Online Travel Agency Success Stories: How to Be One.
November 30, 2007
Your web site is up and running and it looks fabulous. Rich content, plenty of eye-candy and all the right links in all the right places. You’ve even gotten a few leads from the site. Any day now and the money will be pouring in and Fox News will be reporting on your public stock offering.
Reality Check.
Are you ready to be an Internet success story? Great. So is every other travel agency with a web browser. How can you compete? You’ve got one shot. How you handle the potential customers. An amazing web site, creative marketing and strong traffic cannot grow your online business without the right handling of the inquiries that come in. These leads require a different way of thinking. Here are some observations I’ve made over the past seven years:
Forget Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific - Think Web-Time. It’s a whole new global time zone. Potential customers want information immediately and they are steadily getting used to shopping at 4 a.m.. To increase your chances of working with a customer, you should plan on getting back with any overnight inquires by 10 a.m. the next day and within 30 minutes throughout the day. Be sure someone watches the incoming e-mail on the weekends, too.
Call first to confirm - one of my clients was very excited to receive a cruise lead on a Disney Group. It was very promising and she spent quite a bit of time researching it and e-mailing all the information back to the customer. They exchanged several e-mails and it looked better and better as time went on. When it was far enough along in the process, she called to get a credit card number - only to discover it was a 12 year old boy trying to get his parents to book the trip. One initial phone call would have saved many wasted hours.
If the potential customer includes a note in their e-mail that says, ‘do not call’ then it’s probably one of two things - a) not a serious inquiry or b) another travel agent ’shopping’ your rates, which is more and more common these days. In my experience, serious inquiries do not mind a phone call to introduce yourself, discuss your qualifications and establish some rapport.
Think beyond the sale. When we design web sites for small & medium size travel agency clients, we include a consultation in which we determine what customers they would like to target. We stress that they should not think in terms of growing their sales base, but growing their customer base. One agency client is now working with customers that have booked four repeat cruises!
Follow-up, follow-up, follow-up. Converting leads to sales is not an easy process, but follow-up is worth all the effort.
Keep content fresh and in front of them. Many sites we redesign haven’t been touched in months. Web customers are always on the lookout for the best deal and if they see a lovely banner that says ‘Happy Holidays’ in late January then they will surf off to another site. Another high priority is to keep a mailing list and advise your customers of new specials and make it easy for them to reply.
Finally, take stock of the most obvious (but often overlooked) point of differentiation. How are your customer service skills? It may sound simplistic, but think about who you do business with and why. As a customer, I drive an extra 15 minutes and pay slightly more for groceries simply because I can get everything under one roof - that’s called value. I also shop there because they carry everything to the car - that’s called service.
If you make it easy to do business with you, offer good value and genuinely treat the customer well, you can successfully compete with mega-agencies, direct-selling vendors and web-based travel agencies. Make these points part of your online business plan and then I’ll be on the lookout for your public stock offering.
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