This pandemic has been quite a rollercoaster for most tour and activity operators.
At the beginning, there was uncertainty: Governments were starting to close borders, and no one knew what to expect. Is it going to be a month, three months, a year? Everyone was pretending to be statisticians and clairvoyants. No one really had a clue.
Then, there was the frightening part: Everyone realized that things wouldn't go back to normal for a while. As time went by, we realized that this was not a two-or-three week deal. Real surveys and reports showed us that travel wouldn't go back to normal until 2021 or 2022 (some even say 2024?). It really was terrifying. We would see layoffs, business owners shutting down for good and major travel companies falling apart.
At the end of June, Asia en Europe were finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Many countries had apparently "won the battle against COVID", a few borders were opening again, and tour and activity operators started to think on how to target the local travelers. We were talking to hundreds of companies and you could feel the positive energy flowing, finally!
However, the past two weeks have been hard for a lot of operators. Although there are many operators in countries like Germany, seeing an explosion of local travelers, we are seeing many operators in other places not getting the volume of customers they expected or needed to sustain their business. And then there's the whole "second wave" fear we don't even want to touch on. And we really understand how frustrating all of that must be.
The reality is that, to this today, no one really knows how long this whole thing is going to last. Even with open borders and constant flights, it's hard to predict when real volume is going to come back for most operators. Therefore, today we want to introduce the "Free Forever Plan".
This plan is made for small and new tour and activity operators (as defined by those who have less than 125 bookings per month), but also aimed at operators who used to have a larger volume, but are on the process of recovering. We are allowing all these businesses to send automatic Booking Confirmations and Booking Reminders to customers.
This should give your customers peace of mind after booking, hopefully reducing some of the time you would otherwise spend answering customers questions, and making sure that your operation runs as smoothly as possible.
Yes, 99% of reservation systems will allow you to send these notifications via email, but in this day and age, this is not enough. Email is only a one way communication platform and it's not interactive. So how is sending these notifications better via WhatsApp?
While most of your customers will open their booking confirmation email (we've all had that client who didn't check the Spam folder), it is likely that they will fail to open their booking reminder as less than 10% of emails are opened by customers anyways. Open rates on WhatsApp, on the other hand, are above 98% (yes, that high!). Booking reminders are useful to ensure that your customers get to your meeting point on time, bring that thing you will need them to bring, and to reduce the amount of no-shows.
Conversations on WhatsApp are immediately stored in your customers' phone, email is not. That means that they can go and look for these messages, even if they don't have internet service. This is especially useful if you're sending them an address that they might need handy when looking for your meeting point.
You can send them a Google Maps location that they can directly tap to get directions to your pick-up or meeting point. And while, you could also potentially send them this via email, go back to point 1 on why that's just not going to cut it.
And did we mention we will help you do this for free? No account set up fees, no monthly fees, just FREE! If you are ready to get started just click here and select the "Free Plan" link.
But wait, there's more!
If you want to go above and beyond, but still don't have the numbers to justify enrolling in one of the regular plans we offer, we're giving you now the option to add two more messages to this lineup:
Cross-selling: Get more revenue out of every customer by sending a message with suggestions of other tours and services you have available. We see many operators trying to do this with their tour guides at the end of the tour, but at that time it's probably too late, many have already booked other plans. We can help you send this message a few days before your customer arrives. Most of our clients have at least 4% to 7% of their customers book another tour thanks to this message.
Get more POSITIVE reviews: Our system will ask customers how their experience went, if they rate it well, then it will ask them to provide a review on your favorite platform (Google, TripAdvisor, Yelp, etc.). Thus, providing you with more of those good reviews that will make you rank higher on listings. However, If they rate it poorly, it will ask them to provide more feedback directly by sending an email or calling your number. Hence, preventing those bad reviews from going online.
If you want to add these messages to your Free Plan, you will only need to pay $0.75 USD per booking processed (both messages, for one flat fee per booking). By providing a flat fee per booking, you will only pay for what you receive, keeping your costs down in times like this.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at go@touropp.com or start a conversation on WhatsApp here.