Which Agents Can Help You Sell Your Tours & Activities Online?

Which Agents Can Help You Sell Your Tours & Activities Online?

It’s obvious that there’s a massive opportunity for tours and activities businesses online. The trouble is knowing who to partner with in order to access them.

Tour operators and activity providers should seek partnerships with the following types of agents to get booked online.

OTAs (Online Travel Agencies)

online-travel-agent150

An online travel agency can be utilized by a traveler in order to book everything they need for their trip in one place.

This can include making hotel reservations, flight reservations and in-destination reservations like tours, attractions, activities.

There are also specialised OTAs that focus exclusively on selling on tours and activities.

Benefits

  • By working with an OTA, your business gains exposure to an otherwise untouched audience. Although the commission per online booking can be costly, this makes it worth it.
  • You can be included in a dynamic package. Your tour or activity can be included in this convenient online shopping process.
  • You will probably get more direct bookings as a result. Some people like to book directly on your branded website after discovering it through an OTA.

Examples of OTAs

There are global OTAs like Viator, and destination-focused ones like AdventureFree and NTstandby. There are also group booking OTAs like Make It Social.

We’ve listed some OTAs here and here, with information on what they do and how you can work with them.

Experience gift retailers

Some websites exclusively sell experiences, making them a perfect match for tours and activities. While some people use these sites to buy experiences for themselves, many use them for gift-giving.

Benefits

  • There is a growing market for experiential gifts, especially among those aged 18-44 (Source). An experience is seen as being more valuable than just accumulating more ‘things’.
  • You become someone’s gift to a family or friend – and emotional buyers aren’t cheap when they buy gifts for others (Source).

Examples of experience gift retailers

In America, there is Great American Days. In Australia, there’s RedBalloon, Gifts That Thrill, and FreemanX.

Daily deal sites

Daily deal sites are those that offer discounts on a variety of products and services, including tours and activities.

Benefits

  • Coupons increase awareness of your business, thanks to the army of deal-seekers who subscribe to these sites.
  • It’s easy to measure success – simply count how many were sold.
  • Useful for encouraging repeat customers.

Examples of experience gift retailers

You are probably familiar with Groupon, Scoopon, and OurDeal.

How do tour operators manage online bookings from these agents?

One very important part of online distribution is ongoing booking management.

Having a bad process can result in being overbooked – which means you have to deal with unhappy customers and spend time trying to book them into another time.

To do online distribution well, you need online booking software like Rezdy that has a channel management feature, allowing all your agents to pull from your up to date inventory. All your channels will have the correct availability so you’re never overbooked.

Here’s how it works.

OTAs & Experience gift retailers

Your booking system integrates with it so that their customers don’t have to leave their website to make a booking with you. If the person is buying a gift, the recipient of the gift can book themselves in when they want. Rezdy does this with Viator and RedBalloon.

Daily deal sites

Your booking software allows you to load up the promo codes the daily deal site has given you. People can then book your tours and activities online, and it’s automatically redeemed on your end. Rezdy does this as part of our Pro and above online booking software package.

If you’d like more information, take a free trial or request a demo.

You’re also welcome to download our free ebook on tour and activity distribution channels:





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