On the one hand, thousands of travelers are forced to cancel their trips or alter their plans. On the other hand, people who haven’t booked a vacation are now considering the idea of not taking a trip at all. According to Bloomberg, “there was a slowdown in demand in June in the US and UK, for both international and domestic travel.” Airline strikes are not the only reason behind this alarming trend. Inflation is taking a significant toll on spending habits, and most individuals are adjusting to soaring prices by cutting off non-essential purchases.

Due to these difficult circumstances, businesses in the leisure industry are registering higher-than-usual cancellation rates compared to the pre-Covid era. In this article, after deep diving into the reasons behind the strikes, I’ll give you some tips on reducing cancellations and no-shows. With the right strategies in place, you’ll avoid losing revenue while retaining customer loyalty and satisfaction. Sounds promising, right? Without further ado, let’s jump right into it!

Europe’s airline strikes

First of all, what’s happening?

As mentioned in the previous paragraph, employees of all the major European airlines and airports are striking. The first walkouts happened this June, causing long queues at check-ins, chaos at security gates, delays, and cancellations. To give you a few examples:

• British Airways has announced it will scrape 10,300 flights(!) before the end of October.
• SAS AB (the biggest airline company in Scandinavia) has canceled hundreds of flights as over 1,000 of its pilots decided to walk out. The strike was so unsettling that the company had to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US to cut debt.
• In June, over 4,000 Italian travelers suffered from cancellations because air traffic controllers went on strike. Italian trade unions have also threatened further sit-downs in the following months.

The worst thing is that strikes aren’t threatening only air transport. The London Underground was closed for long periods in June, and more walkouts will happen in August.

I get it, but why are workers striking?

The short answer is that workers are fighting for better wages and more hiring. The long answer is that “getting back to normal” is much more complex than we thought. Sadly, the pandemic has severely hit the travel industry. During the last two and a half years, airlines and airports have laid off hundreds of thousands of baggage handlers, ground crews, and other employees. Plenty of airlines have also slashed the salaries of their staff and haven’t restored them yet to pre-Covid levels.

As you can imagine, many of these workers have found jobs in other industries and don’t plan to return. Between the pay cuts and the hectic schedule, working in aviation has become highly unattractive. Overworked and underpaid, airline staffers see striking as the last resort to get better working conditions. Can we blame them?

Honestly, this sucks. But the situation will improve soon, right?

I’m sorry to deliver bad news, but I wouldn’t be so sure about that. According to Roger Jones, head of equities at London & Capital, “Cost inflation, especially fuel and wages, is aggravating the situation and making it a really difficult operating environment, which is weighing on profitability.” In other words, airlines won’t be able to offer better wages in the short term.

For the same reason, hiring new employees won’t be a quick process. And even once they are able to find them, vetting applicants and training the recruits will take several months. As the wise man once said, there are no simple solutions to complex problems.

Sounds like a nightmare. What are the airlines and airports affected?

We’ve already spoken about British Airways and SAS AB, but they’re far from being the only companies affected by the strikes. Europe is in turmoil, and the list of airlines involved in the protest is growing daily.

• Ryanair – Between June and July, Ryanair’s employees have gone on strike multiple times in Belgium, Portugal, France, Italy, and Spain. In the Iberian Peninsula, cabin crew union members plan weekly walkouts until the end of the year.
• Easyjet – Crew members have taken industrial actions during the second half of July and will organize more strikes in the upcoming months. The destinations most affected by the disruption are Malaga, Palma, and Barcelona.
• Italy – Trade unions have organized strikes all over the summer season. Pilots and flight attendants from Volotea, CrewLink, Ryanair, and Malta Air are involved in the walkouts.
• Paris – Charles de Gaulle airport employees have been striking multiple times between June and July and are planning to take further actions in the upcoming months.

How to reduce cancellations

Cancellations and no-shows are just a part of the business for tour and activities providers. However, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do something about it, even during exceptional times like the ones we’re living. With the right policies, you can protect your revenue without antagonizing your beloved customers.

Be flexible

There’s no way around it: during this period, the name of the game is “flexibility.” Flustered by the strikes, your customers will probably fear to book any activity if they can’t cancel them with short notice. I suggest allowing your clients to cancel their tickets free of charge up to one day before the tour takes place.

Encourage rescheduling and buying vouchers

When a customer cancels their reservation, send them a message highlighting the option to reschedule or, if they’re still unsure about the date, to buy a voucher. You can sweeten the deal by adding some small perks, like a free merchandise item.

Make your customers excited with pre-arrival emails

When clients book their tours and activities in advance, it can be a long time before their vacation actually starts. To make the waiting period more pleasant, build anticipation with a series of pre-arrival emails. That’s the perfect opportunity to create excitement and check your clients’ expectations. Furthermore, you can also entice them with cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

Upselling and cross-selling to build commitment

Speaking of which, upselling and cross-selling aren’t just strategies to generate additional revenue; they’re also effective in making your clients committed to their booking. Offer them the chance to buy a merchandise item, showcase your other activities, and suggest they book a premium version of the tour they already reserved. If they feel invested in your experience, they will be less likely to cancel.

Focus your marketing efforts on the locals

It goes without saying that locals are less impacted by airline strikes than tourists from abroad. Given the rise of the staycation trend, try to attract regional travelers! They are less likely to cancel due to force majeure, and if you’re able to build loyalty, chances are they will come more often than foreigners to experience your activities.

Reducing cancellations is easy — with the right tools

I’m sure these tips will help you receive fewer cancellations, but remember that planning a good strategy is not enough; what matters the most is applying it efficiently. For instance, it would be a huge time sink to contact your customers one by one trying to encourage them to reschedule after a cancellation. Thankfully, plenty of applications can help you automate menial tasks and better organize your business.

If you’re looking for an all-in-one solution that lets you sell tickets online, manage bookings, and connect with leading OTAs, check out Regiondo. With our software, you’ll get up to 35% more bookings, you’ll significantly lower your cancellation rate, and you’ll communicate with your customers much more efficiently thanks to the integrated CRM. For more information, book a free demo with one of our consultants.

The post Air traveling is a mess: here’s what’s happening and how you can reduce cancellations appeared first on Regiondo.

In 1960, E. Jerome McCarthy, a marketer, introduced the four Ps classification of product, promotion, price, and place to refine the marketing mix concept. Three more Ps were later added to take into account the unique characteristics of the services market: physical evidence, people, and processes.

The service marketing mix is also referred to as an extended marketing mix that is an essential part of any service marketing plan. It assumes that the service is a product but adds 3 more Ps which are integral to optimum service delivery.

Let’s look at all 7 Ps.

Product

This P refers to a product that a consumer needs and wants to buy and is at the heart of the marketing mix. In the traditional sense, the product is tangible. However, typically, in the service industry, your product is not easy to examine and scrutinize – it is almost always intangible.

Your service product thus needs to be designed carefully. What most successful tour and activity operators do is conduct service blueprinting in order to properly define their services.

Price

This P involves working out a price for your business that is profitable, attractive to customers, and competitive in your niche. Pricing also depends on multiple other factors like:

• The geographic location of the destination.
• Seasonality, which is arguably the most important factor in pricing.
• Competitor pricing.
• Government regulations.

The travel and tourism industry responds to its highly complex pricing at two levels. The first one deals with marketing strategy which consists of product positioning, long term returns on investments, cost-effectiveness, etc.

The second one pertains to the marketing operations or strategies where the prices are manipulated to correspond with demand and competition.

All in all, your final pricing needs to take into consideration labor, material, and overhead costs. Adding a profit mark-up to that gives you your final service price. You could also charge extra for customer-friendly options like shuttle services.

Promotion

Promotion is how customers find out about your tour operation business. It is the different ways you communicate, sell, and describe your services. So when you create your promotional messages, you need to use terms that highlight the benefits of your services as opposed to its features.

Tourism companies need to inform and persuade potential customers. The right promotion will determine how you maximize the frequency of visits. Promotion in the tourism industry primarily focuses on four effective methods: Advertising, publicity, sales promotions, and word-of-mouth.

Advertising

You need to advertise to give important information to prospective tourists. The goal is to create awareness of your tour and activity offers by using visual scenes of events, venues, and activities as your main tools. For example, you can advertise visuals of beautiful cathedrals, white water rafting, relaxing massages, etc.

Publicity

Publicity is another major marketing tool. Building relationships with media people will help project a positive image of your tour operation to your prospective customers. Your publicity strategy could include regular stories and photos in newspapers, travel publications, blogs, social media, etc.

Sales Promotion

Sales promotions of short-term activities in order to boost sales during peak demand seasons are also a good way for you to gain market share. Promotions are particularly helpful if you are launching a new offer. The main tools could be seasonal offers or special sales (e.g. for activities during the week or during the low season).

Word-Of-Mouth

Word-of-mouth is arguably one of the most important and most effective promotional tools. However, to succeed in using it, you need to provide quality services. You also need to keep an eye out for opinion leaders or influencers; and take care of them so that they can promote your service via word of mouth. Nowadays the leader of online word-of-mouth is definitely TripAdvisor. Check out this article to improve your TripAdvisor ranking quickly.

Place

Place is where your customers buy your service and how you enable them to view and evaluate it. You should think about how to best reach your customer base, how they will consume your service, and when they make their purchasing decision.

Since your services are largely intangible, your best bet may be to sell exclusively online. The good news is that you can use various distribution strategies that reflect your objectives.

Physical Evidence

The main problem with services is that the customer cannot test it out before purchasing them – they cannot be produced until they are needed. It is thus important for you to offer other means by which a potential customer can make an informed decision on the value and quality of your service without making an actual commitment to buy it.

You can highlight testimonials from previous customers in brochures and make use of images. If you operate from a physical office, you should make sure that the space accurately exhibits the nature or branding of your business in the design and layout of the space.

Tourist attractions can be expensive for most customers so it is important that you make it more tangible for them by highlighting tangible items like the canoe they will sit in, the Segway they will use, route maps, etc. in your marketing materials.

Brochures, in particular, are important in showing how different elements of your offerings are well thought out. So you should include all the relevant information that a customer needs to know in order to gauge value.

People

The service industry relies heavily on professionalism and customer service. In services marketing, customers have difficulty differentiating between the person they engage with and the actual service. That shows that customer care is absolutely critical for your business. So any employee that has a customer-facing role must be properly trained for the position.

A lot of tour operators are actively focused on training their staff in interpersonal skills, customer service as well as customer satisfaction. They also need to be trained to have extensive knowledge of your product.

Want to know how to recruit the best tour guides? Read our blog article on how to differentiate between good and bad tour guides.

Processes

This refers to the different stages of a process to deliver a service to a customer. Services often need to be booked in advance in order to deliver the service to customer expectations and requirements; unlike tangible goods which are kept in stock and ready for purchase at any time.

As a tour and activity operator, you need to ensure that all stages of the processes preceding delivery of your service are planned and executed as well as possible.

The typical operation process for most tour and activity operators is as follows:

Tour information: The information regarding travel must be provided at a convenient location where a prospective customer can seek information about their tour.

Preparing itineraries: This is the series of operations that are required to plan a tour.

Liaising with service providers: Before travel is sold to a customer, contracts have to be in place with the providers of various services including transportation companies, hotels, coaches for sightseeing, etc.

Planning and costing tours: When the contracts and arrangements are finalized, then you can start planning and costing the tour. That will depend on the tour selected as well as individual requirements.

Ticketing: This typically involves online reservation systems and booking software.

Conclusion

That’s the marketing mix for tour and activity operators. Use this as a guide in setting up your marketing and sales strategies in order to maximize your efforts in those areas.

You might also like:

• 10 Ways To Get Free Advertising for Tours and Activities
• Dynamic Pricing: The Do’s and Don’ts For Activity Providers
• How to Effectively Combine a Multi-channel Strategy and Direct Sales
• How to Boost Your Sales with Add-ons and Merchandise

The post The 7 Ps of Marketing for Tour and Activity Operators appeared first on Regiondo.

• Which channels correspond to your business and culture?
• How do your customers buy? Are they online? How do you optimize online sales?
• Can you leverage technology to manage multiple channels successfully?

These are some of the questions we’re going to explore today.

But first, let’s look at the key stages in a customer’s buying cycle so we understand how your sales strategy fits in the overall picture.

A typical customer buying cycle

Depending on the stage of their research, a customer will be sensitive to different content. Typically, the stages look as follows:

1) Awareness: If he or she seeks inspiration, their web search will probably tend to lead them to platforms for comparison or suggestions such as TripAdvisor.

2) Consideration: Once they define their wishes, choosing a highly reputable company is extremely important.

3) Decision: Customers will be looking for recommendations, along with visiting your site. Not only is the quality of your content important, but the fact that customers can contact you directly and book online is crucial.

As you can see, a customer is likely to go through multiple interactions with your brand before making a purchase. This could be on review platforms, online travel agencies (OTAs), social media, or your website. This is why developing a multi-channel strategy is important to your success.

But you can’t be everywhere – this can eat up your time and resources going after channels that are not relevant to your customers. You need to choose several core distribution paths as the center of your sales strategy.

So which ones should you pick? 

Which channels correspond to your business and culture?

How do you optimize online sales?

The post How to Effectively Combine a Multi-channel Strategy and Direct Sales appeared first on Regiondo.

Most bookings are made within 72 hours of the activity date (63%) and 40% of those bookings are made on the same day.

That’s in stark contrast to lodging and airfare which are typically booked well in advance.

Keeping that in mind, in this article we’ll look at the do’s and don’ts of dynamic pricing as it relates to the leisure and entertainment industry. We’ll share best practices that let you minimize quiet days, plan in advance, delight your customers, and maximize revenue.

But first, let’s look at what dynamic pricing actually means along with some examples to solidify our understanding.

Ready? Let’s go.

Did you know you can set up your online store with Regiondo in less than 5 minutes? Try it for free to reach your customers at the right time and place with customized offers.

What is dynamic pricing?

In simple terms, dynamic pricing means adjusting your prices to meet changes in customer demand. Dynamic pricing can be seen in industries such as airlines and hospitality. Hotels often increase room prices during holidays and other busy times. At the same time, you can fly across Europe for the price of dinner during low season.

When it comes to the leisure industry, common examples of dynamic pricing include seasonal tickets, group discounts, and early-bird promotions.

The Do’s of dynamic pricing

Disclaimer: As every business is different, we cannot guarantee positive results and you are ultimately responsible for the success or failure of your initiatives.

1) Use dynamic pricing sparingly

Daily or hourly changes can do more harm than good in an industry that relies heavily on referrals and online reviews. Would you be happy if you had to pay more than your friends who recommended an activity? I thought so. Although you should test different price points, make sure you spread tests over a longer time period and meet customer expectations.

2) Seasonal pricing and weather-based marketing

Seasonal pricing is a common practice for many outdoor tours and attractions. A less common strategy that yields a similar result is weather-based marketing. One advantage of increasingly accurate weather forecasts is the ability to create promotions with more confidence. If you know the weather this week will be bad, why not introduce a temporary discount to attract more people? Combine that with social media, your agent network, and mailing list to get maximum exposure.

3) Early bird tickets and group discounts

Remember the research about bookings we mentioned earlier? People often book within 72 hours of the activity date which can expose you to a lot of risk. Due to factors outside of your control, you may end up working well below capacity or getting overbooked. This is why early bird tickets and group discounts are so helpful. By encouraging customers to buy early and in bulk, it’s easier to plan ahead and manage your capacity.

4) Make sure your tests are accurate

When testing prices, make sure you have enough data and minimize external influences. Try to compare similar times of the year or month, always using the same time frame. After all, the people who visit in the summer could be much different to the ones visiting in autumn. So make sure you make accurate comparisons and use both revenue and net profit to deduct conclusions from your tests.

What to avoid

Your price adjustments should ultimately serve your customers, not just your business. This is why we’ve also prepared a set of practices you might want to skip in order to avoid disappointing them.

Unreasonable price discrimination

Ensure your price changes make absolute sense. Seasonal pricing and early bird tickets are something people are used to. It’s easy to understand that an outdoor activity will be more in demand during the summer. On the other hand, checking prices one day and finding they are higher on the next with no apparent reason delivers a bad experience to your customers.

High-frequency price changes

Leave hourly and daily changes to large online retailers like Amazon. This can bring huge complexity to your pricing strategy. Also, your customers are likely better connected to each other compared to Amazon’s which rarely know what price other people see for a product.

Pricing based on location, age, and gender

While this is not illegal, it may create complaints and lead people to try and cheat. Think about who is most likely to enjoy your service and create value around them. You can give a student discount, but will they appreciate it more than a family of 4 who may come back again and again over time?

Conclusion

Now you know what dynamic pricing is along with some examples to make it concrete. You also know why it’s helpful for improving customer service, allowing more people to experience your activity, and maximizing revenue. Finally, you have a set of best practices and things to avoid when it comes to dynamic pricing. If you haven’t already, now’s the time to try it out.

You might also like:

• The 7 Ps of Marketing for Tour and Activity Operators
• 10 Ways To Get Free Advertising for Tours and Activities
• How to Effectively Combine a Multi-channel Strategy and Direct Sales
• How to Boost Your Sales with Add-ons and Merchandise

The post Dynamic Pricing: The Do’s And Don’ts for Tours and Activities appeared first on Regiondo.

1. Free classified ads sites

Classified ads websites work like the ad sections in newspapers with one exception – they are free. So you can connect to people who may be looking for a tour or activity like yours without paying anything. Some of the more prominent examples on the web are sites like Gumtree in the UK, QUOKA in Germany, Subito in Italy, and Leboncoin in France. All you need to do is visit the bigger sites in your country and create a free listing.

2. Online directories

Another way to get free advertising is by getting listed on relevant directory sites. These normally list and rank services based on some criteria, such as customer ratings and reviews. Prominent examples here are Yelp, Foursquare, and Tripadvisor. So if you haven’t already, go there and claim your business page.

3. Get featured on listicles

Listicles are long resource pages that are frequently published by travel bloggers and other websites in the leisure industry. For example, a listicle may include something like “The best places to visit in Berlin”. If you contact the blog owner or webmaster, they can include you in such a listicle so you can reach their audience as well.

Just search for “things to do in {your city}” on Google and make a note of the top results and their contact pages. Then, approach the website and offer something in return for being included. This can be promoting the blog on your own website or at least sharing the article on social media once you’re included.

4. Google My Business

Google My Business lets you create a local listing on Google so people can find you on Google Maps. You will also appear in search results when people look for relevant local services (e.g. “segway near me”).

As travelers and even locals often use Google Maps to get around, it’s a great idea to get listed there so people can find you much easier. As a free option that gets you so much visibility, this one is a no-brainer.

5.  Guest blogging

While you may want to post on your own blog, guest posting on other sites is a great way to increase your reach for free. Similar to listicles, you will get access to the website’s audience while earning a backlink which helps you rank higher in search engines.

Guest blogging is a great way to advertise for free as it’s a win-win situation for both you and the website who is getting extra content for free. If you haven’t already, try and search for travel and leisure blogs on Google that are related to your tour or activity. Next, ask if they are looking for a guest post on a topic you know well. You can use tools like SimilarWeb and Moz to estimate the website’s reach and their domain authority.

6. Post in niche communities

While forums have traditionally been the prime example of where people hang out and communicate online, nowadays you have even better ways to reach niche communities. With websites like Quora and Reddit, you can quickly get access to a large relevant audience for free. On top of that, tools like Slack and WhatsApp are also becoming increasingly popular as a place to build and grow online communities.

All these services are free – you just need to register and search for relevant keywords for your tour or activity. Buy/sell groups and traveler communities in your city are a particularly good place to start. Once you join a particular group, start contributing to the discussions and include a link to your website in your profile description. Try to avoid promoting your business outright before you’ve developed some trust and authority within the group.

7. Give interviews on podcasts or articles

Another way to get free advertising while giving value to someone else is by contributing to podcasts or articles. If you have a strong opinion about your industry or matters concerning your customer persona, giving interviews is a great way to reach your audience.

Services like HARO allow you to quickly connect with journalists who are looking for industry experts to contribute to their articles. In addition, more and more podcasts are constantly created which are often highly targeted towards a specific group and are on the lookout for interesting guests to feature.

Just search on iTunes or another audio marketplace to find relevant podcasts and the contact details of the hosts. With some persistence, you might land incredible opportunities and reach thousands of people.

8. Giveaways and contests

While this is not exactly free advertising, it’s certainly an overlooked way to gain more reach and raise awareness about your tour or activity business. You can offer people a chance to experience your tour or activity for free in exchange for sharing your content or engaging with your brand in other ways.

If your offering is especially exciting, you can get a lot of exposure on social media and other places where your audience spends time. Simply decide on an offer and then ask people to participate by sharing the offer or engaging in another way with your brand for a chance to win the freebie.

9. Speaking engagements

Similar to being interviewed on podcasts and articles, getting speaking engagements where you can share your industry expertise is a great way to get exposure to your target audience. Apart from building your image as an expert in the field, you’re also helping the event organizer find relevant speakers. So you get access to their audience for free and they can provide a high-quality experience to guests. If you don’t shy away from giving a speech, why not search the web for relevant industry events and pitch the organizer with a killer topic that’s interesting to your target market?

10. Partner with other businesses

Finally, partnering with local businesses and exchanging referrals is another way to reach your target audience for free. You can promote businesses related to your niche in exchange for the same on their side. Maybe there’s a local restaurant or venue that your target persona often visits? Just reach out and offer a deal, aiming for a win-win situation and developing valuable partnerships with local businesses.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are multiple ways to advertise your tour or activity business for free if you put some extra time and effort. Even if you have a considerable advertising budget, taking advantage of those 10 free ways to advertise for free is always a good idea. After all, reaching your target audience at the right time and place is what’s important.

You might also like:

• The 7 Ps of Marketing for Tour and Activity Operators
• Dynamic Pricing: The Do’s And Don’ts For Activity Providers
• How to Effectively Combine a Multi-channel Strategy and Direct Sales
• How to Boost Your Sales with Add-ons and Merchandise

The post 10 Ways To Get Free Advertising For Your Tour Or Activity Business appeared first on Regiondo.

In this blog post, we will dig a little deeper into how you can use these tools to boost sales amid the uncertainty of COVID.

Ready? Let’s go.

What are Add-ons?

Add-ons are any product or service that you can sell in addition to your current offer and are usually offered upon check-out. Have you ever been offered the option to rent headphones for audio commentary when you book a museum tour? That’s an add-on. Or have you had the chance to buy another ticket at a reduced price? Another add-on. In general, add-ons should be relevant to the offer the customer is already considering.

What is Merchandise?

Merchandise covers any branded items that you sell to your customers. They could be sold as add-ons or as standalone products.

For example, did you ever go to a music gig and see stands selling band t-shirts? That’s merchandise. You can brand pretty much anything nowadays, from stickers and hoodies to chocolate and straws (yes, rather random!) More and more tour operators and activity providers are starting to offer merchandise as a way to supplement their revenue.

Should you offer add-ons and merchandise?

To be honest, it all depends on whether it makes sense for your business and whether you have the capacity to do so. We would sway more towards yes because your activity/tour will likely have extra things that can make the experience even more special for your clients.

Let’s dig a little deeper into add-ons. If you have an online booking system, then you should certainly consider implementing these into your booking process. For effective add-on selling, you need to thoroughly understand your customer’s needs. Your add-ons shouldn’t be considered as a sales opportunity, but a solution that will make their experience more enjoyable, comfortable, or memorable. Before you present your customers with add-on choices, ask yourself if the item in question is truly relevant and useful.

Add-ons generally don’t cost you anything extra. One easy way would be to offer discounted extra tickets upon check-out. You would be surprised at how many people will take you up on this offer!

Do you offer a memorable and exciting experience? Why not offer photos or videos to your guests. These are perfect souvenirs that can also be used for sharing user-generated content thus giving a boost to your content marketing plan! 

Are you an outdoor activity provider? Maybe you could offer equipment as an add-on. Rain ponchos for a walking tour or wetsuits for water sports are both relevant and useful. Rain ponchos are very cheap to purchase and you could choose to personalize them with your logo. If you offer watersports then the likelihood is you already have wetsuits available – so let’s monetize them!

Another option to consider is re-booking insurance- offering rain or bad weather insurance might encourage people to book with you over other providers, and doesn’t cost you anything other than the time that you spend organizing the re-booking.

Merchandise is another way that you can boost your sales. We are big fans of merchandise as it can mean free marketing and publicity. When you see people walking around with t-shirts from a surf school, you instantly want to know more.

It’s important to realize that merchandise can be expensive. If you want to order custom-made products directly from a factory, you would need to order in bulk to benefit from any substantial discounts. The production time can be lengthy and you need to have an expert in print production on board to succeed.

The second, less expensive, option is white labeling. This means using already existing products and adding your branding to them. These products are ready to go and can be delivered, depending on the extent of branding needed, within a few short weeks. There are a number of companies around the world that provide a variety of products for you to white label.

Now that the practicalities are out of the way, let’s discuss what you can merchandise. Pretty much everything is the answer – but we would recommend that it remains relevant to your activity. If you run a cooking school, why not create a recipe book for your clients to buy? Run an indoor ski center? You could sell branded snow globes to your guests.

People tend to be eager to buy merchandise as a great reminder of their activity. It can also be considered as very cool and hip, as merchandise fits into today’s ‘experiential’ way of life. If you didn’t photograph it, it didn’t happen. In the same vein, if you didn’t buy merch you didn’t do the activity / take the tour!

Want to see how it’s done?

Let’s take a look at a couple of companies that are seamlessly integrating add-ons and merchandise into their booking process.

The London Dungeon is a scary museum in the heart of the city that showcases terrifying moments from its history. They have come up with the genius idea of offering face masks as an add-on. Face masks are compulsory at the attraction and most people have their own – but it is relevant to the times and fits in perfectly with the branding of this terrifying attraction. Personalized face coverings are relatively cheap to white-label and you can sell them at a high mark up thus giving your bottom line a much-needed boost.

The London Dungeon also offers a variety of discounts when you finalize your booking. They are tailored towards their target group – tourists visiting the city who want to soak in the sights. Why wouldn’t they want to take advantage of a discount to the London Eye and Madam Tussauds?

Moving on to Maxx Area – Munich’s largest indoor fun sports arena, offering a variety of activities from laser quest to trampolining. They offer MAXX Jumping Socks as an extra for guests booking trampoline sessions online. What’s more, these socks are compulsory so they are certainly boosting their revenue by selling these as an add-on on top of the activity price.

Solardraisine Überwaldbahn is the world’s first solar-powered trolley cart, offering scenic tours in Hessen, Germany. Customers booking online can also purchase souvenirs as a reminder of their trip. Both of these items are highly relevant to the activity itself – the honey comes from the beehives seen on the route and the book explains the history of the region itself. This merchandise is unique and unusual – factors that definitely increase their appeal!

Conclusion

As you can see, there are so many options for you to use add-ons and merchandise to boost your sales. We would recommend organizing a brainstorming session with your team to come up with ideas that are relevant, unique, and fun. Once you do this, you will soon see your revenue increasing!

What’s more, appropriate add-ons and merchandise will also lead to higher customer satisfaction – meaning a higher chance of repeat business and word-of-mouth recommendations. What more could you possibly want?

One last tip? Know your customer and why they are choosing to do your activity or take your tour. As long as you keep them front of mind when making any decisions on add-ons and merchandise, you won’t go wrong.

You might also like:

• The 7 Ps of Marketing for Tour and Activity Operators
• 10 Ways To Get Free Advertising for Tours and Activities
• Dynamic Pricing: The Do’s And Don’ts For Activity Providers
• How to Effectively Combine a Multi-channel Strategy and Direct Sales

The post How to Boost Your Sales with Add-ons and Merchandise appeared first on Regiondo.