Blog homeIt seems to be common sense that having a great, transactional, website is what every travel company should strive for. I wonder though whether websites are as effective as well trained, experienced, members of staff with deep product and destination knowledge.
Is having a website really that golden bullet that will increase your sales by 20%?
Take for example a tour operator who mainly sells tailor-made tours. This style of travel company has challenges creating a website that successfully presents their services because, by definition, every booking sold can be so different. Specialist travel agents have similar challenges.
The conventional approach in this situation is to put up some sample itineraries giving a potential customer an idea of the kind of trip you can arrange for them and then persuade your website visitors to contact you - so your experienced staff can create some itineraries that may be appropriate. As soon as that human contact has started, you can normally sell them a holiday.
The tailor-made tour dilemma
Here is the dilemma - if you put up plenty of information - but it is not enticing enough - the customer may never get to the stage of contacting your sales team because they have made their purchase decision based on the information on the website. They have gone somewhere else.
i.e. a website full of mediocre information may actually perform worse that a brief company overview and a “contact us” form. Getting the human to human conversation started is the key.
The challenge is that if you are not confident in your skills at pulling together a great website (or don’t have a budget to pay someone else) - a mediocre website may actually be damaging to your business. That is a scary thought.
My own experience
In this area my own experience is a bit limited - I have tended to work for larger travel companies selling commodity travel (flights, hotels etc) and holiday packages. However I do speak to smaller companies who are mainly tailor-made tour specialists on a daily basis (many of whom are customers)
This challenge is similar to those I face when marketing our reservation system TourCMS. Our website has a lot of information on it about our system - including our pricing - indeed this is probably sufficient to make a purchase decision. Our competitors have minimal product information and no pricing (except for one competitor - hello Canada!) - and instead focus on arranging face to face meetings to describe their products i.e. our competitors go for human to human contact rather than web based marketing
On the occasion that I do talk to people about our product I tend to do a better sales job than our website does….. so I know that, at the moment, for us, experienced humans are better than an average website.
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