Holiday Travelling: How to Attract More Clients
The development of the COVID vaccine and the commencement of its wide-scale administration has let the travel and tour industry breathe a sigh of relief. After the difficult times for most of 2020, travel agencies are now gradually experiencing an uptick in the business. Even though the pandemic restrictions are still not fully lifted everywhere, many people are planning holiday travelling.
If you are running a travel business and have borne the pandemic's brunt, you need to capitalize on the holiday travelling boom. This blog post will discuss how you can attract and acquire more clients for holiday seasons. You can use these tips and tricks for any upcoming holiday season.
Start Your Promotions a Lot Earlier
It is important to understand that the promotion centred on holiday travelling has to be pretty aggressive. You need to be proactive and upfront in running the promotional campaigns for your holiday travelling tours. To pick up the steam and run this promotional campaign at full throttle, you have to start early. In other words, you should begin promoting your holiday packages in the respective target markets four to six weeks in advance.
This duration usually proves to be enough for laying down a good persuasion scheme. Most travel tours with good promotional campaigns succeed in turning many cold prospects into healthy leads and consumers in this period. However, if you are just starting your promotion a week or ten days before the season kicks in, the promotional results will remain diluted no matter how good, and well-thought-out is the campaign.
Keep in mind that consumers like to mull over a travelling decision again and again. By starting your holiday packages promotions early, you provide that time window to your potential clients.
Target Clients Based on Socioeconomic Levels
Suppose you are offering a variety of travel packages lying at different price points and featuring national and international destinations. In that case, you will need to do the segmentation of your target market. Reaching out to all your targeted audience with the entire basket of your offerings might not give you the desired response.
For instance, a person looking for budget travel packages might close your email or ad by looking at a couple of premium options appearing on the top. Similarly, people looking for luxury holiday plans won't go through the entire ad/email after seeing the packages branded as economical options. You need to first consider the requirements of different segments of your market and then reach out to them accordingly.
It makes more sense to offer luxury and international packages to the audience lying in the high-income band. You can include professionals with a six-figure income and business people as your premium group. Moreover, people with average income should be part of a general group. Then, students and lower-income professionals should be in the budget group.
Well-curated email lists and your own online search can help you identify the socioeconomic tier of each of your potential clients.
All this homework will streamline your holiday promotions and enable you to run your marketing campaign in a more customized manner for better results.
Offer Something More, Something Extra
The online travel and tour industry is abuzz with competition. Even the pandemic hasn't succeeded in waning it down. What we are trying to say is you are not alone in offering holiday tour packages. There might be a list of other tour operators offering similar or better plan than yours.
Therefore, you need to run an extensive search to find out what type of competitive tours are available on the internet. Then devise your tour packages, which should be an improved version of the existing packages (from the consumers' POV). For instance, if a competitor's travel plan doesn't offer a free guide service, you can consider it in your package. In short, you have to offer something more than what your competitors offer.
Keep in mind that it is better to cut down your profit margins on a package rather than completely losing it to a competitor.
Make Special Packages for Couples
Holiday travelling allows couples to spend quality time together away from the regular hustle and bustle of everyday life. This holiday season is more significant in terms of couples travelling because a lot of newlyweds have delayed their honeymoons due to the pandemic. Many of them will try to make the most of these holidays by planning their belated marriage celebration at their favourite destinations.
Make customized plans for this market segment by factoring in the popular travelling destinations among couples in recent times. If you pull off the tour planning and promotion right, you will have a substantial number of couples as your holiday travellers.
Leverage the Factor of Urgency
Consumers are inherently lazy. Most of them only act at the last minute. You need to capitalize on this consumer behaviour while marketing your travel packages. For instance, if you are offering a discount, make sure it comes with a deadline. Similarly, introduce "flash sales" of your holiday tour packages with some extra features and offers that expire within a couple of hours.
Creating urgency will pay off for all cases where clients have already made their mind to use your service but only delay it due to procrastination.
Make the Most of Social Media
The main playground/battleground of your holiday travelling promotions should be social media platforms. Many travel businesses have reported that they create most of their leads from their Instagram and Facebook pages. You also need to leverage those social media platforms to get more traction on your holiday travel tours.
To manage the uptick in orders following a successful holiday travelling marketing, you will need a robust travel management system. TravnetTech can help you with that and all the other critical digital resources required for running a successful travel business. Our experts can also help your new travel agency set up your enterprise's digital front and back office.