Right from booking air tickets, hotel rooms, and rental cars to help travelers in transporting. With growing trends of online transactions, travel agencies have a massive scope of work. The giants like MakeMyTrip and Expedia are already nailing out there.
However, if you are a budding travel agency, you can be popular, too. Technology has helped many sectors, including the travel industry. With a winning website, loud-speaking social media handles, and killer content, any travel agency can rule the world!
Follow the piece to discover how to increase your market and be an affiliated travel agency.
1. By Upselling Products
Offering more products and experience can go a long way when you are a travel agency with more significant goals. When a customer hires you for a trip, look for what they want more. For example, if a couple books a seven-day trip to Italy, suggest some additional to-dos. Besides their regular itinerary, guide them with some excellent romantic date restaurants where they can sip wine together.
Perhaps, you can give them details of local tour operators who arrange telescope viewing nights. If they plan a road trip for a day or two, you can offer them rented cars with ute tub rack and fuel-up tanks. Offering additional products on top of the package can help you win customer’s confidence and get more prospects. You just need to explore your customer’s desires, and you will ace the game.
2. By Leveraging Social Media
No matter what age group, all travelers use social media networks today. There they talk about their trip experiences, travel products, personal preferences, and agency feedback. As a travel agency, you can make the most out of your social media handles. By posting relevant content related to travel deals, industry news, packing tips, destination highlights, and holiday posts on your social media, you can inspire your followers or invite new followers.
Also, through social media, you can engage in affiliate marketing with other travel agencies and create tailor-made trips and vacations for your clients.
3. By Asking For Referrals
Word of mouth is the best marketing method, revenue generator, and sales booster. Let’s understand it with two scenarios:
Scenario 1 – You promote your travel products & services, and
Scenario 2 – A customer enrolled for one of your trips in the past referring your agency to someone
What’s more impactful? We know the answer already. The customer referral program works wonders for a travel agency when it comes to increasing the market presence.
These referral programs create a reputation and trust among the customers, and your agency gets likely to be preferred more. For ensuring double effectiveness of referral programs, send gift cards to everyone who refers to you or give them an additional discount on the next trip they book with you.
4. By Organizing Multiple Contests
Organizing contests is one of the most used techniques by travel agencies to spread the word about them far wide. Who would not want to win something free, whether it be a flight ticket, hotel stay, cruise tour, or passes to a theme park?
Hosting travel contests through your agency will help you in audience engagement and reputation building. You can create a hashtag on Instagram and ask your followers to buzz about it everywhere. This way, you can market your agency, increase your followers, invite new prospects, and become famous.
5. By Doing Effective Email Marketing
Most of the present-day travel agencies use email as an influential marketing tool. Despite social media marketing and other fancy marketing tactics, email marketing has remained influential for direct communication with customers and will always be.
Through emails, not only can you convey essential updates about your travel agency but also generate leads. For this, you can start a weekly, fortnightly, or monthly email newsletter. Keep the content straight, to the point, fact-checked, engaging, and up-to-date. Smartly attach summer holiday packs, couple deals, season trips to get more customers at the end of the email.
6. By Creating a Stellar Website
Nothing but the website of your travel agency helps the most when increasing the market presence. Take an example of any travel agency mammoth – Expedia, MakeMyTrip, LonelyPlanet, or TravelTriangle, everyone features a brilliant website.
A user-friendly, mobile-friendly, and responsive website can rank well on Google, drive in organic traffic, and help you boost sales. You can show pictures, publish blogs, upload videos, insert travel products, mention your travel services, and connect with your potential customers through an attractive website.
7. By Delving Into Strategic Partnerships
The strategic partnership means creating a win-win situation for you and the other business you have collaborated with. In the travel industry, a strategic partnership example could be – A trekking agency having an arrangement with the campsite to offer a stay to the trekkers at a discounted price.
Being a travel agency, you should get involved in not many but a few strategic alliances to increase your yearly revenues fast.
Conclusion
To make your travel agency run successfully, keeping in contact with the past customers and finding new ones is equally essential. For this, these seven little hacks will be of great use. Remember, you should be regular, on time, and ready with a plan to market your travel agency well. Always be creative in your marketing efforts to pull the attention of the global travel audience.