A Brief Guide on Offering Short Travel Trips

Making a travel itinerary is an art. Many times consumers pick one travel agency over the other just because it offers trips that are well-planned and offer better details. While devising trips for clients, it has always been a challenge for tour operators to come up with something short and sweet.

Why Short Travel Trips Are Difficult to Plan?

Individual travellers might pull off great short trips without investing too much thought process. However, it is not that easy for a travel company that has to come up with a short travel package catering to a large group of people. They have to take care of various factors while devising a travel trip.

For instance, they have to offer cost-effectiveness, quality, and unique travelling experience from within the same package. They have to slot in maximum activities and attractions within that short window. Tour companies have to make sure that the activities on the trip don’t exhaust the travellers either. Then, they also need to ensure that improving the traveller experience for a short window doesn’t increase the cost of the trip too much.

If you want to improve your short travel trip planning for your target market and get an edge over your competitors, continue reading this post. Here, we will discuss some tips that can help you plan short travel trips for better traction and sales.

Things to Consider While Planning Short Trips

These are some things you need to take care of while planning short travel trips for the target market of your travel agency.

Pick the Fastest Route to the Destination

The commute is one of the biggest components of any trip. On a long trip with many days to use, the quality and details of the journey become as important as of the destination. However, you can’t extend that idea to shorter trips where you don’t have too many days to splurge. For such trips, you need to keep your routes short and commute fast. Analyze flight routes, transits, and other local travel details to calculate the total time of the back and forth trip travel. Then, pick the combination that completes in lesser time than other combinations.

Pick the Best of the Best Attractions of Any Destination

Some travel destinations are undoubtedly decked with too many attractions where it gets difficult to rate one over the other. However, you have to take that tricky measure while planning short travel trips. If you are offering a short trip to Rome, you can’t cover its dozens of attractions within your constricted time frame.

Therefore, you have to pick the best among the best attractions of any destination. Also, make sure that any two of the attractions in your plan don’t belong to the same genre. For instance, your plan should not include a visit to two museums even if they exhibit different types of artefacts. By doing this you can keep the trip interesting and less exhaustive for your group of travellers.

Try to Make the Trip as Immersive as Possible

You can make up for the limited span of your travel trip by making it more immersive. While picking travel destinations for short trips, you should focus on places where travellers can have more hands-on experience of things. For instance, if a place offers hotel accommodation as well as camp/ capsule stays, you should stick to the latter.

Spending a night in camps and capsules will certainly make things more vivid and interesting than staying at yet another hotel room. Similarly, if meals are part of the package, make sure travellers eat at places that are uniquely associated with the place they are visiting. Outdoor cafes and restaurants amid attractions can offer a great immersive dining experience. Also, look for activities where travellers have to proactively participate. This is another trick to make a trip more immersive.

Things to Avoid While Planning Short Trips

If you want to make your short travel trips a success, watch out for these things.

Don’t Add too Much of Walking Activity

Commute on foot is a great thing when you are backpacking or touring for a long stretch. For short trips, having too much-walking activity might not be the best option. On one hand, it can tire out the travellers since they have to walk a lot to cover as many things as possible. On the other hand, covering distance on foot makes for long time-consuming commutes, which are not suitable for a short trip by any means.

Don’t Plan Excessive Intra-city/ Intra-Destination Travel

What’s the point of visiting a city for a day if you have to spend most of your time tucked in a bus or metro? This is what most people complain about after completing a short trip “full of attractions”. Therefore, don’t stuff your short trip with loads of attraction and slash the intracity travel time. In fact, it is better to drop an attraction or two if they involve a lot of travelling time.

Don’t Set Unrealistic Expectations

Last but not least, don’t set unrealistic expectations and overpromise over a short trip. A travel agency knows about what can be covered in a short window. However, excited travellers travelling to a destination for the first time don’t have that idea. They are willing to believe whatever you will tell them. By offering too many things on short trips and then falling short of travellers’ expectations is just a recipe for losing clients for any future business.

A Robust Travel Management System Is at the Core of All Sorts of Trips

Whether it is multi-week trips or 3-day excursions, you will need a good travel management system to devise and offer all sorts of travel trips. TravnetTech can help you with all sorts of backend logistics you need to run your travel and tour company successfully. 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.