New travel website feature - who do you want to go on a tour with?

Here is an idea for a feature that would work on a tour operator website (but it would have to be a multinational one!).

From my past experience of running tours I know that to make the tour the most enjoyable for all customers you need to create the right groups. One of the issues with adventure travel is that it can attract those in their gap years (prior to University), young professionals and more mature people.

Take a tour in Egypt….. some people go for the culture and history others go for the adventure and diving. If you put people from both groups in the same trip you could end up with some customers getting frustrated at spending too much time in museums etc.

Its not just what people want from their holiday that you need to ensure is compatible with other group members but often nationality and languages spoken. None of this is really an issue for hotels (where you don’t have to socialise with the other guests) but for group tours where you are travelling from place to place you may end up spending 10 evenings with these people that the travel company you have booked with has thrown you together with.

A couple of days ago I was having a conversation with someone and an example of this came up….. a customer from a European country booking via a US tour operator in order to travel to another European country. The customer said that they wanted to book with a US company because they wanted to be with English speaking people. Maybe the exchange rate helps as well.

Anyway, this looks like something that customers consider when booking a tour (that will be a group trip) however I haven’t seen any functionality that tour operators have used on their websites to help this?

One suggestion maybe to add, on all tours on a website, a little graph that gives the demographic information for each tour….. letting the customers move towards tours that suit them better. Not sure though.

Any more ideas?

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