Getting yourself ready to sell tours online

With the advent of on-line booking technologies has come a new set of challenges facing tour operators and travel product resellers; how to structure, categorize, and organize travel products in a way that is easy for customers on line to search and buy. The largest challenge is that, until now, there has been no formal structure or rules that define how products should be created for the Web. Here are 5 simple rules for ensuring that your products will be ready for sale on line using a web booking engine.

1.What do you sell?

Although this seems like a very simple question, in fact, it is the toughest one for most tour operators to answer. The problem is that you must be able to break down your products into parts. By this I mean that if you are a tour supplier who does city tours, it is not enough to say that you sell tours, you must be able to say that you sell a City Tour that leaves at 9:00am from the Fairmont Hotel, located in Downtown Vancouver, BC Canada, that has twenty-five seats, and costs $50 per person. If you have ten departure times throughout the day, then you have ten products to sell, each with twenty-five seats.

2.What is a product and what is an option?

Now that you have defined exactly what it is you sell, you need to look at what the common aspects of your products might be. For example, if you sell the Vancouver City Tour, do you offer departures or various classes of vehicles, or special add ons? Your product is the highest level description of your tour, in this case Vancouver City Tour. If you offer ten departure times, then each of the departure times becomes an option for the product. In this way, you have defined for the customer that the tour regardless of the departure time will be the same. If however, you have a First Class Vancouver City Tour and a Standard City Tour where both tours are identical except that you use different vans and offer a meal plan with one, then these two would be considered separate products. In order to track availability for a given product, most booking systems will require that you break down the product into its smallest form. In most cases, this is an option for a tour.

3.To categorize or not to categorize

A common misconception when selling products on the web is that you have to categorize your products in order to make them easily found. This used to be true when there was no way to search for products. Now, however, it is much more important to ensure that your product description and information is complete and accurate and stored in a way that makes it easy to retrieve. The decision to use categories depends largely on the number of products you offer and how varied they are. For example, if you offer a hundred products ranging from event tickets to shuttle service, it probably makes sense to categorize them so that like products are grouped together. If, however, you only sell one type of product, for example city tours, you can probably get away with not having any categories at all. The benefit to not having categories is that your visitor will only require one click to view your products instead of two or three clicks.

4.Exceptions to the rules

In the world of brochures or printed advertisements, pricing required that you find a specific price for your product all season and then go with that price. This was due, in part, to the fact that you probably had to get thousands of rack brochures printed for the upcoming season. With the advent of web sales and Internet marketing, the pricing game has changed and has opened up more opportunities for tour operators to offer special pricing or season pricing that is more flexible. The key with setting these rules is to build rules for the exceptions and not the norms. For example, if you offer your product on Mondays and Wednesdays and your availability is fifty seats per day, then build your business rules so that your availability is zero except on Mondays and Wednesdays when it is fifty. This may seem incidental but it goes a long way to getting your mind set around the idea of exceptions. You work from the most common to the least common.

5.Expect the exceptions

Let’s face it, everybody wants something a little different. Tweak your products slightly in order to make the administration and distribution of your products simpler. If you charge a service fee for something that is unique to you and cannot be handled by your booking software, consider adding it to your description and terms and conditions that the charge will be billed when the tour is completed or simply add the fee into the cost of the tour. Bottom line, the simpler you make the pricing and structure of your tour, the simpler it will be for your customers to book the tour with you.

The Web has opened up all kinds of opportunities for tour operators. It has also helped to impose some standards where standards never existed. By doing so, however, tour operators need to re-examine their product offerings and modify them in order to make them more attractive to savvy on-line consumers. By taking the time to identify what you sell, categorizing them appropriately, and pricing them in a simple straightforward way, you will increase your chances of success with your on-line sales strategy.

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