Travel & Tourism Technology Trends

The focus of this series to help tourism companies, like tour operators, adventure outfitters, and hoteliers to maximize their tourism on-line marketing efforts.  Because the action items presented in this series are focused on on-line marketing, there are certain requirements in order to realize maximum results from these tips.  Firstly, I am assuming that you have a website or are planning on setting up a website for your tourism related business.  Secondly, I am assuming that you have access to a computer with an Internet connection and can effectively take action on the tips and action items that I provide to you on a daily basis.  Thirdly, I am assuming that you have a sincere desire to improve your tourism business and increase the exposure for your brand and website on-line.

Each daily action will include several important parts:

1. Main area of interest: This is an overall grouping of daily actions around a central theme, for example Basics, Search Engine Optimization, and on-line marketing.
2. Daily Action Title: This is the title of the daily action and will give you the jist of the action for the day.
3. Prerequisites: These are things that you need to have in place in order to successfully complete the daily action.
4. Daily Action Detail: This will detail the daily action.
5. Estimated Time to Complete (ETC): This is how long it should take you to complete the daily action.
6. Daily Action Outcome: This is the result of your successful completion of the daily action.

Before you start the series it is important to know your level of on-line readiness.  Here is a quick reference that you can use in order to prepare yourself for the next 12 months of tourism on-line marketing:

Crawl – You may have a basic website or a brochure page hosted on a third-party site.  You probably don’t have your own domain name yet but would like one. You don’t consider yourself web savvy although you probably already know how to you Google to search for things and you already use email (most probably web-based).

Walk – You have your own website with you own domain name but you don’t have the technical experience to update your pages or content. You receive email messages from the site (via a contact form) but they are not linked to tours or activities directly.

Jog - You have a content managed website that has an on-line booking engine. Your products are available on-line and easily booked. Your booking engine uses real-time availability so your customers know that they can book with confidence. Your site, however, is not performing as well as it could because you don’t update the content as often as you should.

Run – Your site is a major part of your marketing plan and drives significant revenues for your business.  You drive customers to book on-line and they happily oblige.  You rank well in Google for your keywords and for your type of tours and activities.

This series is really designed for those organizations who are at the Crawl, Walk, and Jog stages of on-line readiness. Although some organizations who are at the Run stage may benefit from the refresher.