A Brief Guide on the Marketing of Luxury Travelling

The majority of small and medium-sized travel and tour operators often ignore the luxury travelling niche. They consider it difficult to break into that niche. Many of them also don’t foray into the luxury direction, because they believe the dividends are not as good as the effort required to acquire the relevant clients.

A report from Allied Market Research suggests that the luxury travelling market will be north of $1 trillion in the next five years. With such numbers, it is hard to ignore this lucrative side of the travel business irrespective of how your travel operation’s size.

If you haven’t stepped into the domain of luxury travelling and want to know more about this aspect of the business, continue reading this post. First, we will make a case for why you need to enter the luxury travelling operations. Then, we will discuss steps you should consider to reach out to luxury travellers and tourists.

Why You Need to Reach Out to Luxury Travellers and Tourists

If you are still sitting on the fence about whether luxury travellers and tourists can be your target market, the following discussion will help you to get decisive.

They Boast Good Purchasing Power

Luxury travellers and tourists is an affluent lot and thus have good purchasing power. When you have rich clients, you can easily improve your margins on the services you provide. Moreover, it is easier to upsell among luxury travellers. They usually accept the modification of a package with fewer queries as long as you are providing them value.

The good purchasing power of luxury travellers and tourists also justifies the extra and better persuasion efforts you have to make. A successfully acquired single luxury traveller can earn you profits that you might not be able to earn from, say, four regular travellers.

They Tend to Travel More

Luxury travellers don’t just have lavish travel itineraries. They also tend to travel more than an average traveller. When regular folks plan an international trip in years, a luxury traveller has multiple similar outings within the same year. In other words, if your travel and tour company manages to acquire a luxury traveller, you will essentially get a recurring customer with good purchasing power.

How to Reach Out to Luxury Travellers and Tourists

From the above section, it is pretty clear that not focusing on luxury travelling is like missing a great business opportunity. Therefore, every travel and tour business should strive to expand its operations with luxury travelling offers, plans, and packages as well.

However, the big question is: how to reach out to luxury travellers? The regular marketing efforts might not work in getting traction among luxury travellers and tourists.

So, here, we will see what different or extra you need to do for reaching out to those high-value customers.

Offer Something Unique, Something Different

Your regular incentives and itinerary highlights won’t work on the luxury travelling consumer base. Things like 5-star hotel accommodation or business-class travel don’t excite them. Therefore, don’t make those regular luxury travelling details a part of your marketing message. Instead, you should focus on something unique. Something that most tour companies are not offering and most tourists can’t afford.

A trip to a private island in the Bahamas or Fiji or offering the best and most luxurious suites in Las Vegas—things like these can get you the attention of luxury travellers. Similarly, you need to offer them packages for different events and requirements accordingly. For instance, luxury travellers might be interested in spending their Valentine’s Day at Hotel Georges V in Paris. You should have those plans cued for your luxury travellers. Similarly, an affluent consumer looking for a short getaway might opt for a day-trip to Antarctica.

In short, when you devise a tour or travel package for affluent clients, you need to come up with something that can be labelled as a true lifetime experience.

Focus on Value Rather than Price

As discussed in the above section, luxury travellers need something one-of-a-kind and exclusive. For them, the cost of the itinerary is not the biggest concern. Therefore, never try to lure them with your prices. They look for value in a tour package. If you can provide them with that, they won’t mind what you will charge them. In contrast, no matter how reasonably-priced is your package, luxury travellers won’t opt for it if they can’t see any value in it.

Provide Personalised Experience

You will have a small club of luxury travellers to target and serve. You need to deploy the utmost personalisation to engage with them. Luxury travellers expect exclusivity and special treatment from their travel and tour companies. You need to assign dedicated representatives to every luxury travelling client. This representative should be their travel assistant with your company.

Also, when you are sending newsletters and other promotional stuff, always create a custom message for those high-value clients. Providing a personalised experience might take more time and effort. However, it will yield good results in the long run.

Develop Good Reputation and Leverage It

The reputation of your travel company plays an integral role during your initial interaction with luxury travellers. They create an opinion on a travel business based on its existing position in the market. They also factor in how a certain tour operator promises to provide the services. Then, the customer experience is also important in developing a good reputation among luxury travellers.

Without a robust travel management system and other travel technologies in place, you can’t deliver impeccable customer service and hence fail to develop a good reputation. A fully-functional digital travel back office is essential to offer a great customer experience and travelling services.

To leverage the most recent travel technologies and digital infrastructure, get in touch with TravnetTech. From a travel management system to travel back office and marketing automation, we can help you with all the digital resources your travel business needs to target luxury travellers.