Even though a tour is considered "unusual", it's not unusual for alternative or quirky guided tours to be very successful businesses when properly marketed. Here are some examples, as well as how to get more bookings with tour guide management software.
Tourism, both domestic and international, is about to peak over the next few weeks as couples and families depart on vacation. Operators of unusual or “quirky” tours are making the effort to tap into the upcoming peak travel period through marketing (particularly social media) and with the online tour guide management software used for bookings.
One example is the ABBA Walk in Stockholm. Music fans venturing to Europe will find the ABBA Walk serves their need for a fun activity as well as a trip down musical memory lane. The band (ABBA) for which the tour is named after are legends in Stockholm which makes the quirky guided tour a “must do” while on vacation in Europe. The tour operator does an excellent job of marketing by reaching a wider audience that may not always equate sightseeing with a rock and roll. The walking tour also makes excellent use of social media to bring awareness to tourists, both in Europe and from the United States.
While on the subject of marketing unusual tours through social media, travel blog Go Nomad is savvy enough to have a dedicated "unusual tours" page on the wildly popular Pinterest sharing site. It is assumed your unusual guided tour is already making full use of Facebook, Twitter and google+, but adding Pinterest to your list of marketing platforms is recommended as well.
According to SEO Sky "companies have reported that Pinterest now generates almost as much traffic as using Twitter and Facebook alone in their social media management."
The unofficial slogan of the City of Austin, Texas is "Keep Austin weird", meaning it takes great pride in its off-beat, alternative attitude to everything, including guided tours. Holding true to its axiom the City of Austin was recently spotlighted by Travel Maestro, a frequently visited resource for vacationers.
If you’re in Austin between April and November, be sure to make your way to the Congress Street bridge any night at dusk to see the phenomenon of thousands of bats flying out for their nightly foraging expedition. The best views are from above on the wide sidewalk of the bridge itself, a grassy park on the banks of the river (bring your own blanket or chairs) and tour boats or pedal bikes on the water below.
While specialized sightseeing in Austin is a year round business, unusual guided tour operators know that there are peaks and valleys to bookings. Spikes in the tour calendars coincide with seasonal visits by out-of-towners and a frequent source driving new customers are third party websites. “Weird” tours in Austin market themselves on mainstream external sources, like the Texas tourism website [also using Pinterest], through B2B agreements. One of the best ways to monetize these types of B2B agreements resides inside the tour guide management software.
As mentioned in a previous post, the ability to sell tickets directly on a third-party website is a function of “embeds” from the software used by the operator. Using embeds, small pieces of computer code that are added to the third-party website, the tour operator can get additional bookings on any third-party website (tourism board, local TV station, popular blogs), without any geographical restrictions.
Your tour may be "unusual" (in a good way) but it's not unusual for your guided tour to get more bookings when you choose the right tour guide management software.
The ThunderTix plan for guided tour operators includes sophisticated embeds as part of our new Event Restricted Access feature. If your busy schedule doesn't allow for protracted back-and-forth exchanges with a dozen different webmasters at third party websites, you can securely give them access to your ThunderTix account and let them grab the embed code themselves.
To learn more about our embed codes, take a look at our how to set up a ticket selling website guide.
Of course when it comes to your booking sales data, extending account access can be fraught with worry, especially with 3rd parties that are not directly under your control. You need very fine-grained control to ensure the best security practices while still making it easy for the webmasters of tourism sites to present your tour guests to their visitors– and make reservations. The ThunderTix Event Restricted Access feature lets 3rd parties get the embed codes to allow for your bookings to be made on their external websites without you having to hand over the keys to your entire kingdom.
Need to switch to ThunderTix right away? Our pricing structures for tour guides is tailored to meet your special circumstance. We have several plan levels to choose from, each one based on your booking volumes - beware of other tour guide management software that charges you high fees per booking! ThunderTix never charges you per-booking fees.
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