7 minute read
Making your products ready for online booking
How can you make your experiences suitable for online booking and distribution? Here we share some best practice tips.
There are four key areas you will want to consider getting your products ready for online bookings:
1 How to write great tour descriptions that sell, customising product marketing per channel partner. 2 Operational considerations. 3 Assessing competitive products on the OTA or for sale via the same partner. 4 Translations.
01 HOW TO WRITE GREAT TOUR DESCRIPTIONS
THAT SELL Whether a visitor finds your product on your own website, a reseller website, or through a traditional sales agent, your product descriptions are an opportunity to showcase your product’s USPs and provide your guest with the details they need to make a buying decision.
USE IMMERSIVE LANGUAGE
Tours, activities, and experiences are immersive. Engage with your potential guest by giving them an impression of how they might feel, what they will see, and what they will experience during their visit. Instead of just providing a practical description of the itinerary, create a story.
USE VISUALS
The brain processes images 60 times faster than text. By using images, you can “show – not tell” your offering.
Key Insight
The average attention span is now less than eight seconds, so you need to provide your potential guest with as much information as possible while holding their attention enough to foster conversion.
Use visual media such as professional photography, video content and user generated content (UGC) where appropriate. This type of content allows the guest to experience your offering from the visitor’s perspective.
SHARE HIGHLIGHTS
Use bullet points to showcase highlights of your offering. According to web design statistics, 70% of visitors to a webpage will read bulleted lists over long form paragraphs.
PROVIDE PREPARATION TIPS
If your offering requires experience, make sure your guest can participate. Unless you plan to offer an educational component, your guests should feel comfortable using speciality equipment and feel confident they can manage the experience. If your offering requires specialised clothing or equipment that may be difficult for the guest to bring or travel with, consider offering equipment and clothing rentals to your guests. If you can, consider including equipment or clothing with your experience so that guests don’t have to bring their own equipment.
AVOID TOO MANY CHOICES
When given too many options, customers tend to avoid making a choice. In a famous psychological study by Iyengar & Lepper, 2000, involving consumer behaviour, only 3% of shoppers who were offered 24 choices were able to make a purchase decision. When presented with only six options, 10% of shoppers were able to make a purchase decision.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR YOU AS AN EXPERIENCE PROVIDER?
Where possible, simplify your offerings so guests do not have to choose from a variety of similar but distinct offerings. For example, if you are a kayak tour operator, limit your choices to a maximum of three or four offerings, rather than offering ten or more. When it comes to making a choice, less is more.
CUSTOMISING PRODUCT MARKETING PER CHANNEL PARTNER
You’ll want to ensure your product information is consistent across channels, but some partners like to customise. Here we cover some of the considerations.
Depending on the distribution channel, you may need to customise your product information and marketing on a per-channel basis. For offline sales channels such as tour operators or traditional travel agents, using your standard product descriptions may be sufficient.
In fact, you may consider the product descriptions that you use for direct sales as your default. Providing this information to your offline keeps the information consistent, and since you are unable to control updates as easily through these channels, using your default makes it easy to provide updates in the future.
OTAS
Online travel agencies may require customisation. In some cases, the OTA writes their own version of your product information to ensure that there are no duplicate content issues with Google. For those OTAs where you have control over your content, rewrite the product descriptions to ensure your content and website remain the authoritative source of information for those products.
Consider that some OTAs require you to offer a unique variation of your product. By providing an experience in this way, you avoid the direct conflict of your own product with the OTA’s version of your product. The variation may be small but needs to be distinct enough that it makes the OTA offering unique. Examples include merchandise, a meal option, or an inclusion not offered to other guests. That said, there is no reason your direct guests, who are more profitable, shouldn’t receive an even better perk for booking directly. The above example shows how Viator displays product descriptions.
02 OPERATIONAL CONSIDERATIONS If you do plan to offer unique variations of your experience through your partner channels, you need to effectively manage the offerings in your booking system. The considerations include:
MANAGING GUEST EXPECTATIONS
Will guests from different channels participate in the same experience? If this is the case, you need to manage expectations. The last thing you want is a guest coming to you after the experience and requesting a refund or credit because the person sitting next to them paid less or got a free lunch.
SHARING AVAILABILITY
How will you share availability across channels? Can your booking system allow for booking from multiple channels into the same block of inventory for your experience? If your booking system is incapable of handling bookings from multiple channels, then you may want to avoid this scenario since it will only result in conflicts and potential overbooking.
MANAGING CHANGES
How will you manage changes? If you provide different and unique products across a variety of distribution channels, you need to be able to manage changes across those channels. If your booking system allows you to have multiple versions of your products with different descriptions or options, this may be the best way to maintain a single source of truth for your products. If your booking system does not support this, then you may need to find a different way to manage this information. One solution is to keep a version of each product as a document in a product folder on Google Drive. As you make changes, update the docs in each folder as required.
03 ASSESSING COMPETITIVE PRODUCTS ON OTAS
Although it is likely that your products will be in competition with similar products on a variety of distribution channels, we are focusing on OTAs since their product listings are available online. So how do you determine which products are competitive and how you compare?
Location List what products are offered in your location.
Regardless of whether the experience is identical, all experiences in the same location are competitive with each other to some degree.
For example, a family of four may have the choice of booking a kayak experience or bike tour but not both.
Persona Consider who your primary audience is and look for products that cater to a similar audience. For example, if your experience is a culinary tour designed for couples, not suitable for children, look for experiences designed for couples. Type Look for tours or experiences of a similar type.
Specifically look at how your experience differs from others of the same type and where you might be able to differentiate your offerings. If you find that your offering is not differentiated from your competitors, look at other offerings to see how they differ. Consider add-ons, for example a meal option, merchandise, or another value option. Reviews and ratings If you find a lot of potentially competitive listings, focus on those with the most reviews/highest ratings. These will be the more competitive products in your market, playing an important role in how each OTA ranks the listings in search results.
04 TRANSLATIONS If you choose to work with resellers who service specific geographic markets, those resellers may require you to translate your content.
There are translation services available online but it’s important to consider both translation, which is the direct conversion of one language to another, and localisation, which takes into account cultural considerations when translating. Localisation, for example, would consider things like slang, local terms, and common vernacular. Although Google Translate may seem like a great free option, it often doesn’t take localisation into account and the translations are easily recognised by native language speakers as “Google speak.”
Where possible, work with the reseller to have them translate the content themselves. Since the reseller is the one selling to the specific geographic audience, they want to ensure that the content is accurately translated and that it is localised.
There may be translation fees, but if the reseller wants to sell your product, they are likely to waive costs in exchange for a slightly better net rate.
