Travelers have thousands of options when it comes to organizing trips online. They can find airlines, agencies, hotels, Airbnbs, and vehicle rentals online. The competition is intense, therefore, players in the travel and hospitality industry have to optimize the entire customer journey- from convincing a client to book to post-trip recommendation. Here are 6 actionable ways to boost conversions and lead generation in tourism, travel, and hospitality.
1. Inspire Your Audience
When a person first decides to travel, they probably feel inspired by a location they noticed in a social media post, vlog, or blog post on a travel website. They are not ready to book in this stage but need the inspiration to convert.
Invite your potential clients to travel to consider a destination through inspiring photos, videos, and posts. You can work with influencers, professional photographers, and social media experts to create inspirational content for your blog that entices the visitor to book a trip with you.
As you grab their attention, remember to respond to comments and share links to travel packages or booking landing pages to encourage lead generation. Then, as the visitors browse your site, encourage them to fill out contact forms to register and create profiles to access offers and discounts on your site.
This way, when it’s time for the traveler to book a hotel room, rent a travel vehicle, or consult a travel agency, they’ll have your brand in mind.
2. Make Your Site Simple, Smart, and Friendly
Visitors browsing your site in the travel and hospitality industry operate on the “browsing and finding” mode. They want to easily search and find items, packages, and information on your site.
For example, if you operate a travel agency site that offers hotels, flights, cars, and vacation packages and bookings, provide the search and save box right on the homepage. Why? You want to encourage the visitors to interact with your site and answer their most critical questions with practical results.
Usually, search boxes have fields such as location, check-in date, check-out date, number of hotel rooms, or number of travelers. When visitors land on your page, they can key in the details and access potential offers from different hotels and resorts in their area of travel, with accompanying room booking fees depending on the travel date.
Now while the search feature is excellent for boosting engagement, it’s equally important to have the correct information at hand to serve your audience. Search wide and long for information about travel destinations, hotels, and car rentals before setting up your site. Make sure visitors have access to as much information as possible so that they can sign up with your travel agency.
Lastly, remember to increase site speed and optimize your website for mobile. Visitors should enjoy a seamless experience while browsing and interacting with your site on mobile. A slow and unresponsive website is a quick way to lose leads.
3. Help Your Visitors Choose
There are hundreds of options for destinations to tour, hotel stays, places to eat, and ways to travel. As such, people get overwhelmed and find it challenging to choose the right combinations. You can help your visitors choose by giving them options.
For example, if you sell holiday packages, present organized holiday packages with full details on destinations, travel, accommodation, and prices. If you run a hotel and restaurant, share complete information about the cost of accommodation for individuals, itineraries, couples, families, and groups. Mention if the total includes meals, and if possible, dive further into available menus and costs.
4. Have Extensive and Clear Price Details
Prices are a significant deciding factor for most travelers. Therefore, it would be best to show the visitor the value of registering with you or booking your services. You need to provide all price details from any consultation fees, booking fees, cost of accommodation, travel, meals, and any ancillaries a visitor may need.
For instance, price prediction is an excellent way to boost your travel agencies lead generation and encourage conversions. Using predictive prices based on seasons is an excellent way to encourage visitors to use your site.
You should also provide visitors with as many ancillaries as possible. Make it easier for them to add details such as transportation costs to and from airports, train stations, and bus stations. For air travel, you can add extra luggage and seat selection expenses. For hotels, ancillaries may include the costs of alcoholic beverages, calls from hotel room phones, or snacks in the mini-fridge.
5. Show Reviews and Ratings
Build trust with your customers by showing them your company reviews. You can share reviews on your website and join independent review platforms such as Yelp, Google My Business, Expedia, TripAdvisor, and Expedia for customers to leave independent reviews.
Remember to provide quality services to get the best reviews for your business. You should also respond to negative reviews and compensate and assist travelers during negative experiences. This way, you can preserve your business’s reputation and encourage new visitors to sign up with you.
6. Optimize Your Booking Forms
Form optimization is a critical part of lead generation in travel and hospitality. After your visitors have browsed the site, identified their ideal travel locations, and chosen suitable packages, you don’t want them to abandon their booking.
You can optimize the booking process by investing in well-designed intelligent travel, rental, and hotel booking forms by Responser that guide the user as they book their package. The forms should use relevant fields and only ask for pertinent information. You can also use predicative forms in each field to guide the user on the details they should fill in.
Add a progress bar on the page to help visitors track their progress as they key in details. Also, divide the booking process into identifiable steps to encourage the visitor to complete the process. Finally, add a clickable confirm button to affirm their action at the end of the process.
Furthermore, with the right lead management software, you can track booking forms, identify when visitors abandon forms and then test new formats to encourage sign-ups.
With these six actionable techniques, you can optimize conversions on your site and boost your travel and hospitality business.