Updated February 2022 – The travel, tourism, and experiences industry is an industry that can only flourish if it bands together. While you may be competing with other operators, neither will benefit without travelers. Especially if your business is located within a country or city that heavily relies on tourism. Without consistent levels of tourists visiting your country, your chances of increasing booking levels, especially during peak season diminishes. By coming up with new ideas to attract tourists, you’ll start to figure out new ways on how to improve tourism in a country.

In this article, we’ll go through 6 tips on how to improve tourism in a country and how to attract tourists successfully.

Excite your tourists

While your main goal may be to increase tourism in your country, you need to do so strategically. By identifying the different niches of tourists that visit your country, you’ll begin to understand the things that attract tourists of each niche. Exciting your potential tourists are one of the ways of improving tourism industry in your country

For example, if you’re a tour operator based in Bali, you’d have a wide range of different types of tourists visiting each year. From families looking for a family-friendly getaway, young adults looking for the next live event, or people looking for a relaxing spiritual retreat – all these types of tourists are different, yet come to Bali to experience certain things that excite them.

By highlighting the different aspects of your country that bring excitement to each type of tourist, you’ll be sure to spark huge amounts of interest.

Improve your marketing and advertising

how to improve tourism in a country by optimizing your marketing

Once you’ve figured the different niches and identified the things that excite your tourists, it’s time to focus on your marketing.

Your marketing strategies along with how and where you advertise are key to grabbing the attention of your potential tourists. By ensuring your marketing campaigns revolve around the exciting elements of your country, you’ll soon be grabbing the attention of international travelers. 

Here are a few examples of successful marketing campaigns by different countries that highlight their ‘exciting’ factors:

1. Australia

How to improve tourism in a country with a bold marketing campaign

With Australia set to reopen its borders for fully vaccinated international travelers on the 21st of February 2022, Australia is one of the first countries within the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region to take on this bold move. And with bold moves, come massive marketing campaigns.

Australia has done a great job in featuring their “exciting” factors within the poster and video above. Both these marketing collaterals have been distributed all over the internet and major social media platforms to gain international attention.

2. New Zealand

3. France

You’ll notice that each marketing campaign features well-known tours, activities, and attractions of each respective country. They’ve managed to collate all the things that excite tourists and promote them within their campaigns.

Finding the best channels to promote your marketing strategy is also key to ensuring you hit the right target. For example, if you’re targeting a predominantly younger demographic, marketing online is the way to go. However, if you’re marketing towards an older audience, partnering with local travel agents, or promoting on print media channels may be a better fit.

When starting, online marketing is probably the easiest and most popular medium to feature your marketing campaigns. Online marketing targets a wider audience as many travelers nowadays are mostly online. You can start by advertising on social media, travel websites, and online magazines. Another popular method is to partner with reputable travel bloggers that have a large online audience. This will help promote your country and/or business to a refined audience interested in travel.

Invest in video marketing

A video is an excellent instrument for reaching and engaging with your target audience. Understanding the benefits of video marketing and how to effectively implement the best video marketing tips will help you create engaging content for a wider audience. 

With the rise in popularity of social media platforms such as TikTok, Youtube, Instagram Stories/Reels, people are digesting video content more than ever. However, as these platforms only promote short videos, people’s attention span has decreased tremendously over the years. A study conducted by Microsoft Corp suggests that the average viewer’s attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2021. It’s more important to be able to hook your viewers within the first few seconds of your video.

Video marketing provides tour and activity operators with a chance to engage their prospective guests and offer them an immersive glimpse into their destination. While you’ll likely create videos that focus on your tour products, you should also expand to include regional insight. When you promote the attractiveness of the whole country, you’ll be more likely to increase the number of annual visitors. Ultimately helping you boost the bookings for your tour and activity products.

How to improve tourism in a country by broadening your distribution channels

how to improve tourism in a country by broadening your distribution channels

Developing partnerships with the right agents can have a significant impact on the travelers who discover your destination. For example, there are many OTAs that are used within a specific outbound travel market. Chinese travelers will use one OTA, while travelers from India may opt to book their tours and activities through an OTA that works specifically with their outbound travel market. Operators that work with agents that specialize in specific outbound markets will help attract more travelers.

Joining a tour operator marketplace will help simplify your overall distribution channels. It allows you to connect with hundreds of agents instantly. Furthermore, it allows you to keep track of your distribution data centrally.

For instance, Rezdy Channel Manager is a marketplace platform designed specifically for tour operators. Through Rezdy Channel Manager, you’ll be able to connect with thousands of resellers with a click of a button all while staying in control of your commission rates. 

Rezdy’s Marketplace platform simplifies the overall reselling process into 3 simple steps:

  • List your products
  • Set your commission rates
  • Let thousands of agents and resellers resell and promote your products

Interested in broadening your distribution channels? Try Rezdy Channel Manager today.

Optimize your website for mobile use. 

Mobile technology is no longer a luxury, but rather a necessity. Travelers from all places and across all age groups are becoming increasingly reliant on their smartphones and tablets. 

Mobile bookings continue to rise year after year, and the most motivated market segments around the globe will be discovering new destinations through social networking and mobile searches. Your tour and activity company website needs to offer a responsive web design as well as mobile booking capabilities if you want to increase bookings from the most powerful outbound travel markets.

Optimizing your website for mobile use helps expand your opportunities for more online visitors. At the same time, you’re also improving your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). By having a website that’s optimized for mobile use, you’ll rank better on search engines. This gives you a higher chance of becoming discoverable online.

Embrace chatbots for the booking experience. 

Chatbots can be used as part of your online marketing strategy to connect with site visitors and offer them information in real-time. Site visitors can ask a chatbot a quick question about your services and availabilities. They can also provide your customers insight into the tour experience and receive instant answers. They are an incredibly effective communication tool that has proven to increase customer loyalty as well as brand recognition. Chatbots can provide information about your destination as well. This can be used to further promote your country and its exciting factors. Ultimately, using a chatbot that provides quick and accurate information that helps tourists make a quick decision. This could be extra help in increasing the number of people who visit your country on an annual basis.

Conclusion

With travelers beginning to plan their next adventure, now is the perfect time to start working on improving tourism within your country. Understanding the steps on how to improve tourism will help you create effective strategies in attracting tourists to a country. 

Once you have achieved this, implementing efficient processes within your business will help prepare you for the boost in tourism. Adopting an online booking system and joining an online marketplace will help you simplify your processes. 

Fortunately, Rezdy can help you to put the right technology in place to support effortless online bookings and booking management. Sign up for a FREE 21-day trial, or book a demo today to see if Rezdy is the right fit for your business.

If you enjoyed this article – 6 steps on how to improve tourism in a country – then follow the Rezdy blog. There are a lot of marketing tools and resources designed with businesses like yours in mind.

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