Travel Safety Awareness for Clients: 5 Ways Travel Agencies Can Work on It

Safety is a leading concern of travellers and tourists, especially when they are travelling to a place where they haven’t been before. One survey among a group of global travellers suggests that around 80% of people are thinking about travel safety when they are planning their trips. In many cases, people changed their destinations or scrape off the travel plan altogether due to safety concerns.

Travel agents and tour operators should also work on this front to ensure that their clients can set off on trips without getting anxious and stressed about safety. Travel companies and operators can take several measures to bolster travel safety awareness among their existing and potential clients.

1. Enclose a Custom-Made Safety Guide in Travel Itineraries

You should work out a custom safety guide that you can provide to all your clients irrespective of their travel destination and the nature of the trip. This safety guide should include all the general instructions, steps, tips, and hacks about how to go about a tour safely and soundly. This guide should include flight safety tips, hotel safety tips, common travel scams, online/internet security tips, etc.

Since the pandemic is still here and national and international travelling activity has to follow the strict SOPs, make sure your safety guide has a separate section for COVID-related measures. Try to keep COVID information and prerequisites short and simple, because travellers don’t want to read lengthy paragraphs on the virus anymore.

Moreover, this general travel safety guide should include some emergency contact details. For instance, the police and health emergency numbers (you can search and add the number for all the destinations you cover). Moreover, also mention the embassy and consulate address, phone number, email address and other contact details in this guide.

You can also add some first aid information and tips in the end for turning your safety guide into a comprehensive travel manual.

2. Never Forget to Provide Region-Specific Safety Tips

A general safety guide is a good touch to the travel itinerary package you provide to your clients. However, it has been observed that travellers are more interested in getting region-specific safety tips instead of sifting through a general guidebook. Therefore, you should add a separate handout to every safety guide based on the destination.

For instance, you should provide an Italy-specific safety booklet/handout to your clients who have taken your Rome tour package. Similarly, people travelling to East Asian destinations can get a heads-up about the things they should be mindful of while travelling and interacting with Buddhist communities.

France and Russia are considered the rudest countries for tourists. Moreover, Italy has earned a bad reputation for its petty street cons. You also have to guide the travellers in the right direction when it comes to such region and country-specific stereotypes. Your region-based safety guide should be free from hyperboles and sugar-coating when addressing those stereotypes.

3. Bust the Travel Myths

Many times the safety concerns of travellers are stemming from different travel myths and misconceptions. You need to bust them to ensure clients can travel with the right comfort level. You can make a list of all the popular and prevailing travel myths and then start dismissing them by creating a small campaign for each of them.

There is a range of myths and misconceptions about the expenses of international travelling. Similarly, the information about solo travelling is also marred with loads of misinformation. Women travellers are also misguided by many of the travel myths lingering on the World Wide Web. It is also a combination of different myths and misconceptions that stop travellers from visiting some exciting places across the globe.

Use all your promotional mediums to bust those travel myths. Also, draft a concise copy of all that myth-busting content and add it to your travel safety guide.

4. Use Your Marketing Channels to Reach Out to Everyone

What will be the point of curating all the travel safety content if you can’t get it to all your existing and prospective clients?

Adding travel safety guides and booklets to travel itineraries only serves the clients travelling at the moment. All those people, the ones who have travelled with you before and the ones who will travel with you in the future should also receive those travel safety tips and guidance from you. You can use various means to get across the travel safety content to your entire consumer base.

• Regularly post the travel safety tips on your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts.
• Always add a link to your “travel safety hub” (a webpage dedicated to travel safety content) in your newsletters. You can also create exclusive email campaigns primarily covering the topic of travel safety.
• Send out direct mail to your customers who have given you their physical addresses.
• Make a prominent tab on your website and landing pages that can transport the viewers to the travel safety guide page. 

5. Make Travel Insurance a Mandatory Part of Your Packages

Despite offering all the safety guidelines, no travel and tour company and agent can guarantee their clients that nothing can go wrong on the trips. However, they can certainly prepare for emergencies and unforeseen circumstances by asking travellers to sign up for travel insurance. From medical emergencies to lost luggage and flight and hotel cancellations, good travel insurance provides travellers with a good safety cover in many ways. It is better if you make travel insurance a mandatory part of your tours and packages.

The diligence and proactive attitude of travel agencies and agents regarding travel safety impress customers. They like and appreciate the fact that travel companies are going the extra mile to ensure their safety on trips.

While improving your customer service through proactive travel safety awareness measures, it is also important to embrace the latest travel technologies. 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.