travelinsights100

In celebration of Tourism Week 2009, I would like to present a series of posts that will provide you with the basic tools you’ll need to take the leap to on-line marketing and sales for your tourism business.  Although the principles are shared across many industries, I will be referring to tourism specific terms and technologies.

The first in my series is about the costs associated with developing your website.  There are a number of parts to a web project, however, there is one thing for sure, the overall costs of web projects have decreased.  Applications such as booking engines, content management systems, and hosting have all decreased in cost since they were introduced in the mid to late 1990s.  There are, in fact, many software as a service applications that can help your business get up and running without a large capital investment.

1. Website and Content Management System - There are a number of ways to go about designing your website.  You can choose to use a professional web designer to design your site from scratch, you can use a pre-designed template and have it professionally customized, or you can use a pre-designed template and modify it yourself.  The quality of the result will depend greatly on the quality of the original template and your skill or the skill of the designer.  If you have the budget, I would highly recommend using a professional designer where possible.  My reasons for this are:

• The design will be finely tuned to your brand.
• The navigation structure will be specific to your company and your product type (this may not be true if you use a template that is generic in scope).
• Your design will be unique (as opposed to a commonly used template).

Once your site is designed you will want to consider using a content management system to make it easy to manage and control the content of your website.  There are a number of CMS (content management system) applications available including opensource and proprietary brands.  As a start, I would recommend using Wordpress as a start.  Even though Wordpress is considered a blogging platform, it can be used as a traditional content management system with support for pages and a wide variety of plugins.  In addition to Wordpress, you may want to consider using Drupal or Joomla.  Both CMS platforms are opensource and have a very large (and strong) user/developer community.  Remember, the key is to use a system that is easy for you to use on a daily basis.  Before you choose a solution, make sure you try them out or ask for examples.

COST OF WEBSITE DESIGN & CMS IMPLEMENTATION: $3,000 - $8,000 UPFRONT

2. Web Booking Engine - In my opinion, if your website is not transactional, then you are losing out on a huge opportunity.  Your website is available 24/7/365, so why not give your customers the ability to book from you even if you’re asleep or out on tour.  There are a number of booking engines that are available, but only a handful have been designed specifically for SME operators that provide tours and activities.  A few things to consider looking for in a booking system include:

• Make sure you can fully co-brand the booking process. This is important because you want your customers to have a seamless and continuous experience.
• Ensure that the booking engine can integrate with your payment gateway or offer a secure manual payment method.
• Make sure the system is PCI compliant, which means that it has been tested by a certified security professional for possible vulnerabilities.  PCI compliance ensures that your transactions will be secured and that your customer credit card information is safe.
• You’ll want to make sure the system supports rich media including a photo and video gallery.  This is particularly important now because, according to PhoCusWright, videos can increase a consumer’s decision to book a travel product.  I believe this is especially true for experience based products like tours and activities.
• Your booking engine should be search engine friendly.  Look for systems that use search engine friendly urls and that products are easily indexed by the search engines.  This will save you a considerable amount of work in search engine optimization.
• I recommend that you consider using a hosted booking service or a software-as-a-service.  Booking engines that are provided as a service (as long as they meet the above criteria) are generally much easier to maintain then stand-a-lone systems and are more cost-effective.
• Distribution is a huge opportunity for every SME tour operator.  The biggest issue is that there are very few booking engines that provide distribution opportunities or channel management.
• Pricing for booking engines can vary greatly from one-time set-up fees, flat monthly payments, or pay-as-you-go pricing.  Ultimately, the best pricing will be based on your specific needs and the value delivered by the system.  Many of the most popular e-commerce systems, such as Shopify.com, are embracing a pay-as-you-go pricing model.  The main benefit of a pay-as-you-go model is that you only pay for the system when it delivers bookings.  There are generally low or no set-up costs and no monthly fees other than the transaction fees.  The draw back is that pay-as-you-go pricing can be expensive if you experience a high volume of booking.  Generally, many booking engines will negotiate better rates with you if you can show a high volume of sales.

COST OF WEB BOOKING ENGINE: $1,000 - $12,000 ANNUALLY

3. SEO and Online Marketing - Depending on your budget, you will want to consider making your website optimized for search engines.  The best way to go about this is to ensure that the content management system and the booking engine you choose are already optimized for search.  Wordpress and Rezgo for example are both optimized for search out of the box and provide RSS feeds for content.  There are even additional seo features available through Wordpress, like the Google Sitemap generator and SEO Optimizer, which allows you to customize the title, meta keywords, and descriptions for every page and post on your site.  In addition to your basic seo efforts, you will want to ensure that your company and products are available for review through sites TripReviews.com, which is one of the few customer review sites that supports tours and activities.

COST OF SEO & ON-LINE MARKETING: $500 - $4000 ANNUALLY

So, in conclusion, there are a number of options available to you as a business owner.  The web can be a powerful source of both marketing and sales for your tourism business.  The most important thing to remember is that your online presence will most likely be your most pervasive marketing tool and will be seen by more consumers than your rack card or brochure.  When considering how much to budget for your web strategy, consider how much your brochures cost to design and print and their conversion rate, not to mention the environmental impact of all that paper and ink.  Done well, your website can be a powerful and much greener sales channel for your tourism business.

Photo Credit:
Tour Bus http://www.flickr.com/photos/solarscot/2577242866/sizes/s/
Boat Cruise http://www.flickr.com/photos/wdwbarber/3030149814/sizes/s/