Elevating tour guest experiences: A guide to memorable journeys

The experience of your guests is paramount to the success of your tourism business. As a tour operator, you will want to do everything you can to ensure customers leave favourable reviews and feedback, and spread the word about your company. An important part of creating and maintaining this reputation is by ensuring that your bookings are handled promptly and correctly, which can be upheld by Rezdy’s online booking software.

The tour guest experience is the result of every component of a customer’s experience with your company. It encompasses their thoughts on your booking system, your customer service, the quality of your services, any issues they experienced and whether any follow-up communication was received. The tour guest experience can take the form of tourist feedback and reviews on websites, social media pages, print media or by word of mouth.

Tourist satisfaction levels combine to form your brand’s reputation. This reputation indicates to other potential guests whether previous customers were satisfied with the service they received. If your brand is seen to provide excellent service, it will organically encourage repeat business and grow its reach through word of mouth advertising.

Creating memorable guest moments is an important part of tourism experience design. Here’s how your tourism company can achieve a memorable tour guest experience.

Personalization

Personalized tour experiences are a great first step to improving customer satisfaction. While it may not be feasible to tailor your tour to each specific individual, creating personalized guest experiences that encompass your audience at-large will help make your customers feel welcome.

Customer service

The level of customer service you provide on your tours will undoubtedly contribute to the experiences of your guests. Being accessible, helpful and empathetic towards guest queries on your tours will contribute to a higher level of customer satisfaction. Going the extra mile with your guests is an important part of building your company’s reputation, and more likely to encourage repeat business.

Engagement

While your tour guests will undoubtedly appreciate an accommodation and travel package, they may be left wanting more. Satisfy these requests with interactive and immersive activities that allow your customers to see and experience the local food, history and culture on their travels.

Comfort and convenience

Ensuring your guests have a comfortable and easy time with your company is an important part of enhancing visitor experiences. An easy booking system with functionalities like a live availability tracker and fast payment processing, pleasant facilities and comfortable, centrally located accommodation are all elements of the tour guest experience that should be prioritized.

Memorable moments

Creating memorable guest experiences should be an end goal for every tour operator. Oftentimes, these moments happen spontaneously and organically. They will also be different for every person. Adding value to your guests’ experiences is one of the best reasons to have a solid understanding of your audience, so you can tailor the tour to their lifestyle.

Elevate your tours and allow your guests to experience moments they will cherish for a lifetime with these strategies.

Tailoring experiences to different demographics

Tailored elements of the tour guest experience should be chosen with target demographics in mind. Understand and cater to the specific ages, interests and cultures that make up your group and ensure there is something in your tour for everyone. While this may mean tweaking your tour every once in a while, it will lead to more satisfied customers.

Incorporating local insights and knowledge

Often, tourists will be visiting your area for the first time. As a tourism provider, it is your job to ensure that the area is presented as favourably as possible. You may consider including local experts who have specialized knowledge in the areas your tour is visiting. Bringing in staff at the various attractions you visit is another great way of imparting local information onto your guests.

Implementing feedback loops for continuous improvement

Guest feedback should be encouraged before, during and after your tour. It is important that feedback loops be set up and used appropriately, to regularly tweak and update your company’s offerings. Feedback loops can also be used to tailor the experiences to the preferences of your guests.

Leveraging technology for convenience and engagement

Technology can be utilized in several ways by tour operators. You may choose to use social media to produce a marketing campaign, or implement Rezdy’s online booking software to streamline the reservation process. While on the tour with your guests, you may choose activities that include interacting with technology, or visit locations where storytelling is achieved through virtual or augmented reality.

As already mentioned, collecting guest feedback is an important part of being a tour operator. However, it’s how you measure and improve upon your successes that determine your reputation and level of customer satisfaction.

Surveys

Surveys are an excellent way of collecting feedback, particularly at the end of your tour. Surveys may ask respondents to rate a particular aspect of the guest experience, such as customer service, or provide an overall comment on the way the tour was run and the experiences it entailed.

Online reviews

Online reviews are a chief source of feedback for tour operators in the modern world. Actively replying to all comments on sites like TripAdvisor, Google Reviews and Facebook should be a priority for tourism companies wishing to grow their reach and improve their reputation.

Social media

Social media serves two main purposes to the commercial tour operator. First, it is an opportunity to engage with guests by creating content that is tailored to their wants, interests and needs. It also has an analytical function, allowing you to track mentions of your account and use of your hashtags to improve your brand’s social presence.

Booking data

Booking data is helpful in measuring the satisfaction of your guests, as it allows you to find and analyse booking patterns and preferences to tailor your company’s future offerings to your audience.

This guide has already featured important components of the best tour guest experiences. This section features tips on how to action these elements strategically, in a way that will enhance the guided tour experiences offered by your tour company.

Understand your target audience and personalise your tours

The first step to enhancing visitor experiences in your tourism operation is to develop an understanding of your audience. Insights from your booking data and analytics will provide an indication of who is engaging with your business. These insights can then be used to create personas, whom the tours can be tailored to and tested against.

Define your guest experience goals

It is important for your tourism operation to have clear, measurable objectives relating to its travel experience design. Setting these goals will allow your business to grow strategically, responding to feedback it has received and ultimately offering better service to its customers.

Design tours with the tour guest experience in mind

Plan tours that revolve around the tour guest experience of the personas you are targeting. Tours run by your company should be engaging for guests and offer them a sense of fulfilment and enjoyment.

Empower staff to provide excellent customer service

Your business’ reputation is dependent upon the service your staff provide. Train and motivate your employees to be attentive to customer needs and requests, going above and beyond to ensure guests have an enjoyable experience with your company.

Collect and use feedback from your guests

Surveys, reviews and testimonials from guests should all be supported by you and your company’s employees. Use various methods to gather guest insights and act on this feedback to continually improve your tours.

Create interactive and educational tours

Your tours should be designed to give your guests an entertaining experience from two perspectives. On the one hand, they should feel they accomplished something while on your tour, whether that be seeing a new place, trying a new food or interacting with a new culture. Additionally, they should feel they have learned something, such as snippets of a language or parts of the area’s history.

Prioritizing the tour guest experience when designing your tourism offerings is an effective way of boosting your company’s customer satisfaction. Creating customer-oriented tours that educate and inspire your guests on the local sights and experiences will ensure your tourism business is successful for years to come.

The Rezdy booking software is able to help streamline and manage your company’s booking processes, offering you a comprehensive dashboard of data that you can use to your company’s advantage. Try Rezdy’s online tool today on a free trial and read our e-book on maximising profits as a tour operator.