Engaging SME Suppliers May Not Be About Technology
I had an interesting discussion with the President of the Finnish Chapter of IFITT and a PHD student from the Basque region of Spain about engaging small travel suppliers, primarily tour and activity providers, in the use of new technologies to help manage and distribute products. I was saddened but still encouraged to hear that both were facing the same challenges in their respective countries that I have been facing here in Canada and more specifically in B.C.. In my ongoing efforts to promote Rezgo.com as a tour operator software solution to small tour and activity operators, I have encountered similar issues with SME travel suppliers. The biggest challenge that we all identified is the misconception that SME supplier products are “too complex” for any kind of computerized system to manage. We came to the conclusion that this was in fact a false perception and not reality. When asked what the supplier sold, how many seats they had, and how much they cost, many suppliers could not answer the question. This begs the question “what do you sell?”. We came to the conclusion that many suppliers simply have not taken the time to clearly identify what it is they offer, how to price it effectively, and how to structure it in a way that it can be sold more efficiently. Let’s take a practical example:
Scenario
Jim owns a van and he drives visitors around the city doing a guided city tour (Tour A). On the tour he stops at popular attractions. He will pick visitors up at their hotels and drop them off afterward. He has fifteen seats on his van and the average tour takes about four hours. Seems like a pretty simple product offering. The problem is that Jim also offers two other tours of neighbouring cities which he runs in conjunction with his primary city tour (Tour B & Tour C). Jim will go on whichever tour for which he gets a booking, which means if someone books Tour A first, then he can’t run Tour B or Tour C.
Issues
Which of Tour A, B, or C is the most profitable? Does Jim need to offer all three tours, and if so, do they all have to run on the same day?
Resolution
Instead of focusing on what he can’t distribute online, Jim should focus on what he can distribute online. The bottom line is that if the product is not there then people can’t book it. Focus on selling what you can in order to establish the relationship, then use the personal contact with the customer to follow-up, upsell, and build on the sale.
The Bottom Line
A web site (and a web booking system) is not the only sales channel, but it is a sales channel nonetheless. Travel suppliers should be encouraged to look at their product, simplify their offerings, and look at what they can market and sell online before dismissing their products as “too complex” for sale on the web. At the end of the day, if you cannot define what it is that you sell, how can you sell it.
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2 Responses to “Engaging SME Suppliers May Not Be About Technology”
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Hello Stephen,
Tough challenge. But do keep it up, it should pay off when the SME’s wake up to the fact that services like Rezgo can improve the bottom line. You bring up a very interesting point that also applies to advertising and promoting online. Even with all the talk and activity surrounding Tourism 2.0 my impression to date is that very few tourism businesses know about the potential of the Web 2.0 to boost their visibility and consequently their sales. While some big DMO’s are working on interesting 2.0projects, the hundreds of thousands of tourism sme’s don’t even seem to know about the technologies available to them. I recenlty spoke to a hotel sales manager who confessed that she has never even visited a blog. I will be commenting on this issue in the http://www.canadiantourismblog.ca soon and will use my social network as an example of what can be done at the sme level to get closer to potential customers.
Regards,
Jaime
Hello Stephen
I think you’re on the right track here and this is an issue that has been bothering me for quite a while, albeit in different contexts.
For me, it’s the old issue of businesses being blinded by a tool and thinking that it can magically sort out their problems without having to acquire the skills or do the thinking beforehand (and I am as guilt as the rest - I remember buying an accounts package at some point in the past and then realising that I actually needed to understand accounts before I had any chance of making it work…).
Jaime: I’ll keep an eye out for your forthcoming post as well. Some research we are doing at the moment in Scotland is revealing a similar picture and, for me, one of the stories that is starting to emerge is the fact that SMEs are going to need to add a degree of awareness of PR to their skill sets. Social Networks and Blogging are good ways of getting feedback and interacting but I think there is a need to for some firms to know the implications of these publicly available comments. For example, about 30% of respondents to our survey so far have read something negative about their businesses online and I’m not sure at this stage that they are aware how they should respond to that.
The other thing coming through in the survey (and probably more pertinent to the general topic) is, of course, confirmation of the continued complex mix of booking and promotional channels. The fax is dead as a contact mechanism but otherwise it is still a complex picture out there.
Off topic (ish): I’ve been watching CBC’s Jpod adaptation recently and it made me want to visit Canada again. I’m not sure that the program should really have that effect but suspect that this just reveals that Geek Tourism is part of the long tail of tourism options!