Travel & Tourism Technology Trends

Prerequisites: You should have a digital camera of your choice to use for business purposes.

Estimated Time for Completion: Reading time of 20 mins.

Details: Do you recall the old saying “A picture is worth a thousand words?”.  Well, with the search engines, that’s not entirely true, but pictures can go a long way to helping you convert your potential customers.  The web is a very visual medium and although rich descriptions and well written content can provide customers with context, you have to remember that only about 12% of what you write is actually read by the user.  That doesn’t mean you should only write about 12% of what you write now, because the search engines (like Google) read 100% of what you write.  The pictures however are pretty much ignored by the search engines except for Alt text that accompanies the images.

There are ways to increase the likelihood that your photos and pictures will benefit your brand on-line and potentially drive more traffic to your website.  The strategy is quite simple and has been adopted by a number of tour and activity operators around the World.

1. Make sure your terms and conditions include a photo release which allows you to take and post photos of customers during the tour and activity.
2. Make sure each of your guides has a good quality digital camera with them and that they are familiar with how to take photos.
3. Encourage your guides to take photos at the beginning of the trip, during the trip, and at the end of the trip.  This can provide for enjoyable before and after photos.
4. At the end of each day (or trip) download the photos to your computer and sort them by trip.
5. Upload the photos as soon as possible to a photo sharing website like Flickr.com or even to your Facebook fan page (we will discuss both of these options later).  Make sure that you add your company name, keywords, and web address to the description of the photos when you upload them.
6. Send an email to all the customers who went on the trip to let them know that the photos are available for viewing.  Make it easy for your customers to share the photos.

I spoke to the owner of Splash River Rafting in Scotland about how he has incorporated photos into his website strategy and was happy to see that they follow a very similar process.  In the case of Splash however, they host their photos on their own photo gallery.  This is a perfectly acceptable way to host your own photos, but it does require additional development and hosting.  In general, the process I have described is reasonable one for most operators to follow.  Even a single person tour operator can stand to benefit from increased SEO and link backs by using a technique like this.  Not only do the additional images increase brand awareness but they also provide a great value add for your customers at very little cost to you as an operator.  Now that you have a good idea what you should be doing, we can look at what tools you should be using, and how best to optimize your time when handling photos so that they remain a valuable service for your customers and a marketing benefit for you.

Outcome: If you are successful at completing this daily action, you will have a plan in place to add photography to your tourism business.

Photo Credit: Phoenix Ignition