Business
During these tough times, do you wish you had some fellow tourism peers with many decades of experience to answer your questions and get solid tourism business strategies during Covid answers and advice on some of these core topics? Customer communications and marketing to keep guests engaged What to do and not do with your team to keep them productive How to be more agile and not to feel stuck Where should I optimize my systems to improve bookings & lower costs When to start selling and how to do it Insert your tourism business, marketing, sales, operations or planning topic here… Then join award-winning, family owned tour operator Dan Austin founder of Austin Adventures and host “Tourism Tim” Warren, a fellow tour operator and founder of Travel Business Success Radio Podcast with almost 60 years combined experience in international and domestic tour operations and leadership in a candid tip-filled question and answer session with your tourism peers to help you survive and thrive in the these challenging times. Tourism Business Strategies During COVID: Top Three Suggestions for Food Tour Operators Re-Opening Their Businesses Stay relevant. One way of staying relevant is to come up with creative and amazing to go package. A friend of Dan has a similar business and one of the things they did was to create gift boxes with barbeque sauces and recipes. Give them something physical to keep the anticipation and excitement going. Embrace the restaurants as your partners. Create a restaurant virtual visit and ask the Chef to come out and explain what he did and how he did it Make everything an experience to remember because it is all about the experience. Instead of eating in the restaurants, you go picnics. Bottom-line is to continue to try and make it an experience. Come up with ways and gimmicks to make whatever for you to get started again make that part of the experience. This time is the opportunity to make things interesting. How does the industry plan against over visitation & over saturation once things open up? The physical world is taking a breather right there. There's probably never going to be a time like this in our history, to visit places without the crowds. No tour buses this year. The international travel scene will be an all-time low, so overcrowding doesn’t seem to be a problem or worry. And it’s a great time to travel if you can. Long term, it would be great to learn from this. Evaluating on how to manage or control overcrowding. Maybe it is minimizing the size of tour buses, shuttles, and cruises. Having less of them. Just learning and seeing what works this year might actually motivate us to dig a little deeper and be better in the future. Tourism Business Strategies During Covid: When do you see yourself starting to ramp international trips back up? How are you navigating the international situation? Tourism Business Strategies During Covid It’s really going to come down on the market. At this point, a lot of countries are still opening up and then closing back again. This makes implementing your tourism business strategies during COVID difficult at times. Domestic trips are back about 70%. But internationally, we have guides or partners on the ground to find out what the consensus is. There are 4 different steps to situations like this. The first is fear. The next one in is understanding. The third step is planning. Then finally the action phase. There’s a great website out there that you can monitor different countries and see what is happening daily. It will help to monitor and talk to your partners in and out of the country. Dan has asked his marketing team to create an infographic of the top 10 international trips that they are able to anticipate to reopen. What changes do you think tour operators will have to make? How do we help people feel comfortable about traveling again, especially older travelers who have time and money but may not be risk-takers?