The sightseeing industry has a rowdy, fun-loving cousin - the personal watercraft tour. The market is dominated by youth culture and operates mainly at popular vacation destinations, so tour operators should tailor the booking experience to match. This post looks at jet ski tour marketing and its integration with watercraft tour booking software.
Let The Good Times Roll
From a marketing standpoint, historical walking tours, elegant sailboat tours, and family-friendly trolley tours each have their own demographics and aesthetics. Booking more guests means the online tour reservation experience must match the activity. That rule of thumb is especially applicable to personal watercraft tours, be it at the beach, on the lake or in a river. The jet ski crowd, predominantly of young people, like to have fun, pure and simple.
Around the world, watercraft sightseeing adventures are consistently ranked as one of the top ten activities, and thus, consistently one of the most profitable vertical markets within the sightseeing industry. It does help that many vacation destinations and resort hotels have their own fleets of personal watercraft, but few offer dedicated tours of their own. Some tour operators are contracted by resorts as a third-party service, using the resort-owned equipment, to take guests on sightseeing adventures. But the highest returns are earned by independent tour operators that control the experience from beginning to end.
Matching The Mania
One such independent tour operator is the Discover River Tours company in Georgia. The owners have cultivated a lucrative market in the Southeast and are currently offering tailored experiences in Georgia, Florida and Louisiana. The official website makes great use of photos to convey all the fun to be had, perfectly matching the activity type and youthful demographic.
On the island of Bermuda, K.S. WaterSports is the number one most popular watercraft tour provider of all. In addition to their “jet ski adventure tour” K.S. recently took over management of the WildCat Adventure Tour which takes guests on a thrilling high-speed tour on a converted racing boat. As far as tailoring the reservation experience to match the desired demographic, operators can find great inspiration on the K.S. Watersports website - videos, pictures convey a rowdy (and safe) good time.
In addition to the beaches of the Southeastern United States and tropical Bermuda, watercraft tours top the list in popularity on riverfronts of landlocked states, says USA Today:
In addition to its lakes, Tennessee's rivers also offer jet skiing opportunities. The Tennessee River in western Tennessee is known for its jet skiing. Dream Adventures USA offers a 60-mile guided jet-ski tour of the river that crosses the Alabama-Tennessee border. Each year, the Tennessee River 600 gathers personal watercraft riders on a multi-day charity tour of 600 miles worth of river between Knoxville and Paris Landing. In the Nashville area, the operator offers 120-mile tours of the Cumberland River.
The Dream Adventures USA website shows all manner of extreme sports including skydiving, off-roading and balloon rides right along side of the watercraft tours.
Choose Your Watercraft Tour Booking Software Wisely
If you are considering expanding your expertise as a sightseeing guide to include watercraft tours, you can look to the way in which rock and roll concerts are marketed as a guide. The demographic that enjoys the types of activities Dream Adventures USA offers may not respond to stock photography, or a re-purposing the marketing copy from a wine tasting tour. Think of the mantra used by the hippies of the 1960s - “If it’s too loud, you’re too old!”
Taking marketing queues from rock concerts and the X-Games is just the first step. As a business, you will need to use a watercraft tour booking software that compliment the experience. Not every online booking software supports unique photos for display on a per-tour basis. And a paragraph of plain text and a phone number is unlikely to resonate with the jet ski crowd.
ThunderTix watercraft tour booking software has the tools to create a visually rich reservation experience, one that matches what youth culture expects. As our customer, your adventure tour inherits our years of experience as the online ticketing technology for major rock concerts.
Plus, we are well versed in the needs of tour operators. You need the tools that can keep pace with your busy schedule of daily tours and those tools must be able to adapt to special circumstances like a holiday rush. Our tour management technology lets you set at tour date and and time then propagate for every day of the year – all at once – no need to enter the same date and time over and over.
And when it comes to additional bookings from social media - omnipresent in the lifestyle of youth culture - our custom confirmation feature is just what you need!