand 24/7.
So how is it done? Well, there is a service called Akamai employed by these very streaming sites that take advantage of a pool of cloud servers that are distributed to its clients based on the traffic needs of the clients at that time. Therefore, by looking into the options appropriate for your own tour experiences site at the time, you’ll be able to accommodate the jumps in traffic in an adaptive and fluid manner - allowing you to minimize or eliminate disruptions in service simply due to high site traffic.
Perfecting the Scheduling Experience
Before the ubiquity of the Internet, it would be no surprise for big touring companies to have an elaborate and complex phone and record-keeping system to deal with the logistics required for scheduling a ton of different clients and ensuring that the tour locations are available at the advertised dates. Nowadays, electronic record-keeping and scheduling methods are becoming increasingly popular while fewer clients are relying on calls to make reservations due to the swiftness and relative guarantee of an equivalent online form.
The problem for your touring business in this transitional phase after you handle the demand will lie in your actual ability to predict and schedule all of your customers for tours in an organized, logical, and professional fashion. Adventure Bucket List represents the perfect software that will allow your touring business to make this transition to electronic recordkeeping and scheduling seamlessly due to the easy integration and intuitive features offered by its software.
One of the biggest advantages is that Adventure Bucket List allows your business to integrate an electronic booking and management system on your own site: “We know how time-consuming coordinating reservations with travelers can be. Save money and increase sales by allowing travelers to book through your website 24/7.” This allows for you to have consistency in the method that you use to accept reservations online as well as in organizing and reporting them.
