Customer loyalty has been a cornerstone of well-established businesses and enterprises all over the world. Research suggests that most businesses earn almost 80% of their revenue from only 20% of their recurring clients. You can turn a one-time client into a recurring one by providing them legitimate reasons to be loyal to your business.

As a travel agency, you need to be more diligent in building customer loyalty. A travel and tour agency doesn’t receive a client volume on the scale of a retail business. Therefore, they can’t afford to experience high customer churn like retail operations.

Travel and tour operators need to work on converting every client into a repeat client using various custom loyalty development tips and tricks. Building customer loyalty for your tour agency is also crucial because it can save you considerable marketing overheads. One research study indicates that you need to spend five times more on acquiring new clients than retaining the existing ones.

In short, working on customer loyalty is very crucial for a travel agency to sustain its operation and improve margins. This post will shed light on a list of measures that help online tour operators to build customer loyalty.

6 Ways to Build Customer Loyalty for Your Travel Agency

These are the six areas where you need to work on for improving customer loyalty.

1. Acknowledge Frequent Travellers

The first thing you need for building customer loyalty is to identify your frequent travellers and reward them. Take out your record or CRM data and identify clients who have travelled more than once with you. Pick a certain threshold (e.g. travelled three times), and shortlist all the existing clients that meet this criterion.

Actively reach out to these clients through your customer representatives, thank them for using your travel service and extend a loyalty program/card/membership for them. This loyalty program should offer discounts on air and hotel bookings. The program should also entail perks and benefits (e.g. a complimentary visit to a particular attraction at their destination) that regular customers can’t get in their package.

This exclusive treatment will prove to be effective in turning frequent travellers into loyal clients. A successful loyalty program also acts as a persuasion tool. It can convince new clients to travel with you more to become eligible for that loyalty program.

2. Offer Impeccable Customer Service

We all know that the travelling industry is thriving with competition. It has become more cutthroat with the influx of online travel and tour agencies at a rapid rate. This competition has provided travellers with a lot of options. When two or more travel agencies offer the same tours at similar prices, travellers assess the customer service of these agencies to choose the operator they want to travel with.

If you want to get picked by customers among the range of options, you need to offer impeccable customer service. Use CRM features and customer representatives to attend client queries at any time of the day, especially if you operate internationally.

Your customer support team should be able to cool down angry and frustrated clients. Moreover, your travel management system must be equipped and configured to resolve customer grievances with the shortest turnaround.

Offering good customer experience always works in a travel agency’s favour. On the one hand, it gives them more repeat customers. On the other hand, they get good word of mouth and organic referrals from happy travellers.

3. Personalise Your Services as Much as Possible

Personalisation is another essential element in the traveller-operator relationship that can translate into loyalty. Travel CRM software enables you to track travellers’ journeys with your business. This information will come in handy with personalised travel plans and tours for different sets of clients.

4. Offer Unconditional Value

You can offer some unconditional value to your existing and potential clients without incurring any considerable cost. This unconditional value can be in the form of travel guides, eBooks, and video tutorials. This helpful content will not provide you with any direct returns. However, it will work somewhere in building customer loyalty.

5. Provide Convenient and Secure Payments

Travelling customers need smooth and hassle-free payment systems. A bad experience with payments can turn away a traveller from a tour company for good.

There are various measures you need to take to provide a convenient and secure payment environment for your clients, so they keep coming back.

• Offer multiple payment gateways— accept mobile and online payments.
• Allow international travellers to pay in their own currency without getting into the hassle of conversions.
• Ensure your website is SSL secured for providing data protection to confidential banking information of users.
• Work with a payment service provider that is certified for PCI DSS Level 1 compliance.

All these measures will help customers pay you without any unnecessary back and forth and security risks.

6. Leverage Social Media for Better Engagement

Don’t forget to take the maximum advantage of social media. Set up your Instagram and Facebook pages and keep them updated with fresh content. Post-travel pictures and videos and share important news from the travel and tour industry.

Also, add posts that draw out followers’ responses. Social media pages buzzing with activity also extract customer loyalty for travel agencies.

Travel CRM Plays an Integral Role in Delivering Customer-Focused Performance

Enterprises worldwide use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software applications to improve their service and keep an eye on changing consumer behaviour. As a travel agency striving to harness customer loyalty, you also need to streamline your functions with a custom-built travel CRM application. The CRM application data will enable you to come up with better strategies to improve customer loyalty.

If you want a robust travel CRM system with customised features for your travel agency, get in touch with TravnetTech. Our experts can also equip your operations with a front office, travel search engine, marketing automation, and other digital infrastructure in line with modern travel technological requirements.