10 Ways to Be More Productive and Increase Sales as a Tour Operator

Many of us find it challenging to strike the perfect balance between productivity and the sales process. Being productive is an important issue for tour operators. For example, during the high season, it can be difficult to find time to get everything done. And in the low season, you may procrastinate due to a lack of urgency. If you’re not happy with your productivity, don’t worry – join the club of hundreds of other tour operators who feel the same way. Your workdays are not typically designed to be highly productive as many standard work practices make it hard for you to get things done, instead of making it easier.

However, you’re in luck. We’ve put together a list of 10 Tips for Productivity (that are quick to implement) to help you to be more productive and increase sales for your business.

Let’s get to it.

1. Manage Your Time Wisely

The first step to being productive is managing your time wisely. It is a vital step for all businesses, from start-ups to tour operators. There are so many moving pieces to your business that if you do not manage your time well, by focusing on what is important and what is not urgent, you could easily lose your grip on the company.

You may be tempted to give attention to things that are pressing, but not necessarily important. That is normal. But that is also how important things get compromised. So start every week by managing your time well and create a list of important things that need to get done that week and the not-so-important things that could get done later, and focus accordingly.

2. Focus on the Benefits of Your Product/Service

You should always focus on being unique and listen to your customers. Your customers are the reason why you exist so you should always look out for them in order to improve. One of the ways you can do that is to ask them to write a review of your product or service. They will feel happy that you care about their opinion and in exchange, you will get valuable information on new business ideas and plans.

One way to collect reviews is through TripAdvisor. Make sure to read our guide about TripAdvisor’s Review Express in order to automate your review process.

This tip is particularly essential since you’re in the service industry.

3. Use Social Media

It is essential for you to use social media on a daily basis as part of your sales process. It is the place where you can reach people of all age groups. It is also where groups of people (from all backgrounds) congregate to talk about travel products and services. Furthermore, they share their experiences and preferences on various platforms.

You can encourage those people to follow you and talk about you by creating relevant and engaging content. You can create a variety of posts (pictures, videos, questions, and statuses) to get them to use or recommend your products and services. Listen to their comments and feedback to help your business to become better.

In case you received negative customer reviews, here are ways to handle them properly.

4. Use an Online Booking Software

Selling your offers online is the best, most productive, convenient, and effective way to manage your tour operations business. You can simply and easily give your visitors the option of booking your products online via your webpage.

The additional advantage of doing this s that you can receive reservations 24/7. Your customers will also have a way to easily and safely book and pay for your products and services. It is a necessary part of having a good customer care policy.

New call-to-action

5. Add a Complementary Offer

If you are having trouble increasing your revenue per customer, adding a complementary offer to the service or the experience is the simplest and easiest way to go. For example, if you sell tours, you can offer dinner or lunch options to go with the tours. You could also offer additional equipment for activity tours such as actions cameras or helmets.

In order to do this effectively, you need to know exactly what your customers want. For example, if you offer night time romantic horse carriage tours around the city, perhaps you could offer some wine and tapas before the tour to make the experience more romantic.

Before you get started, make sure that your software enables you to add and manage complementary and special offers.

Regiondo helps you to create complementary offers – make sure to check out our Merchandising Feature!

6. Collaborate

As a tour operator in the EU, you are likely trying to cater to a large and growing market. That being said, you may also be constrained by a lack of resources. It is thus essential that you micromanage your finances and maximize collaboration opportunities to become more profitable, quicker.

You can use complementary sales partnerships or shared services to lessen the strain on your business. Let’s say that you’re offering a city tour. You can collaborate with restaurants or businesses to provide value-added services so you don’t have to pay out of pocket for them.

7. Combine Different Travel Products

Why? Because you should always try to create unique experiences. Combining different travel products to create a unique package will pay off nicely and save you time and effort in attracting customers – because customers naturally gravitate towards unique products and services.

For example, you can create a package that offers a better price by selling flights, accommodation, and activities together, in a single package. This can help both you and your customers. We summarized the experience tourism trend and its effects on the leisure industry in this blog post.

8. Innovate But Don’t Sacrifice Productivity

Innovation and productivity are mutually beneficial relationships. You may be caught up trying to innovate so fast that you overlook important management aspects like profits, productivity, and systems processes.

You simply cannot make the excuse that you are not productive because you’re too busy trying to be innovative. Higher productivity usually means better use of limited resources. So innovation and productivity should go hand in hand in your business. In order to become more productive, you could use tools like Google Analytics. In case you are not experienced with this, we created a short manual for beginners.

9. Plan for Productivity

We already covered the importance of managing your time. However, planning for productivity is different.

If you have 8-10 work hours a day, you should plan your work in a way that will allow you to complete your work in 60 percent of that time. 20 percent of your time should go towards allocating and delegating repeatable work. The other 40 percent should go towards untimely problems that arise daily.

Furthermore, completing 100 percent of your planned work in 60 percent of your time also sets a good example to your co-workers on the importance of efficient planning.

10. Write Everything Down

Do you ever have days when you feel like you’re both really busy and not getting anything done? It’s quite common – we can all raise our hands to that. The reason for that is likely because you are stuck on tasks that you can’t address at the moment.

Perhaps you need to talk to someone who is not currently available? Maybe you need to do more research? Instead of thinking about the task, that seems to be beyond your control at the given moment, just write it down.

If you write down the things you’re stuck on or worries that are distracting you, they won’t have to spend entire days or weeks running around in your head.

Conclusion

There is no single productivity system that works for everyone. You need to simply pick out your biggest challenges and try to address those by implementing different tips and tricks. These ten tips cover a range of tactics and strategies that can help you create a balanced plan to be more productive and profitable in your business.
New call-to-action
You might also like:

Tags:

Get a personalized demo or create your free account now

Take your business to the next level with Regiondo - it's free to get started and you don't need a credit card.