resmarksystems

How to Reduce Booking Friction in High-Risk Travel Periods

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 07:08:12 GMT

Travelers are still searching.

They are just hesitating more.

The difference between a lost booking and a confirmed one often comes down to friction, and having the right tour booking software in place can simplify the process, reduce hesitation, and help travelers complete their booking with confidence.

During uncertain travel periods, demand does not disappear. It changes behavior. Travelers browse, compare, and consider options, but delay decisions when the booking experience feels unclear or risky.

Reducing booking friction is about removing doubt, simplifying decisions, and reinforcing trust at every stage of the booking journey. Tour operators who do this well convert more of the demand that already exists.

The Real Problem: Hesitation, Not Demand

Many operators assume lower bookings mean lower demand.

In reality:

Traffic often remains steady
Interest still exists
Travelers continue researching

The issue is hesitation. When uncertainty increases, so does caution. Travelers take longer to decide, question more details, and abandon bookings more easily.

If your booking experience is not built to handle that hesitation, conversion drops. More traffic will not fix this.

A clearer, more confident booking experience will.

Why Travelers Abandon Bookings During Uncertain Periods

Understanding why users abandon bookings is the first step in reducing friction.

Many of these issues are not new and often come from common booking system mistakes tour operators make, where small gaps in clarity or process create enough doubt for users to abandon the booking entirely.

Lack of Trust and Clarity

If travelers are unsure about what they are booking, they delay or leave.

This includes:

Missing details
Unclear inclusions
Vague expectations

Clarity builds confidence.

Too Many Choices (Decision Paralysis)

When travelers are presented with too many similar options, decision-making slows down.

Without guidance, users hesitate and leave instead of choosing.

Unclear Policies

Uncertainty increases the importance of flexibility.

If refund, cancellation, or rescheduling policies are unclear, travelers assume risk and avoid booking.

Overcomplicated Booking Process

Long forms, too many steps, or confusing flows increase drop-offs.

Every extra step adds friction.

Fear of Making the Wrong Decision

This is the biggest driver during high-risk periods.

Travelers ask themselves:

What if plans change?
What if conditions are not ideal?
What if this is not worth it?

If your website does not answer these concerns, users leave.

If you are seeing traffic but low conversions, this is the moment to evaluate your booking experience, not just your marketing.

What “Booking Friction” Actually Means for Tour Operators

Booking friction is anything that slows, confuses, or creates doubt during the booking process.

Common examples include:

Unclear pricing or hidden fees
Too many booking steps
Missing or incomplete information
Weak or generic messaging
Slow load times
Unclear next steps

Friction is not always obvious. It is often small moments of uncertainty that add up and prevent a booking from happening.

The 5 Core Ways to Reduce Booking Friction

1. Simplify the Booking Experience

A simple booking flow converts better.

Focus on:

Fewer steps
Clear structure
Minimal required fields
Straightforward checkout process

Every unnecessary step increases abandonment.

2. Make Decisions Easier

Too many options create hesitation.

Instead:

Highlight recommended tours
Use “best for” labels
Group similar experiences
Reduce unnecessary variations

Guided choices increase conversion.

3. Build Trust at Every Step

Trust reduces hesitation.

Add:

Reviews and testimonials
Real photos and videos
Clear guarantees
Safety and expectation messaging

Trust should be visible throughout the entire journey, not just at checkout.

4. Address Risk Directly in Your Messaging

During uncertain periods, avoiding the topic of risk creates more hesitation.

Instead, communicate clearly:

Flexible booking policies
Cancellation and rescheduling options
What happens if conditions change
What guests can expect

Transparency builds confidence.

5. Reduce “Thinking Time” With Better UX

A strong user experience removes decision fatigue.

Focus on:

Clear calls to action
Simple navigation
Mobile-first design
Fast load speeds

When users understand what to do next, they move forward faster.

The Psychology Behind Booking Hesitation

Booking hesitation is not complicated. When perceived risk increases, people delay decisions. When clarity increases, people act.

During high-risk travel periods:

Travelers seek reassurance
They need more information
They compare more options
They take longer to commit

Your role is to reduce uncertainty and increase confidence. Confidence leads to action.

How Smart Tour Operators Turn Hesitation Into Bookings

Operators who convert well during uncertainty do not remove risk. They manage perception.

They do this by:

Communicating clearly at every step
Structuring their website for easy navigation
Providing strong FAQs and expectation-setting content
Offering reassurance before users ask for it
Simplifying the booking process

They remove friction before it becomes a problem.

The Role of SEO, Content, and Paid Media in Reducing Friction

Reducing booking friction is not just a website issue. It starts earlier in the journey.

SEO answers questions during the research phase
Content builds confidence before users arrive on your site
Paid ads reinforce messaging and bring users back
Retargeting reminds hesitant visitors to complete their booking

When messaging is consistent across all channels, trust builds faster.

A strong marketing system reduces friction before users even reach checkout.

Improving conversion during uncertain periods is not just about the checkout page but about strengthening the entire journey, which is why understanding how to improve your sales funnel can help guide users from initial interest to completed booking more effectively.

Common Booking Friction Mistakes

Many operators unintentionally increase friction.

Common mistakes include:

Overloading users with too much information at once
Hiding fees or pricing details
Providing no guidance or recommendations
Failing to reassure users during uncertainty
Poor mobile experience
Slow website performance

Fixing these issues often leads to immediate improvements in conversion.

Why Reducing Friction Matters More in High-Risk Travel Periods

During uncertain periods:

Hesitation increases
Competition increases
Trust becomes more important
Conversion gaps widen

The difference between operators who grow and those who struggle is often conversion efficiency.

Reducing friction allows you to capture more of the demand that already exists.

How Resmark Systems Helps Tour Operators Reduce Booking Friction

Resmark Systems helps tour operators reduce booking friction by providing reliable booking technology designed specifically for the complexities of tour operations.

By improving how availability, payments, confirmations, and customer data are handled, the platform helps operators:

Increase completed bookings
Reduce abandonment during checkout
Improve customer confidence during the purchase process
Create smoother operational workflows between marketing and fulfillment

Resmark Systems focuses on building booking infrastructure that supports both conversion performance and operational efficiency. Instead of relying on generic ecommerce tools or disconnected systems, tour operators benefit from a platform built to handle real-world tour requirements such as capacity management, scheduling logic, resource allocation, and customer communication.

For operators navigating high-risk travel periods, having stable booking technology becomes even more important. Clear availability, reliable payment processing, and structured customer workflows help reduce hesitation and allow travelers to complete bookings with greater confidence.

Resmark Systems provides the technical foundation that allows marketing efforts to convert more consistently, helping tour operators build predictable direct booking growth over time.

Next Steps: Turn More Visitors Into Bookings

If your traffic is not converting, the opportunity is already there. The next step is to reduce friction.

Focus on:

You can take the next step by:

Meet Our Speaker

Brandon Lake

CEO of Resmark, and owner of Western River Expeditions and Moab Adventure Center.

Brandon is the founder of Resmark Systems, WaiverSign, and Resmark Web. He also helps operate Western River Expeditions and Moab Adventure Center, two of the most successful tour companies in North America. With more than 25 years of experience, Brandon has helped operators of all sizes uncover the systems, habits, and structure that lead to real growth.

Small improvements in friction often lead to significant increases in bookings.

Frequently Asked Questions

Reducing booking friction is not about adding more features. It is about removing barriers.

How Tour Operators Can Build Trust When Travelers Feel Uncertain

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 07:04:55 GMT

Travelers are not avoiding trips.

They are avoiding uncertainty.

The tour operators who win are the ones who feel safest to book with.

When confidence drops, bookings do not disappear. They slow down. Travelers take longer to decide, ask more questions, and become more selective.

In this environment, trust becomes the deciding factor, and having reliable tour booking software helps ensure a smooth, transparent booking experience that reinforces confidence at every step. Tour operators who communicate clearly, reduce perceived risk, and create a transparent booking experience consistently outperform competitors, even during uncertain travel periods.

Trust is not a brand statement. It is something that must be built intentionally at every stage of the customer journey.

Why Trust Becomes the Deciding Factor During Uncertain Travel Periods

Uncertainty changes how people make decisions.

Travelers:

✔️ Compare more options

✔️ Look for reassurance

✔️ Avoid anything that feels unclear

✔️ Delay decisions when confidence is low

Even small doubts can stop a booking. When conditions feel unpredictable, trust becomes the filter through which every decision is made.

If your business feels:

✔️ Clear

✔️ Reliable

✔️ Transparent

✔️ Easy to understand

You will convert more of the demand that already exists.

How Traveler Behavior Changes When Confidence Drops

Understanding behavior is the first step to building trust.

During uncertain periods, travelers:

Take longer to decide
Research more extensively
Ask more detailed questions
Become more sensitive to risk
Prefer flexibility and clarity

They are not looking for the cheapest option. They are looking for the safest decision.

If your website, messaging, and booking experience do not provide that reassurance, they will keep searching.

If you are seeing longer booking cycles or lower conversion rates, this is usually a trust issue, not just a traffic issue.

What Trust Actually Means in the Tour Booking Experience

Trust is often misunderstood as branding or reputation.

In reality, trust is built through execution.

Trust means:

Clear information
Consistent messaging
Transparent policies
Reliable systems
Confidence in the outcome

It is not what you say about your business. It is how easy it is for a traveler to believe in it.

The 5 Core Trust Signals Every Tour Operator Needs

1. Clear and Transparent Information

Clarity removes doubt.

Your website should clearly explain:

Pricing
Inclusions
What the experience involves
What guests should expect

No hidden details. No ambiguity.

When information is easy to understand, trust increases.

2. Strong Social Proof

Travelers trust other travelers.

Show:

Reviews
Testimonials
Real guest experiences
Photos and videos
This helps potential guests see what the experience is actually like.

Proof builds confidence faster than promises.

Building credibility through reviews is not accidental, and a structured approach to tour operator online reviews management ensures consistent, trustworthy feedback that helps travelers feel more confident in their decision.

3. Visible Flexibility and Policies

During uncertain periods, flexibility matters.

Make it easy to find:

Cancellation policies
Rebooking options
Refund conditions

Clarity reduces perceived risk.

When travelers know they have options, they are more willing to commit.

4. Consistent Communication Across Channels

Trust breaks when messaging is inconsistent.

Your:

Website
Emails
Ads
Social media

Should all communicate the same expectations and tone.

Consistency builds familiarity. Familiarity builds confidence.

5. Professional Booking Experience

The booking process itself is a trust signal.

A strong experience includes:

Clean, simple design
Mobile-friendly layout
Clear steps
Reliable system performance

If booking feels confusing or unstable, trust drops immediately.

If your booking flow feels complicated or unclear, improving it can directly increase conversion.

Where Most Tour Operators Lose Trust Without Realizing It

Trust is often lost in small moments.

Common issues include:

Unclear or outdated website content
Slow response times
Confusing booking steps
Inconsistent messaging across channels
Missing details about the experience

These are not always obvious problems. But to a hesitant traveler, they are reasons to leave.

How to Build Trust at Every Stage of the Customer Journey

Trust is not built in one moment. It is built across the entire journey.

Structuring each stage intentionally is critical, and building a customer journey map that converts helps ensure trust is reinforced consistently from discovery to booking.

Discovery Stage

This is where first impressions happen.

SEO visibility
Helpful content
Clear messaging

Travelers decide whether to keep exploring.

Consideration Stage

This is where comparison happens.

FAQs
Detailed information
Clear differentiation

Travelers decide whether you are a viable option.

Booking Stage

This is where hesitation is highest.

Simple booking flow
Visible trust signals
Clear policies

Travelers decide whether to commit.

Pre-Experience Stage

Trust continues after booking.

Confirmation emails
Pre-trip communication
Clear expectations

Travelers feel reassured before arrival.

Each stage must reinforce confidence.

If one stage breaks trust, conversion drops.

The Role of Technology in Building Trust

Operational clarity builds customer confidence.

Resmark Systems supports this by providing:

Organized booking systems
Clear confirmations
Automated communication
Reliable guest management

When systems are structured and predictable, the experience feels more professional.

Guests feel confident because everything works as expected.

Operational clarity becomes a trust signal.

The Role of Marketing in Building Trust

Trust starts before a traveler reaches your website.

ResmarkWeb focuses on:

SEO to build visibility
Content to answer questions
Paid media to reinforce messaging
User experience to improve conversion

Marketing shapes perception early in the journey.

If travelers already feel confident before they arrive on your site, they are more likely to book.

How Trust Directly Impacts Conversion Rates

Trust is one of the strongest drivers of conversion.

It:

Reduces hesitation
Shortens decision cycles
Increases booking confidence
Improves repeat bookings

When trust is high, decisions are easier.

When trust is low, even interested users do not convert.

Common Mistakes That Destroy Trust

Many operators unintentionally reduce trust.

Common mistakes include:

Vague or unclear messaging
Hidden fees
Inconsistent information
Overpromising experiences
Lack of social proof
Slow or delayed responses

These issues create doubt. And doubt prevents bookings.

How Tour Operators Can Start Building Trust Today

You do not need to rebuild everything to improve trust.

Start with:

Auditing your website for clarity
Simplifying your booking process
Adding visible trust signals
Improving communication
Aligning messaging across channels

Small improvements can significantly increase confidence and conversion.

Trust Is the Foundation of a Strong Growth Engine

Trust connects every part of your business.

SEO brings visibility
Content builds authority
User experience builds confidence
Systems ensure reliability

Together, these create a stronger Growth Engine.

Without trust, traffic does not convert. With trust, your entire system performs better.

Build a More Trust-Driven Tour Business

If you want to improve conversion, start with trust.

Focus on:

You can take the next step by:

Meet Our Speaker

Brandon Lake

CEO of Resmark, and owner of Western River Expeditions and Moab Adventure Center.

Trust is not built overnight. But once it is built, it compounds.

Frequently Asked Questions

Build Trust, Boost Bookings: Discover the Right Tools Today.

How Tour Operators Turn Website Visitors Into Bookings

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 20:35:08 GMT

Resmark Growth Engine - Stage 3

This is where bookings are won or lost...

At this stage, small improvements to your tour pages and booking flow can have a big impact. When you reduce friction and build confidence , more visitors follow through and book.

In this webinar, we’ll show you exactly where to focus.

What We Cover

What travelers are thinking when they reach your website

How visitors behave once they have already researched their trip and are deciding which tour to book.

How strong product pages guide the decision

What your tour pages need to show, explain, and communicate so visitors feel confident choosing your experience.

Designing a booking flow that makes it easy to say yes

How small changes in your booking process can reduce friction and increase completion rates.

Building confidence with urgency and risk reducers

How availability signals, guarantees, and social proof help travelers feel comfortable booking now instead of later.

Increasing revenue during the booking process

How thoughtful upsells and add-ons can increase average order value while still improving the customer experience.

Turning questions into bookings

How phone, chat, and email conversations can help interested visitors become confirmed guests.

Meet Our Speaker

Brandon Lake

CEO of Resmark, and owner of Western River Expeditions and Moab Adventure Center.

Meet Our Speaker

Brandon Lake

CEO of Resmark, and owner of Western River Expeditions and Moab Adventure Center.

FAQs

Reserve Your Spot and Learn How to Turn Website Visitors Into Confirmed Bookings

How to Create a Booking Website for Free (And What It Actually Takes in 2026)

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 12:01:00 GMT

Search interest around how to create a booking website for free has grown rapidly. AI website builders, no-code platforms, and API integrations make it feel possible to launch a booking flow in a weekend.

And technically, you can.

But creating a booking website is not the same as building booking infrastructure.

A time-slot picker connected to Stripe is not a booking engine. A calendar with a form is not operational capacity management. An AI-generated interface is not concurrency-safe inventory logic.

If you are going to build one yourself, here is what it actually requires in 2026.

Can You Build a Booking Website for Free in 2026?

Yes.

You can use:

AI website builders
No-code platforms
Calendar tools
Payment APIs
AI agents to generate code
Basic database integrations

You can connect a form to a payment processor and send confirmation emails.

From the outside, it may look like a booking system.

But a booking website does not equal booking infrastructure.

A scheduler allows time selection.

A booking engine manages inventory, payments, compliance, reporting, and distribution under real-world pressure.

The difference matters most when money and capacity are involved.

What a Real Booking System Actually Includes

Before deciding to build your own tour booking system , understand the architectural layers behind a true booking engine.

1. Front-End Interface Layer

This is the visible portion:

Tour pages
Date pickers
Time-slot selection
Guest information forms
Add-ons and upsells

AI can generate this layer quickly. It is the simplest component.

The complexity begins behind the interface.

2. Inventory and Capacity Logic Layer

This is where most DIY builds fail.

A real booking engine must manage:

Real-time seat tracking
Capacity limits per departure
Resource allocation
Concurrency protection
Temporary seat locking
Multi-product inventory overlap

If two users attempt to book the last available seat at the same time, what happens?

Without concurrency controls and seat-locking logic, double bookings occur.

Inventory logic is not visual. It is mathematical and transactional.

3. Payment Processing Layer

Collecting payment is not just embedding a checkout form.

A booking engine must handle:

PCI compliance
Secure tokenization
Refund logic
Partial refunds
Chargebacks
Currency normalization
Tax calculation

Payment disputes and refund edge cases require structured workflows, not manual fixes.

4. Waiver and Legal Layer

For tour operators, waivers are operationally critical.

A booking infrastructure must support:

Digital signature capture
Secure storage
Guest-level association
Time-stamped documentation
Retrieval during disputes

Legal documentation cannot rely on loose file uploads or unsecured databases.

5. Notification and Automation Layer

Customers expect:

Immediate confirmation emails
SMS reminders
Calendar invites
Pre-trip instructions
Follow-up review requests

Automation must integrate with booking logic.

If a booking is modified, cancelled, or partially refunded, all communications must update accordingly.

6. Reporting and Revenue Layer

Operators need visibility into:

Daily sales
Channel attribution
Tax reporting
Departure utilization
Staff capacity
Revenue per product

Without structured reporting architecture, business intelligence suffers.

7. Distribution and Channel Layer

If you distribute through OTAs or partner channels, inventory must sync.

This includes:

Real-time availability updates
Channel reconciliation
API communication
Commission tracking
A scheduler does not handle this.

A booking engine does.

This is the structural difference between a simple free booking system for tour operators and a full operational backbone.

If you are unsure which layer presents the greatest risk in your current setup, a booking infrastructure consultation can clarify exposure points.

If You Use AI Agents to Build It, Here Is What You Would Need

AI agents can:

Generate UI code
Connect APIs
Draft backend logic
Suggest database schemas

But they cannot automatically design your business logic correctly.

You must configure:

Capacity logic
Concurrency management
Time zone normalization
Daylight savings adjustments
Payment reconciliation
Error logging
API failure handling

Ask yourself:

What happens if two users book the last seat simultaneously?
Eventually, you’ll reach a point where your tour grows faster than expected . How do you prevent overbooking during peak traffic?
How do refunds cascade through reporting?
How do you normalize time zones across international guests?
What happens if your payment API times out mid-transaction?

AI can write code. It cannot define operational responsibility.

The Hidden Complexity Most DIY Builders Miss

Scalability Under Load

Traffic spikes during promotions or peak season can overwhelm lightweight builds.

Without queueing systems and stress testing, failure occurs at the worst time.

Edge Cases

Daylight savings shifts, cross-time-zone bookings, and partial guest modifications introduce complexity most MVP builds ignore.

API Failures

External systems fail. Payment gateways time out. Email providers throttle sending.

Do you have retry logic and error monitoring?

Email Deliverability

Confirmation emails landing in spam create operational chaos.

Deliverability requires domain authentication, warm-up strategies, and monitoring.

Payment Disputes

Chargebacks require documentation retrieval, waiver access, and structured evidence workflows.

Data Security and PCI

Storing card data incorrectly exposes legal and financial risk.

These are not fear-based arguments. They are engineering realities.

When Building a Free Booking Website Makes Sense

There are valid scenarios:

Testing an MVP concept
Low-volume coaching or consulting
Internal scheduling
Very small operations without inventory overlap

If capacity complexity is minimal, risk exposure decreases.

When It Becomes Risky

For:

Tour operators
Activity providers
Multi-product businesses
Seasonal high-volume traffic
Businesses dependent on precise capacity control
Operators distributing inventory across channels

Revenue depends on reliability.

Operational friction damages reputation quickly.

Why Dedicated Booking Systems Exist

Booking infrastructure exists because operational logic becomes complex fast.

A scheduler is a calendar wrapper.

A booking engine is an operational backbone.

Platforms like Resmark Systems were built to manage inventory concurrency, payment workflows, waiver compliance, reporting architecture, and distribution synchronization at scale.

Dedicated systems evolve to handle real-world load, edge cases, and integration demands that DIY builds underestimate.

This is not about discouraging innovation. It is about recognizing engineering scope.

The Strategic Balance

Use AI for:

Landing page testing
Marketing experiments
Content generation
Funnel optimization
MVP validation

Use booking infrastructure for:

Revenue protection
Capacity control
Operational reliability
Legal compliance
Scalability

Innovation is powerful. Infrastructure protects revenue.

Both have roles.

If You Still Want to Build One, Here Is a Checklist

If you are committed to building your own booking website for free, ensure you:

Define inventory logic clearly.
Map concurrency scenarios in detail.
Implement temporary seat locking.
Stress test capacity under load.
Test refund and partial refund flows.
Simulate API failures.
Implement structured logging and monitoring.
Normalize time zones across geographies.
Encrypt sensitive data properly.
Plan migration pathways if scale increases.

This checklist does not eliminate complexity. It exposes it.

Infrastructure vs Innovation: Choosing Wisely

Creating a booking website for free is possible.
Creating booking infrastructure is engineering.
Innovation without operational resilience creates fragile systems.
Infrastructure without flexibility creates stagnation.
The right decision depends on volume, risk tolerance, technical capability, and growth goals.
If your business depends on capacity precision, payment reliability, and scalable performance, infrastructure becomes strategic.
If you want a neutral evaluation of your architecture before committing to a build or migration, a scalability assessment can provide clarity.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Planning Stage of Tour Operator Marketing (Why It Makes or Breaks Bookings)

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 07:33:42 GMT

Most tour operators think the problem is traffic.

It’s not.

The real issue usually lives in the Planning Stage.

This is the moment when a guest already knows they want to travel. They’re narrowing down options. They’re comparing companies. They’re asking:

Should I do a tour?
What type of tour should I choose?
Which company can I trust?

If your systems aren’t built to guide them through that decision, they leave. And they rarely come back.

In this webinar, we break down exactly how to fix that.

Understanding the Planning Stage in the Growth Engine

Inside the Growth Engine framework, the Planning Stage sits between Dreaming and Booking.

Dreaming is visibility. Booking is conversion. Planning is where trust is built.

This is where your website, email strategy, follow-up systems, and remarketing either work together… or fall apart.

And here’s the reality:

96% of visitors are not ready to book on their first visit
webinar-february-planning
Most operators are not capturing those visitors
Even fewer are nurturing them properly

That means revenue is leaking every single day.

Step 1: Build a Conversion-Focused Website

A beautiful website is not the goal.

Clarity is.

Your website must:

Clearly explain what you offer
Answer objections before they’re asked
Build trust immediately
Make the next step obvious

That includes:

Strong above-the-fold calls to action
Clear tour comparisons
Social proof that matches your target demographic
FAQs that remove hesitation
Mobile-first design

Confusion kills conversions. Structure increases bookings.

Step 2: Capture Planning-Stage Leads

If someone isn’t ready to book, you have two choices:

Let them leave.
Capture their information.

Lead magnets are one of the most underused tools in tourism marketing.

Examples that work:

5-day itineraries
Packing checklists
Interactive “Which Tour Is Right for You?” quizzes
Destination guides
Comparison checklists

One client generated 5,000 downloads in a year from a planning-stage itinerary

That’s 5,000 warm leads who would have otherwise disappeared. The key: the value must match the planning stage. Not generic content. Not fluff. Real trip-planning help.

Step 3: Automate Lead Nurturing

This is where most operators struggle. They capture emails… and then nothing happens. Automated nurture sequences can generate significantly higher engagement than generic email campaign s.

Why?

Because they’re timely.

When someone downloads a guide, takes a quiz, or submits a form, interest is fresh. That is the moment to follow up.

Effective nurture systems:

Send immediate confirmation emails
Deliver ongoing value for 7–14 days
Continue long-term nurture at wider intervals
Avoid pushy sales pressure
Focus on helpful information

The goal is simple: stay relevant until they’re ready.

Step 4: Build a Real Email Campaign Calendar

Random email blasts don’t create predictable revenue.

Structured campaigns do. Nurtured leads can generate up to 50% more sales at a lower cost

Planning-stage email strategy should include:

Segmentation by tour type or interest
Seasonal promotions
Limited availability alerts
Early bird offers
Referral reminders
Past guest re-engagement

Consistency increases lifetime customer value. Sporadic outreach creates silence.

Step 5: Use Remarketing to Stay Visible

Remarketing is one of the most overlooked tools in tourism marketing.

If someone visits your tour page and leaves, you should still be visible to them.

Meta Pixel.
Google Ads Tag.
Audience segmentation.

These tools allow you to:

Retarget visitors by specific tour pages
Exclude completed bookings
Promote planning-stage lead magnets
Run low-budget campaigns effectively

You don’t need a massive budget. Even $5–$15 per day can keep you visible to warm audiences .

Visibility builds familiarity. Familiarity builds trust. Trust builds bookings.

The Bottom Line

Traffic without structure leaks revenue.

The operator with the better system converts more of the same traffic.

If you want more bookings, you don’t necessarily need more visitors.

You need a stronger Planning Stage system.

Capture the lead.
Nurture the lead.
Retarget the lead.
Stay present.

That is how you win before the booking even happens.

Planning Stage Strategy: Tour Operator FAQs

How Tour Operators Can Boost Early-Year Bookings and Streamline Operations with Unified Software

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:38:59 GMT

The start of the year can be one of the most profitable periods for tour operators. It can also be one of the most operationally demanding.

Increased booking activity, unpredictable weather, lean staffing, and guests booking on short notice quickly expose weaknesses in disconnected systems. When availability, payments, check-in, and communication are not aligned, revenue is lost and guest experience suffers.

For rafting, kayaking, hiking, zipline, and other outdoor activity operators, early-year performance depends on how well the website, booking flow, and daily operations work together.

A unified tour management system helps turn that complexity into a competitive advantage.

This guide explains how tour operators can prepare for beginning of the season demand, capture more bookings, and operate more efficiently using software designed for high-volume tour businesses.

Why Seasonal Demand Requires Purpose-Built Tour Software

Booking patterns at the start of the year follow a familiar rhythm. Demand rises quickly, booking windows are shorter, guests expect immediate confirmation, and teams are often smaller than later in the season.

Without the right systems in place, operators are forced into manual workarounds at the exact moment speed and accuracy matter most.

Prevent Capacity Conflicts and Booking Errors

When phone reservations, website bookings, and reseller sales happen close together, inventory must stay accurate in real time. Without centralized controls and automated rules, capacity conflicts and booking errors become unavoidable.

Tour software with live inventory tracking and rule-based controls helps ensure bookings stay accurate and manageable without constant manual oversight.

Manage Increased Booking Activity with Less Friction

Busy booking periods are not the time to rely on spreadsheets, inboxes, or disconnected tools.

A connected system allows operators to:

View reservations, cancellations, and payments in one place
Apply inventory and capacity rules automatically
Reduce repetitive administrative tasks

This keeps teams focused on guests instead of troubleshooting.

Support Mobile and Multi-Channel Reservations

Many bookings happen outside business hours or on mobile devices. Guests expect a smooth experience no matter how they discover your tours.

A modern booking setup should:

Function seamlessly on mobile
Show accurate open spots in real time
Support both direct and reseller sales

A centralized platform keeps every channel aligned and reduces booking conflicts.

Capabilities That Support Efficient Seasonal Operations

Success is not about adding more tools. It is about reducing friction between the systems you already rely on.

Online Booking and Secure Payments

Guests expect a fast checkout experience with clear pricing and immediate confirmation.

Effective booking software allows operators to:

Display real-time availability
Accept deposits or full payment
Process payments online, by phone, or in person

This improves conversion rates and stabilizes cash flow during busy periods.

Automated Guest Communication

A large portion of bookings come from returning guests, referrals, and travelers planning on short notice.

Automation helps operators:

Respond to inquiries automatically
Send confirmations and reminders
Reduce no-shows without increasing staff workload

Consistent communication builds confidence and improves show rates.

Built-In Customer Management

Understanding who your guests are and how they book supports smarter decisions.

Integrated customer tools make it possible to:

Track guest history across seasons
Identify repeat customers
Personalize communication by tour or activity

This is especially valuable when promoting seasonal experiences to past guests.

Reporting and Operational Insight

Early-year data provides immediate feedback on performance.

Access to booking trends and revenue reports helps operators:

Adjust pricing for busy dates
Identify strong-performing tours
Refine marketing efforts quickly

Clear insight supports better decisions when timing matters.

How Software and Your Tour Website Work Together

One of the most common breakdowns during busy booking periods happens at the website level. When the website, booking engine, payments, and waivers operate as separate systems, friction appears quickly. A unified approach treats the website as part of the booking experience rather than a disconnected layer.

Your Website Should Support Conversions

During busy booking periods, your website must load quickly, reflect accurate open spots, and guide visitors smoothly through checkout.

Embedded booking tools and integrated checkout flows create a consistent experience and reduce drop-off.

Flexible Website Integration Options

Tour operators benefit from software that:

Connects cleanly into an existing website
Or includes a purpose-built site designed to convert

This flexibility allows operators to improve performance without unnecessary rebuilds.

A Connected Experience for Guests and Staff

When reservations, payments, waivers, and communication operate within a single system:

Guests complete bookings faster
Staff access everything from one dashboard
Errors and confusion are reduced

This is especially important when operating with smaller teams early in the year.

Challenges of Operating Without a Connected System

Many tour operators do not realize their systems are limiting growth until demand increases.

Lost Revenue from Abandoned Bookings

Slow checkout experiences, inaccurate booking information, or disconnected sales channels cause guests to leave before confirming. During busy periods, those opportunities are rarely recovered.

Reactive Marketing and Missed Follow-Ups

Without automation and customer insight, marketing becomes reactive. Operators miss opportunities to follow up with interested leads and reconnect with past guests.

Manual Management Across Multiple Tours

Managing multiple tours, start times, or activities increases complexity. Without shared inventory rules, capacity management becomes manual and error-prone.

Best Practices for Managing Demand During Busy Periods

Busy booking periods reveal the difference between reactive systems and prepared operations.

Set Rules and Availability in Advance

Define pricing, booking limits, and capacity rules before demand increases. Automation ensures those rules are applied consistently.

Monitor Performance and Adjust Quickly

Review reservations and revenue regularly. Small adjustments to pricing, capacity, or promotions can have a meaningful impact.

Maintain Clear Guest Communication

Consistent communication reduces confusion and no-shows. Automated confirmations, reminders, and follow-ups set clear expectations.

Optimize for Mobile Bookings

A significant share of bookings happen on mobile devices. A fast, mobile-friendly experience directly improves conversions.

Why Tour Operators Choose Resmark Systems

Tour operators need software designed for the realities of seasonal volume and outdoor operations.

Resmark Systems provides a connected tour management platform that helps businesses:

Manage increased booking activity with confidence
Keep websites, reservations, payments, and waivers aligned
Support rafting, kayaking, hiking, zipline, and other activity-based tours

By combining booking technology with seamless website integration, Resmark helps operators simplify operations and focus on delivering great experiences.

Ready to Improve Your Early-Year Operations?

Periods of high demand reward operators who are prepared.

An integrated tour software platform provides the structure needed to manage reservations, reduce operational strain, and capture more revenue when it matters most.

Schedule a demo of Resmark Systems to see how connected software can support your tours and help your business operate more smoothly.

Questions About Hidden Revenue Leaks

How Guests Start Dreaming About Your Tours (Before They Ever Book)

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 19:43:27 GMT

Most tour operators think marketing starts when a guest is ready to book. In reality, the decision is often made long before someone clicks “Book Now.”

Today’s travelers begin their journey in what we call the Dreaming Stage . They are researching ideas, scrolling social media, watching videos, reading reviews, and forming opinions about which tour companies feel trustworthy, exciting, and worth their time.

As Nikki DeSantis, Marketing Director at Resmark, puts it:

“Before guests ever compare prices or click ‘Book Now,’ they’re already forming opinions about which companies feel familiar and trustworthy.”

Understanding and showing up during this early stage is one of the most powerful ways to drive more direct bookings and long-term growth.

What Is the Dreaming Stage?

The Dreaming Stage is the first phase of the guest journey. According to Greg, Senior Sales and Marketing Manager at Resmark, guests typically fall into one of two groups at this point:

“You have guests who don’t know what they want to do yet, and guests who know the type of experience they want but not who to book with.”

Both groups are searching. They’re asking questions. And most importantly, they’re discovering brands for the first time.

This is where visibility matters most.

How Guests Discover Tours Today

Guests don’t rely on just one channel anymore. They might see your brand in Google search, come across your videos on social media, read reviews on an OTA, and then encounter you again through AI-powered search results.

Greg emphasized how fragmented and personal this process can be:

“Two people sitting on the same couch will research trips completely differently. That’s exactly how your guests are searching too.”

This is why consistency across platforms is critical. Travelers are far more likely to book a tour they’ve seen multiple times across different channels.

Showing Up in Google and AI Search

Search is still one of the strongest drivers in the Dreaming Stage. While AI-powered tools like ChatGPT and Gemini are growing rapidly, Google remains foundational.

Nikki explained it simply:

“If you have a strong foundation in Google and you’re doing the right things, most likely you’re going to show up in AI search too.”

That foundation includes clearly defined destination pages, experience-specific content, FAQs, and helpful resources that answer real guest questions. Publishing consistently and updating older content also plays a major role in staying visible.

Social Media Builds Familiarity Before Booking

Social media is not just a booking channel. In the Dreaming Stage, it’s about familiarity.

“When guests see you regularly on social, booking later feels familiar instead of risky,” Nikki shared.

Authentic content matters more than polished marketing. Real moments from tours, guide spotlights, guest reactions, and behind-the-scenes footage often perform better than highly produced ads.

Consistency is key. Even small, regular efforts compound over time.

Video and User-Generated Content Build Trust

Video plays a powerful role in helping guests imagine themselves on your tour. Professional videos are great, but user-generated content can be even more impactful.

Greg highlighted this shift:

“People want to be sold, but they also want to be sold by their peers, not just by you.”

Encouraging guests to share photos and videos, asking for permission to reuse content, and creating simple ways for guests to upload footage can dramatically increase engagement and trust.

The Role of Referrals, Print, and OTAs

Referrals remain one of the strongest discovery channels in the industry. Happy guests create future guests.

Print marketing, while often overlooked, still plays a role for some audiences. Nikki shared that direct mail can feel more personal and trustworthy, especially when paired with digital touchpoints like QR codes.

OTAs also remain a major part of the discovery landscape. While they take a commission, they introduce your brand to guests who may later book directly if your website, content, and messaging are strong.

Dreaming Works Best as a System

The biggest takeaway from the Dreaming Stage is that no single channel works alone.

“Dreaming works when channels support each other,” Nikki explained. “Visibility compounds when your messaging is consistent.”

When SEO, social media, video, paid ads, referrals, and OTAs all work together, guests move naturally from dreaming to planning, booking, and beyond.

The goal isn’t to be everywhere. It’s to be in the right places, for the right guests, with intentional systems that grow stronger over time.

Frequently Asked Questions About the Dreaming Stage

The Direct Booking Machine: A Proven Growth Blueprint for Tour Operators

nikki@resmarkweb.com (Nikki DeSantis) — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 18:52:26 GMT

If you have been running your tour business for a while, you have probably felt the frustration.

One day you are slammed with bookings. The next, it is crickets. You have a decent website, you are trying ads, you are dabbling in social media, but the bookings still are not consistent. And when they do come in, it is often through OTAs that take a big chunk of your margins.

Most tour operators do not need more tools. They need a better system. One that works consistently.

That is exactly what this replay uncovers. Inside this session, Brandon Lake walks through The Direct Booking Machine, a proven Growth Blueprint built specifically for tour operators who want predictable, sustainable direct bookings without relying on chance.

This replay breaks down the biggest ideas taught in the webinar, with quotes, insights, and real examples pulled directly from the session. If you want to watch the video, it is embedded below, but this guide captures the full essence of what Brandon shared.

Meet the Expert

Brandon Lake

Why Tour Operators Struggle With Consistency

Tour operators work incredibly hard. They manage operations, safety, logistics, scheduling, and customer service all at once. Marketing often becomes something you do in spare moments, not a controlled system.

That creates gaps. Those gaps create leaks. And those leaks cost you bookings. Brandon emphasized that most operators already have good tools. What they lack is a framework that ties everything together and makes the tools work.

The big problem is not effort. The big problem is inconsistency. The Direct Booking Machine exists to fix that.

The Breakthrough: Structure Over Software

One of the core takeaways from the session is that tools do not create results by themselves. They only work when placed inside a structured strategy.

Brandon explained how even his own team struggled for years until they changed the way they implemented systems:

“We wrapped everything inside a coaching program, and that structure caused things to happen that we had been struggling with for a very long time.”

This is important. You can have the best booking engine in the world, but without structure:

• Leads go cold
• Follow-up breaks
• Content becomes inconsistent
• Website friction remains
• Reviews slow down
• Social media loses momentum

The Growth Engine fixes these issues by turning them into controlled, repeatable actions.

The Five Stages of Travel and the 25 Critical Actions

Every operator knows the traditional travel journey:

• Dreaming
• Planning
• Booking
• Experiencing
• Sharing

What most operators do not know is what must happen inside each stage. Brandon’s team identified five essential actions inside each one. That is 25 critical actions that drive consistent direct bookings. Most operators only execute a handful of them. Some execute ten or twelve. Very few complete all twenty five. When those actions are missing, demand becomes unpredictable. When all twenty five actions are functioning, demand becomes steady. This replay shows how to identify which of the twenty five your business is not doing.

The 12-Step Growth Engine

The 12-Step Growth Engine is the central framework taught in the session. It is the blueprint behind Western River Expeditions , Moab Adventure Center , and many other successful operators. The Growth Engine focuses on three outcomes:

1. Bring in the right leads

Through content, visibility, storytelling, SEO, social media, and partnerships.

2. Nurture and convert those leads consistently

Through automated follow-up, lead magnets, email sequences, and website clarity.

3. Retain and amplify guests

Through reviews, referrals, user-generated content, and post-trip communication.

The power of this system is that each step supports the next. Once all 12 steps are in motion, the system becomes self-sustaining.

Why Tools Alone Cannot Fix Booking Problems

Brandon sees the same pattern year after year. When bookings slow down, operators sign up for more tools:

• A new CRM
• A new booking engine

• A new ad agency
• A new email platform
• A new AI tool

But without the Growth Engine, none of these solve the underlying problem The system must come first. The tools only amplify it.

Social Media and Visibility: A Modern Operator’s Edge

Visibility matters now more than ever. Consumers browse social media before they book. They want to see real people, real experiences, real adventure.

During the training, Nikki highlighted that presence is the priority, not perfection. Even basic consistency increases conversions.

The takeaway for operators:

• Post regularly
• Share real moments
• Show personality
• Educate and inspire
• Use scheduling tools when needed
• Have staff and friends help amplify your reach

Visibility keeps you top of mind. Top of mind leads to more direct bookings.

Lead Magnets and Nurture Are Game Changers

One of the biggest opportunities for operators is capturing leads before they are ready to book.

A simple lead magnet can turn cold website traffic into warm leads who:

• Read your emails
• Learn from your content
• Trust your brand
• Come back and book later

And when paired with the Growth Engine nurture system, conversions rise quickly. Brandon explained that operators often miss this because they focus only on booking or not booking. Lead capture opens the entire middle of the funnel.

The Coaching Structure That Transforms Results

Perhaps the most valuable insight from the replay is how coaching transformed everything for Brandon’s own companies. Before coaching, the pieces existed, but the pace was slow. After coaching, the pieces aligned and produced predictable results.

The 90-day framework gives operators:

• Accountability
• Structure
• Weekly implementation
• Monthly optimization
• A clear blueprint
• A predictable rhythm

That rhythm creates consistent bookings.

FAQs

Take the Next Step

If you want real clarity on where your booking system is strong and where it is quietly losing revenue, this is the best place to start. The free Growth Engine Assessment will show you exactly where your business stands and what to focus on next for the biggest impact. If you'd like to learn more about the 90-day growth engine framework, click here .

How Tour Operators Can Create Positive Impact Through Sustainable Travel

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 15:00:27 GMT

How Small Actions Create Big Impact in Sustainable Travel

During a recent multi-day hike up a mountain, I witnessed a small but powerful moment on the trail.

A few guides began picking up bits of trash as they climbed. Then one of them turned to their group and asked, “Would anyone like to help keep the mountain clean?” Within minutes, others joined in. Soon, hikers from completely different groups were doing the same, myself included.

It created a ripple effect. One small action inspired many others.

The mountain itself wasn’t overly littered, but that moment stuck with me. It was a clear reminder that sustainability in travel doesn’t have to start with massive initiatives or complex programs. Often, it begins with awareness, leadership, and the example set by the people guiding the experience.

As tour operators, we have the opportunity to lead those same small but meaningful changes every single day.

Why Sustainability Starts With Tour Operators

Many travelers don’t set out to harm the environment or local communities. In fact, most would make better choices if they simply understood the impact of their actions. The problem isn’t intent; it’s awareness.

That’s where tour operators play a vital role. You’re more than trip planners. You’re educators, storytellers, and stewards of the destinations you share. The way your team behaves, the policies you enforce, and the partners you choose all send a powerful message about what kind of tourism you believe in.

When travelers see your guides model responsible behavior, such as picking up trash, respecting wildlife boundaries, or supporting local communities, it normalizes that behavior. They follow your lead.

5 Ways Tour Operators Can Lead Positive Change

Here are a few ways you can integrate sustainability and regeneration into your operations without losing sight of your business goals or guest experience.

1. Educate Before and During the Tour

Build sustainability into your storytelling. Share pre-trip emails or short briefings that show guests how they can help protect the places they visit. Include local customs, waste reduction tips, or the reasons your company supports specific community initiatives. If you’re using tools like Resmark, you can also link to educational content or local guidelines within your automated emails so guests start engaging with sustainability efforts before they even arrive.

2. Model the Behavior You Want to See

Guests learn by example. Encourage your guides and team members to demonstrate respect for the environment, whether that’s refilling reusable water bottles, staying on marked trails, or cleaning up as they go. These actions create social proof that influences traveler behavior naturally.

3. Support Local Communities

Choose locally owned accommodations, restaurants, and suppliers whenever possible. Source crafts and food from artisans within the region. Not only does this strengthen your relationship with local partners, but it also keeps more economic benefits in the community.

4. Create Regenerative Experiences

Sustainability is about reducing harm. Regenerative tourism goes further. It leaves places better than they were before. Consider integrating activities that contribute to local well-being: planting trees, joining beach or trail cleanups, volunteering with conservation projects, or cooking alongside locals to support social programs.

5. Partner for Impact

You don’t have to build these programs from scratch. Collaborate with organizations already doing incredible work.

Positive Impact Tourism is one such example. They’ve created a regenerative model that helps tour operators co-create “Positive Impact Experiences,” which are hands-on activities that directly benefit local communities and nature.

Their approach combines sustainability, cultural preservation, and community engagement in ways that make travel more meaningful for everyone involved. Whether it’s planting trees, cooking for the elderly, or volunteering with local NGOs, these experiences connect travelers to the heart of a destination.

If you’re ready to take that step, you can even become a Positive Impact partner . It’s also a great opportunity to gain more exposure by having your tours listed as part of a growing global network of experiences that give back to local communities and nature.

Imagine If Every Tour Did This

That moment on my hiking trip still stands out, not because of the trash, but because of what it represented. One person’s small action inspired others, which inspired more.

Imagine if every tour around the world sparked that same ripple. If every guide, every traveler, and every operator believed that small steps add up to global impact.

Sustainability isn’t just an environmental goal; it’s a mindset. One that tour operators are uniquely positioned to lead.

A Small Step Toward a Big Future

Whether you operate local adventures or multi-day expeditions, you have the power to shape how people experience the world. Start small. Educate your guests. Support your community. Model the behaviors that create pride, respect, and connection.

And when you’re ready to take your sustainability journey further, explore resources like Positive Impact Tourism to see what’s possible when travel gives back more than it takes.

Check out the inspiring video below from Positive Impact Tourism!

FAQs About Sustainable Tourism for Tour Operators

The Hidden Leaks Costing Tour Operators Thousands in Lost Bookings

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 15:27:25 GMT

Running a tour business isn’t just about creating unforgettable experiences. It’s also about making sure your systems convert interest into bookings and maximize every guest relationship. Yet, many operators are quietly losing thousands of dollars each season without realizing it.

We have identified four hidden “leaks” where revenue slips through the cracks. The good news? Once you know where to look, you can plug these leaks and start keeping more of your hard-earned bookings.

1. Website Visitors Don’t Convert

Your website might look stunning, but if it isn’t built to convert, you’re leaving money on the table. Tour operators often see high traffic but low bookings because the site lacks clear calls to action, mobile-friendly booking buttons, or trust-building elements like reviews and guarantees.

How to fix it:

Audit your booking flow. Can a guest book in three clicks or less?
Add urgency and clarity with phrases like “Book Your Spot Today.”
Highlight social proof with testimonials and photos from real guests.

Looking for a step-by-step checklist to build a website that converts visitors into bookings? Read this blog: https://www.resmarksystems.com/website-design-checklist

2. Leads Walk Away

Not every guest books on their first visit. Without a lead capture system, those visitors disappear forever. Imagine the cost of paying for ads or SEO, only to watch potential guests vanish without a trace.

How to fix it:

Use lead forms and pop-ups offering a discount or travel guide.
Automate nurture emails with helpful tips and reminders.
Track abandoned bookings and follow up quickly.

Even a simple reminder email can recover a surprising percentage of lost leads. If you don’t have a CRM for tour operators to automate follow-ups, check out this post: Why Every Tour Operator Needs a CRM .

3. Missed Upsell and Resell Opportunities

Most operators focus heavily on acquiring new guests but forget to re-engage past customers. That is a costly mistake. Repeat guests are easier to convert, spend more, and often bring friends along.

How to fix it:

Offer package upgrades at checkout (for example, add a photo package or lunch).
Send post-trip thank-you emails with future booking discounts.
Launch a referral program to turn happy guests into promoters.

Your best source of new revenue may already be in your email list.

4. Scattered Systems = Lost Data

When booking platforms, waivers, and marketing tools do not integrate, critical data falls through the cracks. This leads to duplicated effort, missed communication, and no clear picture of your guests.

How to fix it:

Choose a booking and CRM system that centralizes all your guest data. With Resmark, we make this simple through our integrated solution called CruiseControl.
Integrate digital waivers to streamline check-in and reduce paper clutter.
Use reporting tools to track trends and repeat behavior.

An integrated system like Resmark does not just save time. It gives you the insights to scale smarter.

Turning Missed Revenue into Bookings

Every tour operator faces these challenges, but you do not have to keep losing revenue. Start by identifying where your business might be leaking and take one step this week to fix it.

Want to go deeper? Read 17 Booking System Mistakes Hurting Tour Operators for more practical tips on boosting bookings and plugging gaps.

Questions About Hidden Revenue Leaks

5 Must-Have Features in an Activity Reservation App for 2025

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 08:15:02 GMT

Guests today expect booking a tour to be as simple as ordering dinner or reserving a rideshare. If your booking process feels complicated or outdated, potential customers will move on quickly. That’s why choosing the right activity reservation app matters more than ever in 2025.

Resmark was built specifically for tour operators, combining all the tools you need to manage reservations, payments, waivers, and marketing in one place. Here are five features that set it apart and why they should be at the top of your list when evaluating booking technology.

1. 24/7 Online Booking That Never Misses a Sale

Guests want the freedom to book on their own schedule, not just during office hours. With Resmark’s embeddable booking widgets, you can capture new customers directly from your website anytime, day or night.

Key benefits include:

A user-friendly checkout experience that reduces abandoned bookings
Optimized mobile booking so guests can reserve from any device
Multi-activity booking and add-ons so customers can build their perfect itinerary in one cart

With real-time availability built in, your guests always see accurate openings down to the second. That means no overbooking headaches for you, and no disappointment for them.

2. Automation That Turns Leads Into Customers

Resmark isn’t just a checkout tool. It also helps you grow by capturing and nurturing leads. Using custom forms, you can gather contact information from people who aren’t quite ready to book. From there, Resmark’s automated email sequences follow up with them - reminding, encouraging, and guiding them back to complete their reservation.

This automation doesn’t stop after booking. Resmark sends confirmation emails, pre-trip reminders, and even review requests once the activity is done. All of it happens automatically, so you spend less time chasing guests and more time running your business.

3. Built-In Digital Waivers for a Seamless Guest Experience

One of the biggest frustrations for both guests and operators is the waiver process. Resmark solves this by including WaiverSign , a powerful digital waiver system, right inside the platform.

Here’s how it helps:

Guests automatically receive a waiver link when they book
Waivers can be signed on desktop, mobile, kiosk, or even by scanning a QR code
Manifests update in real time, so staff instantly know who has signed and who hasn’t

This saves time at check-in, reduces paperwork, and ensures you always have the documentation you need.

4. Powerful Back-Office Management

Behind the scenes, Resmark gives operators the tools they need to manage every aspect of bookings. From inventory control to financial tracking, you have full visibility into your business.

Some highlights:

A real-time dashboard showing upcoming tours, cancellations, and overdue payments
Custom tour manifests that display exactly the data you need
Auto inventory generation to ensure you always have capacity to sell
Flexible payment options, including deposits, balances, and gift cards
Task management and booking notes to keep your team on the same page

Instead of piecing together multiple tools, Resmark puts everything under one roof, saving you hours of admin work each week.

5. Expanded Sales Through Partnerships and Channels

Empty seats are lost revenue. Resmark helps you maximize every opportunity by making it easy to connect with resellers, travel agents, and OTAs.

You can:

Share real-time inventory with partners so they can sell your tours directly
Set unique pricing per channel to control commissions and margins
Automatically generate invoices and statements for resellers
Integrate with platforms like Viator, GetYourGuide, Expedia, and TripAdvisor

By opening your tours to more sales channels while keeping control of your inventory and pricing, you’ll fill more spots without creating more work.

Where to Go From Here

Resmark isn’t just another activity booking app. It’s a complete solution designed for tour operators who want to simplify their operations, increase bookings, and deliver exceptional guest experiences.

From 24/7 online reservations and built-in waivers to automated marketing and reseller connections, Resmark provides the tools you need to grow confidently in 2025.

If your current activity booking system feels outdated or pieced together, it might be time for a change. The right software is not just about managing bookings. It’s about building stronger guest relationships and unlocking growth.

�� Ready to see how Resmark can transform your business? Schedule a demo today .

FAQs: Activity Reservation Apps for Tour Operators

17 Booking System Mistakes Hurting Tour Operators | Resmark Systems

nikki@resmarkweb.com (Nikki DeSantis) — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 09:15:49 GMT

Your booking system should be your tour business’s growth engine, helping you capture ready-to-book guests easily and consistently. Yet for many operators, hidden issues in their booking systems quietly act as conversion killers, draining bookings, wasting ad spend, and creating a poor user experience that frustrates guests and staff alike.

If you are ready to fix what is holding your business back, here are 15 booking system mistakes that may be hurting your revenue and growth, and exactly how to address them to improve guest experience, increase bookings, and reduce friction in your tour operations.

1. Not Following Up via Email

Many guests who abandon a booking form intend to return, but distractions, questions, or decision fatigue often delay them. Without automated follow-ups, you are missing the chance to bring these warm leads back to complete their booking without extra marketing costs.

Failing to follow up reduces your booking completion rate and limits repeat business opportunities. A clear, consistent follow-up process helps guests complete bookings, prepares them for their tour, and increases the likelihood they leave a review or book again.

2. Poor User Experience

Your website is often your guest’s first real interaction with your brand. If your booking flow is slow, confusing, or not mobile-friendly, guests will feel uncertain about booking and may leave to find a competitor with a smoother process.

A poor user experience can drastically lower your conversion rates, making your marketing spend less effective while damaging your brand’s credibility. By improving your user experience, you create a clear, easy path to booking, which builds guest confidence and trust in your tours.

3. Not Building Your Website for Conversion

Your website’s primary purpose is to guide visitors toward booking. A site that looks beautiful but lacks clear calls to action and pathways to purchase misses out on turning interest into revenue.

Without a conversion-focused design, your traffic does not translate into bookings, leading to wasted ad spend and lost growth opportunities. Adding trust signals, strong calls to action, and an intuitive flow can significantly improve your bookings and make your marketing efforts more effective.

We have an entire team dedicated to building websites for conversions. Just check out some of our sites: https://www.resmarkweb.com/our-work

4. Not Having a Digital Waiver Policy

Paper waivers lead to longer wait times, lost paperwork, and missed opportunities to collect guest data for marketing. A digital waiver system like WaiverSign enhances professionalism, protects your business legally, and helps you capture emails with consent, supporting your marketing and guest communication strategies.

5. Manually Managing Bookings

Manual processes can result in double bookings, missed payments, and inaccurate availability, damaging your reputation and creating unnecessary stress. Automating your booking management saves time, ensures accuracy, and allows your team to focus on what matters most.

6. Limited Payment Options

Guests expect to pay in ways that suit their needs, whether paying in full, placing a deposit, or splitting payments with their group. Limiting payment options creates unnecessary friction that can cause potential guests to leave without completing their booking.

Without flexible payment options, your business may lose guests who would otherwise be ready to book, reducing your conversion rate and overall revenue. Offering a variety of payment methods meets guest expectations and supports your business model.

7. Not Integrating Booking with Your Website

Guests trust your brand and want a consistent experience from browsing to booking. If your booking system redirects them to an off-brand, confusing third-party platform, it can create doubt and reduce their confidence in completing the transaction.

We see it all the time, a disconnected booking system leads to higher drop-offs and fewer completed bookings. Seamlessly integrating your booking system with your website keeps guests engaged and builds trust, improving your conversion rates. Learn more about how Resmark creates beautiful integrated websites .

8. A Friction-Filled Checkout Process

The checkout process is your final opportunity to secure a booking. If it is slow, confusing, or requires unnecessary steps, guests may abandon their purchase despite wanting to book.

9. Complicated Tour Pickups and Transfers

Disorganized pickups can cause delays, negative reviews, and stress for guests and staff. Allowing guests to select their pickup locations during booking and automating manifest generation helps streamline your operations while improving the guest experience.

10. Not Offering Multi-Activity Bookings

Guests often want to book multiple experiences in one trip and appreciate the ability to plan efficiently in one transaction. Forcing them to book each activity separately creates friction and reduces your revenue opportunities.

11. Missing Add-On Opportunities

Guests are often willing to purchase extras like meals, rentals, or merchandise if offered at the right time, especially when these add-ons enhance their experience.

Failing to offer add-ons during booking means missing out on additional revenue while providing a less complete experience for your guests. Ultimately, integrating add-on options into your booking process increases revenue with minimal effort.

12. Lack of Reporting and Analytics

Without clear data, you risk wasting money on channels that do not convert while neglecting those that quietly bring in your best guests. Using reporting and analytics allows you to optimize your marketing, increase bookings, and grow efficiently.

13. Not Connecting GA4

Google Analytics 4 allows you to see how visitors interact with your website and your booking funnel, revealing where guests drop off and which pages drive bookings.

Without GA4, you cannot track conversion data accurately, making it challenging to optimize your website and marketing campaigns. Connecting GA4 helps you refine your strategies and improve your booking flow based on real guest behavior.

What to do:

Set up a GA4 account and connect it to your website and booking system.
Track key actions like “Book Now” clicks and completed checkouts.
Use funnel analysis to see where guests drop off.
Check reports monthly to adjust your website and marketing for more bookings.

Learn more about Google Analytics for tour operators here .

14. Not Asking for Reviews

As you know, positive guest reviews build trust with potential customers and improve your visibility in search results, helping attract future bookings.

If you do not actively request reviews via automation, you miss opportunities to strengthen your reputation and drive organic growth. Automating review requests through your booking system helps you collect valuable testimonials without additional manual effort.

15. Not Partnering with Local Businesses

Building partnerships with hotels, travel agencies, and local attractions helps you expand your reach, capture warm referrals, and fill empty seats with guests who are already in your destination and ready to book. Many guests trust recommendations from local businesses they are already interacting with, making these referrals more likely to convert.

Without partnerships, you miss a consistent, low-cost channel for bookings, especially during slow seasons. By collaborating with trusted businesses, you can maximize your occupancy without additional advertising spend, while building valuable community connections that support your brand.

Your booking system should make it easy for partners to sell your tours directly, whether by providing them with unique booking links, reseller portals, or commission tracking. Resmark enables you to generate direct booking links and track reseller sales, ensuring your partners can seamlessly book guests into your system in real-time, helping you fill tours and manage capacity while maintaining full control over inventory and payments.

16. Not Using Real-Time Availability to Prevent Overbooking

Overbooking occurs when your system cannot track availability accurately, allowing multiple guests to book the same tour slot or seat, leading to operational stress, last-minute refunds, and negative reviews that damage your reputation. Without real-time availability, your team risks overselling tours and underestimating capacity, creating friction that erodes guest trust while disrupting staffing, transportation, and vendor coordination.

A strong booking system should display up-to-the-second availability, automatically updating as guests book online or staff add phone reservations. With Resmark’s real-time inventory management, you can eliminate accidental double bookings, sync schedules across all sales channels, and ensure your capacity is managed accurately for a seamless guest experience.

17. Not Simplifying Multi-Day Tour Reservations

Managing multi-day tours involves coordinating accommodations, transportation, activities, and guest preferences while handling complex itineraries and overlapping schedules, and without a system designed for multi-day booking management, organizing these tours becomes time-consuming and error-prone. Relying on manual tracking or tools not built for multi-day reservations can lead to missed details, double bookings, and guest confusion, creating frustration for your team and customers while damaging your reputation.

Your booking system should centralize your multi-day operations, allowing you to adjust itineraries, manage availability, and coordinate activities in one place. Resmark’s system makes it easy to build structured multi-day packages, track participant details, and avoid scheduling conflicts, ensuring a seamless guest experience while reducing your administrative workload.

How Resmark Helps Eliminate These Booking System Mistakes

Resmark is built to address these booking system mistakes and help tour operators provide a seamless, high-converting, and guest-friendly booking experience. With features like CruiseControl for automated follow-ups, integrated digital waivers with WaiverSign, optimized checkout flows, and advanced reporting, Resmark ensures your booking system becomes your most effective sales tool.

Frequently Asked Questions About Tour Reservation Software

Ready to Fix Your Booking System Friction?

Your booking system should drive growth, not limit it. If you are ready to remove friction, improve your guest experience, and grow your bookings:

�� Book a Resmark call and discover how Resmark can transform your tour business.

A Day in the Life With (and Without) Tour Reservation Software

nikki@resmarkweb.com (Nikki DeSantis) — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 08:17:57 GMT

Running a tour company is supposed to be about delivering unforgettable experiences to your guests. But too often, it feels like the real adventure is simply trying to keep the business organized. If you have ever finished a long day wondering where all the hours went or how you could possibly be overbooked again, you are not alone.

Let’s look at what a typical day feels like without an activity booking software compared to life with a modern tour reservation software that does the heavy lifting for you.

The Morning Scramble Without Software

The day begins before sunrise. You are armed with a phone, a stack of printouts, and the latest version (hopefully) of your tour schedule. But as soon as you walk in, the phone is already ringing. A guest insists they booked yesterday, but there is no record. Someone else wants to reschedule, but you cannot find their payment confirmation in the spreadsheet.

As you manually tick off names on your clipboard, you realize a group of eight is double-booked. Someone has to be bumped or compensated. The guides look at you, frustrated. Your guests look at you, frustrated.

By 10 AM, you have already spent hours juggling emails, handwritten notes, and phone calls just to confirm who is coming today. You are still nowhere near ready to handle payments or last-minute inquiries.

How the Day Starts With Resmark

Contrast that with life using Resmark’s online tour booking system . Instead of guessing or piecing together scraps of information, you simply log in to your real-time dashboard.

At a glance, you can see:

Who has booked and paid
Open spots for each departure
Waiver status for every participant

No more overbooking or missing details. The morning check-in runs smoothly because guests already received automatic confirmations and reminders. Your guides have accurate manifests right on their phones, updated in real time. You even have time to greet guests personally because you are not buried in paperwork.

If you want to understand more about what to look for in a solution, this guide to choosing tour booking software is a great place to start.

The Digital Ecosystem Tour Operators Need in 2025

Tour operators wear a lot of hats: business owner, marketing manager, operations coordinator, and sometimes even tour guide. To stay competitive in 2025, businesses need a complete system, not just standalone tools. That means your booking software should communicate with your marketing automation. Your SEO strategy should align with your paid ads. Your AI tools should actually save you time instead of adding complexity.

Without this integration, you're missing out on leads, losing bookings, and wasting money.

Midday Mayhem Without a Tour Booking System

Once tours are underway, your day should get easier. But instead, you are dealing with a steady drip of problems.

A last-minute caller wants to book, but you have to check inventory manually. A credit card payment fails, and you do not know until it is too late. A guest calls to ask about adding lunch, but your notes say “maybe,” and you are not sure what that means.

Without a dedicated tour operator system software , every task requires you to stop what you are doing and start over.

A Calm, Organized Afternoon With an Activity Booking Software

With Resmark, you do not just track bookings, you manage your entire operation confidently. A customer calls to add an activity? In just a few clicks, you update their reservation and send them an updated confirmation automatically. Payments process securely whether guests booked online, over the phone, or in person.

You can even upsell extras like equipment rentals or meals since Resmark makes it easy to offer add-ons during checkout. Real-time availability ensures you never sell something you cannot deliver.

If you are curious about costs, you can view Resmark pricing here .

Evening Wrap-Up Without Software

It is finally time to close out the day. You cross-reference every reservation against payment records, hand-count cash receipts, and attempt to reconcile guest counts. Someone forgot to sign a waiver, which means you have to track them down before tomorrow.

Your reports are a patchwork of spreadsheets and printouts. By the time you finish, you have spent as much time on paperwork as you did running tours.

Ending the Day Confidently With Resmark

When your business runs on Resmark, closing out the day feels almost effortless. You generate detailed reports in seconds, check waiver status in real time, and review revenue, outstanding balances, and tomorrow’s manifests instantly. You head home knowing your operation is organized, your team is prepared, and your guests had a great experience from start to finish.

What an Industry Expert Says

Erik Weiseth, Managing Partner of Orange Torpedo, put it best:

It’s hard to imagine building a scalable business without a reservation system. To create a sustainable tour or experience company, you first need a great product—an experience that people want and that you can operate well. But beyond that, you need a system that makes it easy for customers to book and for you to manage the operations.

A reservation system helps you manage inventory to avoid overbooking and identify where there’s room to grow. It gives you insight into your clients so you can better target your marketing and understand your audience. It should enable consistent communication with your guests, which is essential for delivering great experiences. It should help you manage your accounting, track your leads, and ensure you provide the right information to your guides allowing them to provide incredible experiences. It is the central tool for all business operations.

At the end of the day, the difference between a thriving business and one that struggles often comes down to systems. A good reservation platform becomes the central source of truth in your business, the foundation upon which your other systems rely. Without it, sustainable growth becomes nearly impossible. So what do I think our business would have been like without reservation software? Ultimately, I think it would have been miserable and not sustainable.

Why Resmark Is the Best Tour Operator Software

Resmark is more than an activity booking software. It is the backbone of a thriving tour business. From powerful online booking tools and integrated digital waivers to automated lead follow-up and flexible payments, Resmark helps you:

Streamline operations and eliminate double-bookings
Capture more bookings 24/7
Offer upsells, custom pricing, and gift cards
Simplify communication and guest check-in
Grow your business with confidence

If you are exploring ways to improve your tour company’s efficiency, Resmark can show you what is possible.

Frequently Asked Questions About Tour Reservation Software

Ready to See It in Action?

You do not have to keep running your business in constant reaction mode. With the right tour reservation software, you can build a more organized, profitable, and sustainable operation. Schedule a demo today to see how Resmark can help you create better guest experiences, save hours every week, and finally take back control of your day.

NEW SEO + GEO Formula for Your Tour Business

nikki@resmarkweb.com (Nikki DeSantis) — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 18:38:04 GMT

Your Future Customers Aren’t Just Googling Anymore

Your ideal customers are still using Google, but they’re also turning to ChatGPT, Google Maps, and other AI-powered tools to plan their trips. If your tour company isn’t showing up in these results, you're already falling behind.

Watch our June 2025 webinar to discover how to rank across both traditional search engines and emerging AI platforms so you can drive more bookings than ever.

What You’ll Learn

In this webinar replay, you’ll learn how to future-proof your tour or activity business by improving your visibility in both search engines and AI-driven tools like ChatGPT and Gemini.

We’ll cover:

How AI is changing travel search and how your tour business can show up in ChatGPT and other AI tools
SEO for tour businesses that still work in 2025 and what you can stop wasting time on
A new visibility formula that connects Google, Maps, directories, and AI to help you get more bookings

Meet the Experts

Brandon Lake

Brandon is the founder of Resmark Systems and WaiverSign, two industry-leading tools serving tour and activity companies worldwide. He also helps run Western River Expeditions and Moab Adventure Center, two of North America’s top tour operators. As a founding member of Trusted Adventures and Rafting America, Brandon brings deep industry experience and a passion for helping businesses grow. When he's not working, you’ll find him exploring the outdoors with his wife and four kids by raft, bike, or foot.

Nikki DeSantis

Nikki is the Marketing Director for Resmark’s family of brands, including Resmark Systems, ResmarkWeb, and WaiverSign. With a background in content strategy and social media, she leads marketing efforts that drive visibility and bookings for tour and activity operators. Nikki began her career as a travel blogger and social media entrepreneur. Today, she also works with multiple brands and companies in the tourism industry, guiding them through best practices in digital marketing, lead generation, and brand growth.

The New Era of SEO for Tour Operators: How to Win Visibility in an AI-Driven World

The landscape of SEO has fundamentally changed. If you're a tour operator still focusing solely on ranking on Google’s first page, you're missing the bigger picture. In a recent workshop led by Nikki DeSantis, Director of Marketing at Resmark Systems, and Brandon Lake, tourism industry veteran and founder of multiple adventure travel brands, the duo broke down the seismic shift happening in online discovery and what tour businesses must do to stay relevant, competitive, and booked.

Why SEO Isn’t Just About Google Anymore

“SEO is no longer about ranking #1 on Google. It’s about visibility across platforms where customers are actually searching,” said Nikki, setting the tone for the discussion. With the explosion of AI tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Gemini, consumer search habits are quickly evolving. Nikki shared a personal story of planning a Kilimanjaro trip where her research journey started not on Google, but in ChatGPT. She asked nuanced questions, compared tour operators, and narrowed down choices based on trust signals like social media presence and online reviews.

This is the new buying journey. And it’s being shaped by AI.

The Shift to Multi-Platform Discovery

Today’s travelers are discovery-driven, not just search-driven. That means your brand needs to show up not only in Google, but also in:

AI Overviews (Google SGE)
ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity
Google Maps
YouTube (for visual research)
Instagram, Reddit, TikTok (for social proof and UGC)

Nikki described this broader strategy as Search Everywhere SEO , a term borrowed from top SEO influencers. Visibility now means being cited as a trusted brand across a web of platforms, not just one.

Real-Time Data Shows It Works

Brandon shared real traffic insights from their own adventure brands. For example:

Traffic from AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity is growing exponentially, with 3 to 5 times more visits since January.
Conversion rates from AI-referral traffic reached 3.3%, which is higher than many traditional channels.
Some clients experienced 361% increases in traffic and 26 to 31% jumps in revenue by following this strategy.

This isn’t theory. It’s working.

What Makes Content AI-Optimized?

To earn visibility in AI platforms, content needs to be:

Helpful : Focused on actual customer questions and needs
Unique : Not generic AI regurgitation—human experience matters
Trustworthy : Supported by reviews, testimonials, and real-world data
Structured : Using FAQs, schema markup, and organized formatting for easy indexing

Tour operators should aim to become the cited source in AI responses by building out pages that educate and convert. These could include destination guides, detailed tour pages with multimedia, and high-intent blog posts that match conversational queries.

The Strategy in Action

Brandon walked through the design and SEO strategy behind Moab Adventure Center’s upcoming website. The site includes:

Deep-dive informational pages like “Arches National Park Visitor Guide”
Keyword-rich, visual tour listings with strong conversion design
Embedded FAQs wrapped in schema markup
Internal linking between blog, guide, and product pages

The goal is twofold. Earn visibility with AI and organic search, and maximize conversions once a visitor lands on the site.

A Quick SEO Checklist for Tour Operators

Nikki wrapped up with a practical roadmap:

Audit your current website with tools like SEMrush, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console
Identify high-intent keywords using tools like Ubersuggest or Ahrefs
Refresh tour pages for mobile optimization, media, and conversion
Create FAQ and blog content that answers common questions in detail
Focus on presence across Google Maps, review sites, blogs, and YouTube
Track traffic from AI tools using an AI source tracking report

The Bottom Line

“AI is not the future of SEO. It’s the present,” said Nikki. “If you’re not showing up in AI tools, your business is invisible to the new wave of travelers.”

Tour operators must embrace a Search Everywhere mindset. Optimize content to not only rank, but resonate. The companies that do will build trust faster, win more bookings, and future-proof their growth.

A Guide to Choosing Tour Booking Software

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 15:38:22 GMT

Choosing a Tour Booking Software

In today's digital world, your customers don't just prefer online booking they expect it. The days of phone tag and manual entry are over. If a potential guest can't book your tour or activity instantly from their phone or computer, they will move on to a competitor who offers that convenience.

Switching from manual methods to an online booking system isn't just about staying competitive; it's about fundamentally transforming your business. It's about automating tedious tasks, freeing up your team to focus on creating amazing experiences, and gaining invaluable data to help you grow.

But with so many options available, how do you sift through the noise? How do you find a platform that’s a perfect fit for the unique needs of a tour and activity business?

This guide will walk you through everything you need to know. We’ll cover the non-negotiable benefits of making the switch and provide a clear, three-step framework for choosing the right tour booking software for your business.

Why an Online Booking System is No Longer Optional

Before we get into the "how," let's solidify the "why." A powerful online booking system is the engine of a modern tour business. Here’s what it can do for you:

Meet Modern Customer Expectations: Today's travelers book flights, hotels, and dinner reservations online. They expect the same seamless experience from you. An online system allows you to capture bookings 24/7, not just when you're there to answer the phone.
Automate Operations and Free Up Your Time: Imagine a world where confirmations, reminders, and payment processing happen automatically. The right software handles the administrative heavy lifting, reducing human error and freeing up your staff to focus on delivering exceptional customer service.
Leverage Data to Grow Your Business: Which tours are most popular? Where are your customers coming from? An integrated system provides a dashboard of powerful analytics, giving you the insights you need to make smart, data-driven decisions about your marketing and operations.

How to Choose the Right Tour Booking Software: A 3-Step Guide

Now that you're ready to embrace the benefits, how do you choose the best platform? It boils down to three key areas.

1. Assess the Must-Have Features for Your Tour Business

Not all reservation software is created equal. A system built for restaurants or salons won't understand the complexities of your tour business. Look for features specifically designed for tours and activities:

Real-Time Availability & Scheduling: The system must show live availability to prevent overbooking and automatically update your schedule across all platforms.
Waiver Management: The ability to have customers sign digital waivers during the booking process is a massive time-saver and organizational tool.
Centralized Dashboard: See all your bookings, customer information, and payments in one clean, easy-to-understand interface.
Automated Communication: Look for automated confirmation emails, pre-trip reminders, and post-trip follow-ups (like review requests) to enhance the customer experience.
Resource & Guide Management: The ability to assign guides and manage resources (like vehicles or equipment) to specific tours is crucial for staying organized as you grow.

2. Prioritize Ease of Use (For Everyone)

The most feature-rich software in the world is useless if it's difficult to use. A complicated system will frustrate your staff and, even worse, cause potential customers to abandon their booking.

For Your Customers: The booking process should be simple, intuitive, and mobile-friendly. How many clicks does it take to get from your homepage to a confirmed booking? It should be as few as possible. A clunky customer experience will directly lead to lost revenue.
For Your Staff: Your team needs to be able to quickly learn the system, manage bookings, check in guests, and pull reports without needing a technical degree. An intuitive backend is just as important as a smooth frontend. When you schedule a demo, imagine your team using the software day-to-day.

3. Don't Underestimate the Power of Great Customer Support

Your booking software is the lifeblood of your business. When you have a question or something isn't working right—especially during your busy season—you need immediate access to expert help.

When evaluating a software provider, ask about their support:

What are their support hours?
Is support handled by a call center, or by an in-house team that truly understands the tour industry?
Do they offer help with the initial setup and data migration?

A company that invests in a dedicated, knowledgeable, US-based support team is a company that is invested in your success. Don't settle for anything less.

Ready to Transform Your Business?

Choosing the right tour booking software is one of the most important decisions you'll make for your business. By focusing on industry-specific features, prioritizing ease of use, and demanding excellent support, you can find a partner that will help you streamline your operations, improve your customer experience, and drive growth for years to come.

At Resmark, we've built our system with these principles at its core. Our platform is powerful, easy to use, and backed by an unrivaled US-based support team. Schedule a personalized demo today to see how Resmark can work for you.

AI, SEO, and Online Bookings: Why It All Needs to Work Together in 2025

nikki@resmarkweb.com (Nikki DeSantis) — Thu, 22 May 2025 07:15:00 GMT

Are your booking system, website, and marketing tools really working together, or are they holding each other back?

The tourism industry is evolving fast. In 2025, tour operators are expected to do more with less. They need to optimize every marketing dollar, streamline bookings, and personalize the guest experience. That means having a solid booking platform isn’t enough. A beautiful website on its own won’t cut it. And AI tools? They’re only useful if they’re fully integrated into your strategy.

It all needs to work together.

Let’s break down why booking software, marketing (SEO, paid ads, and websites), and AI tools must be aligned to help tour operators grow in today’s digital landscape, and what that looks like in action.

The Digital Ecosystem Tour Operators Need in 2025

Without this integration, you're missing out on leads, losing bookings, and wasting money.

Why Booking Software Is the Foundation

Your booking system is the engine of your business. It manages availability, processes payments, and secures customer data. But a great booking system does much more. It should also:

Connect with your website seamlessly
Allow guests to book from any device, anytime
Automate emails, reminders, and waivers
Track conversions from marketing campaigns

Resmark Systems was built by tour operators to solve these exact problems. It's more than a calendar. It's a central hub that syncs with marketing tools, supports mobile-friendly bookings, and makes operations smoother.

If your reservation software isn't making your life easier and your business more scalable, it’s time for an upgrade.

The Role of SEO and Website Design in Driving Direct Bookings

Your website is where most customers will first interact with your brand. But pretty isn’t enough. A great tour operator website needs:

Clean, intuitive design for mobile and desktop
Fast load times
Clear calls to action (“Book Now,” “Check Availability,” etc.)
SEO-optimized content that attracts traffic and converts visitors into guests

This is where ResmarkWeb comes in. The team focuses 100% on tour operators and understands how to build websites that not only look great but also rank well in search results and convert traffic into revenue.

Investing in SEO for tour operators is no longer optional. With Google constantly evolving, operators need strategies tailored to how travelers search, like “kayaking tours near Asheville” or “best canyon hikes in Utah.”

To avoid common pitfalls, be sure to review these 17 tour marketing mistakes that could be sabotaging your marketing goals . Fixing just a few of them can have a major impact on your visibility and bookings.

Whether you’re a beginner or have a few marketing wins under your belt, understanding SEO for travel websites helps ensure long-term visibility.

Paid Ads: Accelerating Results With Targeted Traffic

SEO is a long game. Paid ads provide the speed. Google Ads and social media ads can drive traffic almost immediately, but only if they’re well-managed.

Paid advertising helps:

Target specific demographics (e.g., families, adventure travelers, honeymooners)
Highlight seasonal promotions
Retarget past website visitors who didn’t book
Gain visibility in crowded markets

ResmarkWeb’s paid advertising services are designed specifically for the tourism industry. Instead of wasting ad dollars on vague campaigns, they help operators create targeted ads that lead to bookings, not just clicks.

The key is making sure ads align with your SEO efforts, website landing pages, and booking system. When those pieces connect, you’ll maximize your ROI.

Where AI Fits In and Why It’s Not a Silver Bullet

AI is everywhere right now, but for tour operators, the real value lies in how it’s used.

AI can support your tourism business in several powerful ways:

Email automation : AI tools can schedule personalized follow-ups, review requests, or seasonal promos at the perfect time.
Chatbots and voice assistants : These can handle simple inquiries and free up your team.
Content creation : AI can help draft blog posts, meta descriptions, and social captions (with human editing for tone and accuracy).
Predictive analytics : AI can analyze past booking trends to suggest optimal pricing or tour times.

But AI is only helpful when it's plugged into your system. Tools that don’t integrate with your booking software or marketing platforms will just create extra work.

Want to explore actionable ways to use AI in your tourism business? Here’s a helpful guide on how to use AI in travel and tourism .

The future isn’t about replacing humans with AI. It’s about using AI to enhance human-driven strategies.

Why Integration Is Non-Negotiable in 2025

Imagine this. A guest finds your blog via Google (thanks to SEO), clicks to your site (because your site loads fast and looks amazing), browses your tours, and books instantly on any device. They receive a confirmation email, sign a waiver automatically, and get a review request after their trip.

That’s the power of an integrated system.

This isn’t just about tools. It’s about how those tools work together to create a seamless guest experience and make your business more efficient behind the scenes.

Operators using Resmark’s booking platform along with ResmarkWeb’s marketing services are already seeing this synergy and reaping the rewards.

Connect the Dots for Growth

The travel industry is getting more competitive. Travelers expect seamless online experiences, personalized communication, and quick answers. Tour operators who want to grow in 2025 must stop thinking in silos.

Your booking software, website, SEO, paid ads, and AI tools need to be connected, customized, and aligned with your goals.

Success isn’t about adding more tools. It’s about making your existing tools work smarter together. And that’s what Resmark and ResmarkWeb were built to do.

Building a Smarter Tourism Business in 2025

Want to see how Resmark and ResmarkWeb can help your business grow?
Check out our reservation software and tourism marketing services for more info.

Your Website Design Checklist & Tips for 2025

Sat, 10 May 2025 18:49:20 GMT

Your website is often the first interaction potential guests have with your tour or activity business. It sets expectations, builds trust, and influences whether someone chooses to book or leave. With travel planning happening primarily online, investing in a website that is visually appealing, user-friendly, and strategically built is no longer optional.

This updated website design checklist outlines key elements to help tour operators create a site that converts and complies with modern usability and SEO standards. Backed by industry data and usability research, each section reflects current website design tips and best practices for 2025.

Visual Design That Reflects Your Brand

Your website’s design should do more than just look good. It should support your business goals by building trust and delivering a consistent brand experience. Design choices like layout, colors, typography, and photography all contribute to the message your brand communicates.

Checklist:

Consistent use of brand colors and fonts
High-quality, relevant photography
Accessible contrast ratios and font sizes
Clear hierarchy with intuitive visual flow

Use real images from your tours/business instead of stock photos to build credibility and emotional connection.

Clear, Conversion-Focused Structure

Your site should be easy to navigate for first-time visitors and returning guests. Key information like your tour offerings, availability, and booking process should be immediately accessible.

Checklist:

Intuitive navigation with clear labels
Prominent "Book Now" buttons visible on all devices
Descriptive headings and page structure for scanning
Well-organized homepage with clear value proposition

Structure each page with a clear goal in mind, especially those targeting organic traffic from search engines.

Fast, Mobile-Optimized Performance

Mobile traffic now accounts for more than half of global web visits. Your website must perform quickly and responsively on all devices, especially mobile, where slow loading or clunky interfaces can lead to abandonment.

Checklist:

Mobile-friendly design with responsive layouts
Compressed images and efficient use of media
Fast load times (under 3 seconds preferred)
Avoid pop-ups or elements that disrupt mobile usability

Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to test performance and make user-driven improvements.

SEO-Ready Content and Structure

An effective website needs to be visible. That means optimizing for search engines while keeping content clear, helpful, and relevant for human readers. Keywords should align with what potential guests are searching for and placed naturally within high-quality content.

Checklist:

Title tags and meta descriptions for each page
Header tags (H1, H2, H3) structured for clarity
Internal linking between services and blog posts
Keyword-optimized content that is readable and trustworthy

Think beyond aesthetics. A well-structured site supports your SEO goals and helps search engines understand what your business offers.

Secure and Trustworthy Infrastructure

Trust is a major factor in online bookings, especially when customers are providing personal and payment information. Your website should follow modern web security standards and signal trust throughout the booking process.

Checklist:

HTTPS and SSL certificate in place
Up-to-date booking software with secure payment processing
Trust signals such as reviews, certifications, and testimonials
Transparent privacy policy and terms of service

Display key trust indicators near high-conversion areas like booking forms and checkout pages.

Seamless Online Booking Integration

A frictionless booking experience improves conversion rates and customer satisfaction. Your online reservation system should be embedded into your site and easy to use on any device.

Checklist:

Booking calendar with real-time availability
Clear pricing and options for add-ons or packages
Automated confirmation emails after booking
Integration with payment gateways and CRM tools

Avoid redirecting users to third-party platforms for booking. Keep everything in one place when possible.

Analytics and Continuous Improvement

A high-performing website isn’t built once and left untouched. Use heatmaps, session recordings, and analytics to monitor user behavior and continuously test improvements.

Checklist:

Google Analytics or GA4 properly installed
Goal tracking and event tagging for bookings
Heatmaps or feedback widgets to identify friction points
Regular content audits to keep information current

Periodically revisit this checklist as part of your website maintenance routine to keep up with changing trends and customer expectations

Final Thoughts

A thoughtful website design plays a critical role in converting curious visitors into paying guests. Following this comprehensive website design checklist ensures your site is functional, visually engaging, and optimized for both search engines and real customers.

If you're a tour or activity operator looking to launch or revamp your website in 2025, Resmark’s team is here to help. From custom designs to integrated online booking systems, we provide solutions built specifically for your business goals.

Event Management & Booking Software Guide

Sat, 10 May 2025 17:42:47 GMT

Event Booking Systems

Being an event manager is no cakewalk. With the rise of comprehensive event management software , businesses are moving beyond spreadsheets and manual tasks. Every event is different, and each one has a ton of moving parts, which could be any of the following:

The venue
The caterer(s), bartender(s), or food vendor(s)
The performers
The serving staff
The parking
The guests
The cleanup
The money

A good number of things have to go right for the event to be successful, and even temporary hiccups can really throw a wrench in things. And without careful planning, management, and damage control (when it’s needed), everything is liable to fall apart.

In short, it takes a lot of hard work, and event managers don’t always get the credit they deserve for a job done well.

But you probably already know all of that. What you may not know, however, is that there’s software that can make the job of planning and running an event significantly easier by cutting down on paperwork, helping you keep track of everything, and reducing how often you have to talk to people on the phone yourself.

Sound like it’s up your alley? We thought so.

Very simply, an event booking system is a type of event management software designed to help you schedule, manage, and run events efficiently. It does the job by helping you stay organized, keeping relevant information right where you need it, and allowing you to do things like offer online booking to guests.

Different solutions are built with different end-users in mind, so feature sets will vary from tool to tool. That, of course, means that not every tool will be a good fit, so you’ll want to do your research before deciding on one.

That said, the one feature they all have in common is guest management, typically with online booking . This is the core feature of the software: allowing you to take bookings and track them, keeping the schedule and all of the guest information in the same place. This makes things much easier to manage for you (and your team, if you have one), and (in the case of online bookings) more convenient for the guests.

Common Use Cases for Event Booking Systems

As you might imagine, the term “event” can cover a host of different situations, and each of these separate “use cases” can have different needs. But a solid event booking system can answer the needs of a variety of use cases. To illustrate that, let’s cover some of those use cases, and how an event booking system can help them get things done.

Private Events

Private events are defined primarily by the requirement for an invitation to attend. Weddings, company parties, and family and class reunions all fall under the category of private events. Most private events are one-offs, but that doesn’t make them any less difficult to organize.

An event booking system , often integrated within comprehensive event booking software , can enable you to take and manage RSVPs digitally, making it easier to plan for foodservice, seating, and other headcount-based decisions. Depending on the toolset, you’ll also be able to plan seating arrangements, send out confirmation emails, collect information on dietary needs, and more.

Races

Races come in a lot of shapes and sizes. They include foot races like marathons, half marathons, and 5ks, as well as bike races and triathlons. They’re distinct in that they typically require public spaces as venues (like city streets), which means there are additional logistics to work out for the venue if you’re, say, closing streets down and stopping traffic.

Races can be one-offs, but more often they’re recurring events (usually yearly). They’re also unique because they tend to have a lot of participants (sometimes thousands). And in some cases, it costs money to enter the race, which means you’d need a solution that not only allows booking but allows for payment processing as well.

These are things that an event booking system can simplify. If you have a yearly race, odds are you have a website dedicated to it, so people can find information on it. With most event booking systems, it’s rather straightforward to add an online booking feature right on your site, meaning you won’t have to sit at a desk all day taking calls from hundreds of people.

Beyond that, if you need to charge a fee for entering the race you can do that. Some booking systems even have liability waiver functionality, so if you want to have each participant sign a waiver, there’s that functionality as well.

Sporting Events

Along similar lines are sporting events like tournaments, meets, and other competitions. Whether it’s a swim meet, a basketball tournament, or a baseball game, these events have to worry about two groups of guests: spectators and participants. That means you’ll have to manage venue space for both.

Not every sporting event needs to plan seating for each spectator (as you might in a stadium), and some events only have a single competition space, either of which can cut down on the logistics and planning required. But even the simplest of sporting events will take some setup, some scheduling, and some cleanup.

Additionally, a lot of sporting events involve food vendors, which, depending on how the transactions are handled, can add a layer of complexity (not to mention add to the mess).

With the right event management software , you can plan out all the spectator seats, sell tickets, accommodate for foodservice, administer sports waivers, and more.

Performances

Concerts, stage plays, musicals, festivals, and even movie theaters all deal with similar problems to the events that have already been mentioned. Whether it’s a concert tour for a popular band or just the daily operation of a local movie theater, the right software can make life easier for the managers in charge of the events in question.

For all of these types of events, seating is the primary issue, even if you don’t get as granular as assigned seating. The income from ticket sales is the whole point of the event, so making that process as smooth as possible for both your guests and your staff is priority number one.

There are also food and beverage services, which a lot of these events have—concession stands, independent vendors, or otherwise.

Event booking systems can digitize all of these functions, making the process a lot more seamless for both staff and guests.

Conferences and Conventions

Similar to indoor private events but typically much larger in scope, conferences and conventions tend to take up the entire space at an event venue, rather than a single room. These kinds of events are almost always ticketed, and often last for more than one day. Attendee numbers can range from a few dozen to thousands. And since they usually take up whole days, there’s almost always some foodservice involved.

The purpose of this type of event tends to be the most varied compared to other events. They can be, for example:

Business-based (industry- or profession-specific)
Pop culture-based
Technology-based
Fitness-based
Culinary-based
Trade shows
Job fairs
And more

Those who organize these types of events have to manage logistics for attendees as well as presenters. Additionally, though, most of these events (even the ones that aren’t dedicated trade shows) feature a vendor room, where attendees can browse booths run by a variety of businesses. This adds a unique level of complexity to the event, as all of the businesses, their transactions, and the floor space they occupy has to be accommodated for.

Handling so many disparate needs requires an event management system with a rather robust set of features, and quite a few of them aren’t up to the task. Even so, the right software suite can solve a number of these concerns, most notably managing the floor space.

Common Event Locations

Event venues are as varied as the events that are hosted there. Here are a few of the places that frequently host events:

Hotel conference rooms and ballrooms
Country club ballrooms
Auditoriums, theaters, and other stages
Concert halls
Small concert venues
Stadiums and other sports venues
School property (like gymnasiums)
Public property (like city streets or parks)
Residences-turned-vacation-destinations
Large cabins, farms, farmhouses, and barns
Outdoor venues like beaches, ships, and rooftops
Dedicated event venues

Essentially, any place that can be reserved for people to gather can (and often is) used as an event venue, and may benefit from event booking software.

Important Event Booking System Features

What an event booking system is actually capable of depends on the use cases it’s designed to address, and few (if any) have comprehensive functionality. But, to help you identify one that might meet your event management needs, let’s talk about some of the most popular (and often most critical) features.

Booking Management and Online Booking

This is the foundational feature, the heart and soul of any of these tools. With this, you can take bookings online or input them manually. The system tracks all of your bookings and organizes them visually so you can reference them quickly. Some tools even enable you to provide tickets to booked guests.

Ultimately, whether you’re the event manager booking guests or the venue manager booking events, booking is the number one feature you don’t want to be without.

Resource Management

With this feature, you can allocate inventory, staff, and other resources to specific bookings, ensuring that you don’t schedule more bookings than you have the materials or manpower for. It’s also an important functionality for venue managers who need to track the usage of things like chairs, tables, presentation equipment, and so on.

Venue Management

This is the feature that allows you to plan out the physical layout of the event space. Wedding planners, for example, may need to plan out who sits at what table. Concerts and sporting events often have ticketed, assigned seating. And conventions have vendor booths to worry about. This allows you to plot out all of those things on a virtual representation of the space.

Foodservice Management

A lot of events outsource food services like catering, drink bars, or independent food vendors, but sometimes event managers need to handle that all in-house. In that case, you need software to facilitate the sale of food and beverage items, and potentially to process the transactions.

The specifics of this feature will vary from tool to tool, but comprehensive foodservice management allows you to set up menu items, sell them, and process the transactions, giving you full insight into sales numbers, inventory tracking, and customer trends.

Data Management

Speaking of data insight, if you manage lots of events (especially if they’re of different types), you’ll probably want to know things like what’s most popular, what your customer demographics are, what events bring the most attendees, and so on. That’s what data management is for.

First, it stores the information gathered from bookings, sales, resource management, and other functionalities the tool has. Then it tracks that data over time. Finally, the best systems organize all those numbers for you, often giving you visual representations of how those numbers change over time.

Very few tools have the power to rival true business analytics tools, but some can give you quite a bit of data insight on their own, and almost all of them allow you to export the data for uploading to more robust number-crunching tools.

Customer Outreach

Sending individual emails to large groups of people is time-consuming at best and downright infeasible at worst. The good news is, there’s a straightforward solution to the need to send the same confirmation email to 300 people. It’s called marketing automation.

Now, not everyone cares to follow up with guests by email after they book, but some event managers need to, and it can become incredibly tedious as the number of bookings rises. If you’re the venue manager, and you’re just taking bookings for each event as a whole, it may not seem too troublesome, but should you be managing the bookings of individual attendees, things can get out of hand really quickly.

Marketing automation can simplify things, by allowing you to set up automated emails that trigger whenever a specific condition is met (when someone makes a booking, for instance). Rather than having to draft an email every time you have to send customer correspondence, marketing automation can take a single email, and email it to everyone who needs it.

Very few event booking systems have this feature built in (and we’re not just saying that because RESMARK has marketing automation). It’s outside the purview of most tools, and your options instead become solutions like Hubspot and Mailchimp that can cost hundreds of dollars a month or more, and may not play well with your booking solution.

With the right event booking system, though, you’ll have the tools you need to handle:

Confirmation emails
“What to bring” emails
“How to make the most of your experience” emails
“What to expect” emails
Reminder emails
Payment reminder emails
Requests for signatures on documents like waivers or photo releases
Post-event review requests

So, if you’re sending hundreds or thousands of emails a month, be sure to check if this feature is included in your digital event booking system.

Lead Generation and Nurturing

Private events limit attendees to just the people who are relevant to the event, and if fewer people RSVP, it’s technically saving money on things like catering for whoever’s footing the bill. Public events are different. In nearly every case, getting more attendees is better than having fewer, at least until you reach max capacity. But how do you increase the number of attendees?

Advertising is a viable method, but it’s costly, and not every event manager has the budget for it. A more cost-effective solution is lead generation and nurturing.

With lead generation , you can set up lead capture forms on your website, allowing you to capture the contact information (typically the email address) of potential attendees. From there, you “nurture” the leads with email campaigns, much in the way you might with guests who have already booked, by using marketing automation.

Lead generation and lead nurturing cost only what it takes to initially set it up, and they continue to benefit your marketing and sales efforts essentially in perpetuity. It’s an incredibly effective way to increase sales without having to devote a significant portion of the budget to the endeavor.

Who RESMARK Works For

You probably remember us mentioning above that few—if any—solutions are comprehensive. So at this point, you’re probably assuming that when we listed important features, we only listed features that RESMARK actually has, so that we look comprehensive as a solution. Well, we’re sorry to disappoint, but there were several features up there that we don’t currently offer.

The truth is, RESMARK just can’t meet the needs of every use case. Our event booking system is always under development, and we’re adding new features all the time, but there’s only so much a single team building a single solution can do. So we’d be very remiss if we weren’t honest about who we can help, and who we can’t.

We’d much rather be fully transparent, and avoid wasting your time with a sales call for a solution that can’t meet your needs. So let’s do just that.

You’d Benefit from RESMARK If…

While not comprehensive, our solution is very robust. It’s built from four primary components:

RES+ , the core booking software
WaiverSign , our digital document and online signing tool
CruiseControl , our marketing automation solution
TrueConnect , our reseller and distribution channel manager

That last one is primarily for our tour and activity operator clients, who often have networks of travel agents, hotel concierges, and fellow operators who help them sell bookings. Rather than having to manage all of those relationships manually and answer actual phone calls (who does that anymore?) to take bookings from partners, TrueConnect allows users to do all of that digitally, including handling partner commissions.

Additionally, RESMARK boasts a few other benefits, like analytics reports, lead gen capabilities, an incredibly intuitive user interface, and a US-based support team that’s easier to get a hold of than almost any other support team.

In other words, RESMARK is an excellent software suite for organizations that need:

Lead generation and nurturing
To send identical emails to large numbers of guests
To gather signatures on documents digitally (a must in a post-COVID world)
Help managing third-party sellers of bookings
Sales and operations reports
A solid booking solution with the other tools they’re looking for already baked in

You’re Looking for Something Else If…

There are two major features that RESMARK doesn’t have the functionality for currently. The first is venue management (like planning seating in physical space). We don’t have tools for you to outline a room digitally and lay out what’s going to occupy that space.

We also can’t handle foodservice transactions (just like we can’t facilitate retail sales). While you could certainly set up menu items (or retail items) in our system, we can’t do UPCs, those easy selection touchscreen buttons like they have at fast food places, or things like that.

More importantly, our system is designed to collect information with each purchase, like name, phone number, email address, age of participants, and so forth. Even if you ditch all other questions, bare minimum you’ll have to fill out an email address with each online order (though email doesn’t have to be required for in-house orders).

We’re also not what you’re looking for if you don’t have your own merchant services account. Resmark is designed for a business-oriented market, meaning we don’t process credit cards on your behalf and then give you the money later, like some other booking solutions do.

Instead, you’ll have to set up a merchant services account under your name or your business’s name. Then, when we process transactions for you, the money goes directly into your bank account with each transaction.

And in the event that we’re not the right solution for you, keep in mind, it doesn’t mean we still can’t help you. We’re very familiar with our peers and competitors in the market, and have a good idea what many of them are capable of. So if we’re not a good fit, you can still get in touch with us, and we can help you find a toolset that does work for you, without pressuring you to try ours.

Booking System Pricing

We figure you’d also probably appreciate a little transparency concerning pricing too, since pricing is pretty complicated in the event booking space, and not every brand is brave enough to talk about what they cost out in the open. But that doesn’t really help you, does it? So let’s talk about it, so you can tell when a solution is charging more than normal.

What’s important to know is that, when they do talk about price, a lot of brands use either confusing pricing or straight-up hidden fees to make it more difficult to know exactly what they cost. For example, they may charge one price for base functionality, add on prices for additional venue spaces or bookings, separate fees for card processing or website integration, and so on. Look for event booking software that integrates seamlessly with CRMs, marketing tools, and calendar apps to streamline your operations.

Ultimately, though, most fall into one of two categories:

Monthly subscriptions based on pricing tiers, where higher tiers include more functionality and support
Per transaction fees that can either be absorbed or pushed onto the customer

Subscriptions

For subscriptions, some brands start with a “free” plan that offers base functionality and limited features for those who don’t need the whole suite. This can be useful, especially if, say, you’re planning your own wedding, and you won’t be scheduling events ever again after the big day.

It’s less useful for those who have multiple venues, book lots of events, or book through most of the year, especially because one of the “features” that’s typically limited is support availability.

Lower-tier plans typically cost around $10–$20 a month, often billed annually, so expect to shell out around $100 to $200 just to get on board. You should also expect to be limited in the number of guests who can book, the number of venues you can manage, custom field functionality, ways you can contact support, and more with these lower-tier plans.

Pro or business plan subscriptions range from $40–$70 a month (or $480–$840 a year). Even at this higher tier, some still put a cap on the number of simultaneously scheduled events, the number of bookings, the length of time guest data will be stored, the number of users, and more.

Finally, most brands have custom plans for high volume clients.

Transaction Fees

The other pricing strategy charges you based on how many transactions you make. Now, some brands charge only for online bookings (but charge at a higher percentage, even as high as 10%), while some charge for any booking made through the system (but at a much lower rate).

Others still use a hybrid system, where they charge a standard, lower rate for all bookings, but then tack on a much higher rate for any online transaction that’s made. Finally, some brands lower the price per transaction if you connect with their payment processor, so they can save money on the processing.

To gauge just how expensive a given transaction fee is, you first have to understand how much payment processors actually charge to...you know...process payments. Typically, processing a card costs between 2% and 4%. The cost goes up if it’s a card with a lot of rewards, and stays low if it’s just a basic debit card.

Because of this, most transaction fees will sit between 3% and 4% so that the booking system can cover their processing costs and still make a profit. Those that employ transaction fees as low as 2% usually combine it with something else, like a monthly subscription fee (like we do; more on that below).

Similarly, there are a few transaction fees that dip below 2%, but since this is below what processors charge, they have to supplement that fee with something else in order to turn a profit (often a hidden, much higher online transaction fee).

You’ll also see a lot of brands trying to handwave high transaction fees by trying to say that you can push the fee onto your booking guests. While that’s true, pushing a 10% fee onto, say, an attendee booking a business convention ticket that costs $2,500 will seem like a bit of a ripoff to the attendee.

In other words, keep an eye out for high fees and hidden fees, because some brands like to sucker punch you with them.

RESMARK’s Pricing

How do we do it here at RESMARK ? Well, we like to keep our pricing simple. We have three options. First, we have a 3.5% booking fee with no flat monthly fee. This is for those who don’t book all year, only want to be charged for bookings they take, or who simply plan to push the whole fee onto their customers.

Next, we have a 2% booking fee with a $95 monthly fee, for those who want to reduce the fee being pushed onto guests when they book, or who book in higher volumes and want to save on the booking fee. Finally, we have custom pricing for businesses processing over $3 million annually.

No matter which pricing plan you choose, you get full access to the whole RESMARK suite. No limits, no restrictions. Full-fledged support is included, and the team can be reached by email, by phone, and in-app. There’s also no cap on usage of the system; you get unlimited users, bookings, transactions, and so forth.

Conclusion

All of us in this corner of the SaaS industry are trying to make the lives of event managers easier, but each of us come at the problem with a different approach. This results in different toolsets, and no single toolset meets the needs of every use case. Even when the solution solves your problems, the price may be cost-prohibitive, making it a bad fit anyway.

We know RESMARK won't be right for everyone, but it's a carefully built event booking system that solves many of the problems event and venue managers face. Beyond that, we’re very familiar with the tools on the market, and we can help you find the software that's right for you in the event RESMARK isn't what you're looking for. Choosing the right event scheduling software or event management software depends on your business needs, but the goal is always the same: simplify, automate, and grow.

Top 7 Travel Industry Trends to Watch Out for in 2025

nikki@resmarkweb.com (Nikki DeSantis) — Sat, 10 May 2025 10:53:29 GMT

The tourism and travel industry is evolving faster than ever before, and if you’re not paying attention, you will get left behind. Whether you’re a tour operator offering day tours, multi-day tours, a DMO, a travel agent, or something else, you’ll be impacted by the changes happening in this dynamic field.

In 2024 alone, we attended several tourism conferences and noticed some significant shifts—much larger than in previous years. These changes aren’t just trends; they’re reshaping how we operate and connect with travelers. As tour operators ourselves, we know that staying ahead of these shifts is essential to succeeding in an increasingly competitive industry.

What Are the Key Trends Shaping the Tourism Industry in 2025?

The resurgence of travel: Tourism is recovering and expanding beyond pre-pandemic levels, with significant growth in international arrivals and revenue.
The rise of personalization: Travelers expect tailored experiences and itineraries designed to meet their unique needs.
AI and technology integration: Artificial intelligence and automation are streamlining operations and enhancing customer experiences.
Sustainability and wellness focus: Eco-tourism and wellness travel are growing as travelers prioritize their health and the planet.
Content and SEO innovations: Adapting to voice, AI-driven search, and new marketing strategies is critical for digital success.

Tourism Industry Growth and Revenue Forecast

Overall, the tourism industry is projected to see growth, building on the recovery momentum of previous years. International tourist arrivals are expected to surpass pre-pandemic levels, with an estimated 1.53 billion travelers expected globally, marking an increase from prior years. This growth is driven by pent-up demand, the resurgence of business and leisure travel, and an increased focus on sustainable and personalized travel experiences. Revenue in the tourism sector is forecasted to rise as travelers spend more on unique and tailored experiences. With continued advancements in technology and the increasing importance of eco-conscious travel, 2025 is set to be a year of significant expansion for the industry.

1. Niching: Catering to Specific Travel Trend Needs

In 2025, niche tourism will continue to dominate, with travelers seeking specialized experiences over generic tours:

Specialized Experiences: Culinary tours, wellness retreats, and eco-conscious travel are among the top niches gaining traction. Tour operators who cater to these markets can build strong customer loyalty by meeting specific interests.
Boutique Travel: Small-group tours and highly personalized experiences—such as luxury wine tours or immersive cultural experiences—are in high demand. Operators in these areas can charge premium rates while offering distinctive value.

2. Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Travel

AI is transforming the travel industry, and its role will only grow in 2025.

Personalization Through AI: AI systems analyze customer data to provide tailored travel suggestions, personalized itineraries, and real-time assistance via chatbots.
AI Chatbots and Customer Service: These tools enable 24/7 support, offering instant responses to inquiries, booking management, and customized recommendations based on traveler behavior.
Predictive Analytics: AI helps operators forecast trends, adjust pricing, and identify emerging customer preferences, leading to data-driven decision-making.
Tool Highlight: ResmarkWeb offers a free AI prompt document to help you create detailed customer profiles. This tool can enhance your content strategy for websites, emails, and social media. Learn more in the video below.

3. Content Marketing & SEO: Digital Dominance

Content marketing and SEO will remain critical for attracting and converting travelers in 2025.

Content That Resonates: Engaging, authentic content like blogs, videos, and social media posts highlights the unique aspects of your offerings, inspiring confidence among travelers.
SEO Best Practices: Optimize websites with keywords, meta tags, alt text, and mobile-first designs to rank higher in search results and attract relevant traffic.
Local SEO: Focus on localized strategies to capture niche markets and drive traffic for “near me” searches and specific regional audiences.
Voice and AI Search Optimization:
Use natural language and long-tail keywords to align with how travelers search using voice assistants like Alexa or Google Assistant.
Structure content for AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini by creating concise, informative answers to common travel queries.

4. Video Marketing: The Power of Visual Storytelling

Video is one of the most powerful ways to connect with potential travelers in 2025.

Immersive Experiences: Showcasing destinations, behind-the-scenes tours, tips, and traveler testimonials helps customers visualize their experiences.
Live Streaming: Virtual tours or live Q&A sessions foster engagement and trust.
User-Generated Content: Encourage customers to share their travel videos, amplifying your reach and showcasing authentic experiences.

Expedition Kanab, a ResmarkWeb client, does an amazing job of using social media as a marketing tool. Check out the account !

5. Personalization & Customization: The Demand for Tailored Experiences

Personalization is now an expectation for travelers.

Tailored Itineraries: Flexible packages that allow travelers to choose their own dates, activities, and accommodations are increasingly in demand.
Tech-Driven Personalization:
CRM Systems : Use customer data to send personalized recommendations, upsell add-ons, and refine marketing campaigns.
AI and Machine Learning: Analyze behavior to suggest relevant itineraries and optimize dynamic pricing.
Hyper-Personalized Marketing:
Use targeted email campaigns or interactive quizzes to guide customers toward curated experiences.
Focus on bespoke travel for luxury or niche travelers who want exclusive, one-of-a-kind journeys.

6. Eco-Tourism and Wellness Travel Trend

Sustainability and wellness are at the forefront of traveler priorities.

Eco-Tourism: Carbon-offset programs, eco-friendly accommodations, and low-impact tours appeal to environmentally conscious travelers.
Wellness Travel: Mental and physical well-being are driving demand for yoga retreats, mindfulness programs, and other wellness-centered travel experiences.

7. Community Engagement and Extreme Tourism

Meaningful and adventurous travel is growing:

Community Engagement: Collaborate with local businesses, promote responsible tourism, and support local economies to create socially conscious travel experiences.
Extreme Tourism: Cater to thrill-seekers with activities like polar expeditions, base jumping, or mountaineering, which attract niche but passionate customers.

The Future of Tour Operators in 2025

The tourism industry is not just recovering; it's evolving—and quickly!

Success in 2025 will depend on:

Embracing emerging technologies like AI and predictive analytics.
Creating personalized, niche experiences that resonate with travelers.
Adapting marketing strategies to prioritize SEO, voice search, and video storytelling.
Staying committed to sustainability, wellness, and community-driven tourism.

Tour operators who adapt to these 2025 travel trends will position themselves as leaders in a changing market. Tools like Resmark Reservation Software and ResmarkWeb (marketing for tour operators) can streamline operations and make the customer journey A+ for your clients. Plus, our team is here to guide you every step of the way, helping you maintain a competitive edge.

17 Tour Marketing Mistakes That Could Be Sabotaging Your Marketing Goals

nikki@resmarkweb.com (Nikki DeSantis) — Sun, 04 May 2025 14:13:44 GMT

If you're not meeting your marketing goals as a tour operator, it might be because of overlooked strategy mistakes. Whether you're running ads or building a campaign, aligning every effort with your overall marketing aims is essential.

From ignoring online reviews to not taking advantage of the features you already have, these mistakes can keep your business from moving forward. This post outlines 17 common problems and gives practical advice to help you build a smarter marketing plan.

1. Not Tracking Where Leads Come From

If you’re not tracking how people are finding your business, whether it’s through Google, Instagram, referrals, or review sites, you could be missing out on valuable insights that inform your marketing strategy and increase bookings. Even a simple spreadsheet is better than nothing, but a dedicated system like a CRM for tour operators makes a big difference.

Tracking your leads helps you understand which marketing channels are actually working. If most of your customers are coming from Instagram, for example, that’s a clear sign to invest more time and resources there. On the other hand, if a paid ad campaign isn’t bringing in leads, you can adjust or cut it. Without this visibility, you're just guessing. A reliable lead tracking system helps you spend smarter and grow faster.

2. Not Using an Integrated Booking System

Manually managing bookings or relying on disconnected tools leads to not only headaches, but missed opportunities. It’s easy to miss something, double-book, or lose track of guests.

An integrated booking system like Resmark helps with more than just reservations. It connects your calendar, payments, emails, guest records, and waivers so you can spend less time on admin and more time focused on your guests.

3. No Clear Call-to-Actions (CTAs)

If people aren’t booking, it might be because they’re not sure what to do next. A strong CTA guides visitors toward the next step, whether that’s making a reservation, joining your email list, or calling for more info.

Make your CTAs easy to find and use simple language like “Book Now” or “See Availability.” Don’t leave people guessing. Tell them exactly what you want them to do!

4. Ignoring the Power of Online Reviews

Online reviews influence booking decisions more than you might think. They show potential guests what kind of experience they can expect.

Make it easy for happy customers to leave reviews by sending a quick follow-up email after their tour, or maybe even an SMS. Always respond, even if the feedback isn’t perfect. This shows you’re engaged and professional. For more guidance, see this post on review management .

5. Underusing Features in Your Booking System

Many tour operators only use the basics, such as the calendar and payment tools, while ignoring features that could save time or help grow revenue.

Features like automated follow-up emails through Resmark’s Cruise Control, discount codes, customer notes, and reporting tools are often built in. Take time to learn what your system can actually do. You may already have the tools you need, you just haven’t turned them on yet.

6. Not Investing in a Marketing-Focused Website

Your website should help people book, not just tell them what you offer. If your site is outdated, hard to navigate, or missing key information, it could be turning people away.

A well-designed tour operator website includes clear calls to action, mobile-friendly design, trust signals like testimonials, and fast loading times. Your website is where many people decide whether to trust you. Make sure it’s working in your favor.

7. Neglecting Basic SEO

If you’re not showing up in search results, you’re likely missing out on potential customers. SEO doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does need attention.

Start by making sure each page has a clear topic, uses plain language, and answers the kinds of questions travelers are asking. Add location-based content and check your site speed. For a simple place to start, explore this SEO guide for tour companies .

8. Skipping Blogs and Resource Building

Writing blog posts can help more people find your business online and learn about what you offer. It’s also a way to answer common questions and make guests feel more prepared.

Write about topics like “What to Pack,” “Things to Do in [Your Destination],” or “Meet Our Guides.” Once you write it, you can also share it in your emails or on social media. A little effort here goes a long way.

9. Not Automating Where You Can

Doing everything by hand takes up valuable time and increases the chance of mistakes. Whether it’s sending reminders, asking for reviews, or confirming bookings, automation makes your life easier.

Start small. Set up automated booking confirmations and follow-up emails. Over time, you can add more. Many booking platforms have these features ready to go. You just need to turn them on.

Also, keep in mind, you can automate email campaigns. Here’s an example of an automation we just set up for a client. We’re running Facebook ads for a tour operator, with three different ads targeting different destinations. When someone clicks to get more info and fills out the form, that contact is automatically added to the client’s CRM, tagged based on which Facebook ad form they completed. From there, they receive a specific sequence of emails delivered right to their inbox.

When someone replies to one of those emails, the tour operator gets notified and can jump in to personally answer any questions. The best part? He didn’t have to individually reach out to every single person who filled out a Facebook form. It all happens automatically!

10. Not Investing in Ongoing Learning

Marketing isn’t static. New tools, platforms, and customer behaviors emerge all the time. Something that worked two years ago might not be effective anymore.

Spend a little time each month staying informed. Watch a short webinar. Read a blog post about tour operator SEO . Follow an industry leader on LinkedIn. Even 30 minutes a month can lead to smarter decisions and better results over time.

11. Not Delegating or Getting Help

If you’re doing everything yourself, you’re probably doing too much. It’s tempting to think you’re saving money, but holding on to every task can slow you down and keep your business from growing.

You don’t need a big team. Start small by outsourcing one thing, like blog formatting, image editing, or basic inbox management. You can use platforms like Upwork or Fiverr , or find a local intern who’s looking to build experience.

12. Avoiding Community Involvement

Running a business can feel lonely, but you don’t have to figure everything out on your own. There are Facebook groups like Josh’s Sunshine Tribe and the Tour & Travel Marketing Mastermind where tour operators share ideas, tools, and strategies that are actually working in the real world.

You’ll learn faster, discover what others are testing, and find encouragement from a group of people who understand your challenges. You might even find a new partner or referral source just by showing up and contributing.

13. Thinking Social Media Doesn’t Matter

Social media marketing and advertising isn’t just a place to post pretty pictures. It’s where travelers go to learn about experiences, ask for recommendations, and get a feel for your brand. If you’re not active where your audience is spending time, they may never find you.

Choose two or three platforms that make sense for your tours. Post regularly and focus on sharing helpful, fun, and authentic content. Think trip prep tips, behind-the-scenes stories, guest highlights, and real conversations, not just promotions.

14. Failing to Follow Up with Guests

Many operators work hard to get a booking but stop there. The experience should continue after the tour ends. Following up with guests shows that you care, helps you stay top of mind, and opens the door for referrals or repeat visits.

Send a thank-you email. Ask for feedback. Include a link to leave a review or offer a small discount on a future booking. These small touches make a big difference.

15. Not Aligning Ad Spend with Landing Pages

Running ads without a clear landing page strategy is a fast way to waste money. If your ad promotes a specific experience but your homepage features everything you offer, you’re asking potential customers to do too much work.

Build simple landing pages for each campaign. If you're advertising a private tour package, send visitors directly to a page about that specific service. Keep the message consistent from ad to page, and you’ll see better results.

16. Using Too Many Disconnected Tools

If your booking software doesn’t sync with your waiver system, which doesn’t integrate with your email platform, you’re spending more time managing systems than running your business.

It’s worth taking time to review what tech stack you’re using. Look for platforms that connect with each other or consider switching to an all-in-one solution like Resmark . Fewer tools means less chaos and fewer things to forget or break.

17. Skipping Digital Waivers

Paper waivers are easy to lose, slow to process, and frustrating for both staff and guests. Digital waivers make the check-in process smoother and more professional.

With a tool like WaiverSign , guests can sign online before they arrive. You’ll collect accurate data, save time at check-in, and store everything securely. It’s a win for both sides.

Plus, when guests opt in to marketing during the signing process, you can build a valuable email list of people who are already interested in your experiences. This opens the door to follow-up promotions, seasonal offers, and re-engagement campaigns that keep your brand top of mind and encourage repeat bookings.

Smart Marketing Q&A for Tour Operators

Simple Changes That Make a Difference

Every tour operator makes mistakes, it’s part of learning and growing. The key is recognizing where your marketing efforts might be falling short and taking small, consistent steps to improve. Whether it’s tracking your leads, updating your website, automating more tasks, or simply asking for reviews, each improvement builds momentum. You don’t need to fix everything overnight. Start with one or two of the tips in this list and keep moving forward. A smarter, more streamlined marketing strategy isn’t just possible, it’s within reach.

Want help figuring out where to start? You can talk with one of our marketing consultants for free. Book a call now and get practical advice tailored to your business.

Why Every Tour Operator Needs a CRM

nikki@resmarkweb.com (Nikki DeSantis) — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 09:15:07 GMT

Running a successful tour operation is as much about the behind-the-scenes management as it is about creating memorable customer experiences. Leveraging the right technology can make all the difference. A powerful combination of a tour operator CRM and a tour operator booking system can streamline operations, increase sales, and create stronger customer relationships.

Let’s talk about why choosing the right tools is essential for growth, how these systems work together, and what to look for when selecting software for your travel business.

Why CRM Systems Are Essential for Travel Businesses

CRM systems are critical for organizing, managing, and nurturing customer relationships. They allow businesses to:

Track and organize leads and contacts
Automate marketing campaigns and follow-ups
Enhance customer service and engagement
Streamline form submissions, bookings, and live chats

The efficiency and organization a CRM provides can drastically impact your sales and operational flow.

Popular CRM Options

While many CRM platforms exist, here are some options that we see tour operators using:

Constant Contact : Starts at around $12/month, great for email marketing and basic CRM needs.
HubSpot : Several packages to choose from. We see a lot of tour operators going with the $1,170 per month tier.
Zoho : Affordable, starting at $14/user/month, with strong customization options.
Active Campaign : Starts at $29/month, combining CRM with advanced email marketing automation.
Salesforce : Powerful but pricier, starting around $25/user/month for small businesses.
Other notable mentions : Pipedrive , Insightly , HighLevel , Keap (formerly Infusionsoft…or what many called - Confusionsoft ��).

Choosing the right CRM depends on your business size, marketing goals, and how much customization you need. Don’t rush the decision, take your time, do your research, and make sure you really understand what you’re getting into. Your CRM is like the heart of your business, so it’s important to choose wisely.

What Resmark Offers: CruiseControl Lead Nurturing

Resmark has created a specialized solution for tour and activity operators called CruiseControl , focused on lead nurturing. Here's why it's so valuable:

Immediate Lead Follow-up : As soon as a lead submits a form, CruiseControl sends a "Thank You" email and can attach digital materials.
Customizable Follow-up Sequences : You set the timing and content—1 day, 3 days, 5 days, or any intervals you choose.
Hands-Off Automation : Once a lead becomes a customer, the nurturing sequence stops automatically, and you can begin new messaging streams.

CruiseControl is like having a full-time employee working 24/7, ensuring that no lead ever goes untouched and maximizing your chances of closing sales.

Why You Should Use Both a CRM and Resmark’s CruiseControl

So, do you need both a CRM and Resmark’s CruiseControl? Technically, no! CruiseControl allows you to manage all your contacts in one place and send automated emails. However, it depends on how robust you want your system to be and what other marketing efforts you have in place. That’s why we recommend using both a CRM and Resmark’s CruiseControl, with each serving different purposes in your marketing strategy.

If you have a powerful CRM, you can likely manage everything directly through it — but keep in mind, it will take some legwork to get everything properly set up. On the other hand, if you use CruiseControl’s automated emails, our Support Team will help set everything up for you, making it much easier to get started.

Why Lead Nurturing Matters

If you're not nurturing your leads, you're leaving money on the table. Lead nurturing reduces sales cycles, increases booking rates, and helps you build stronger relationships. Automation through CruiseControl or your CRM ensures consistent communication without putting extra strain on your team.

Manage and Integrate Your Leads

For businesses using Resmark’s website and SEO services, ResmarkCRM is now available to you, making it easier than ever to manage and nurture your leads across multiple platforms.

Here’s how it works:

Form Submissions and Live Chats: Capture all your website inquiries and live chat conversations directly into ResmarkCRM, no extra steps required.
Easy Integrations via Zapier: Prefer another CRM like Constant Contact or HubSpot? You can easily “zap” your ResmarkCRM data into your preferred platform.
Combined Power with CruiseControl: Seamlessly export your ResmarkCRM contacts to CruiseControl (or any email marketing platform you're using) to automate email nurturing and follow-up.

Even if you’re not using Resmark’s CruiseControl system, you can still fully leverage ResmarkCRM to streamline your lead management and integrations.

One way or another, we have a solution for you to help you streamline your operations so you can spend less time manually managing your contacts.

Real-World Example

One tour operator we work with uses ResmarkCRM to capture all their website leads, but zaps the submissions into Constant Contact. For instance, when a visitor submits a form on their day trip tour page, that lead is automatically added to a "Day Trip" list in Constant Contact. This triggers a specific sequence of automated emails designed to nurture the lead until they respond, ensuring no opportunity is ever missed.

At Resmark, we help guide tour operators in making efficient decisions to streamline their operations. We work with you to determine what’s best based on the tools you already have , or the tools you may need to implement.

CRM and Marketing: The Perfect Partnership

A CRM isn't just for organizing contacts, it's a cornerstone of your marketing strategy:

Every form , every booking , and every digital waiver becomes a marketing tool.
Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to stay top of mind.
Automation ensures you never miss following up with potential customers.

Investing time in crafting effective email campaigns, setting up smart automations, and using your CRM to its fullest potential means you're making the most of every interaction.

Want to take your automation even further? Learn more about how tour booking software can save you even more time and streamline your customer journey. Read: How Tour Booking Software Saves Time with Automation

Tour Operator CRM: Your Top Questions Answered

Ready to Streamline and Grow Your Tour Business?

If you're ready to streamline your lead management, automate your marketing, and grow your bookings, we’re here to help. Whether you need a CRM, an automated lead nurturing system like CruiseControl, or a fully integrated solution with ResmarkCRM, our team can guide you to the right setup for your business.

Schedule a call with us today to see how Resmark can help you save time, close more sales, and create stronger customer relationships — all with tools designed specifically for tour and activity operators.

Why a Reservation Management System Matters

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 20:55:15 GMT

Do I Really Need a Reservation Management System?

Okay, so you’ve heard of booking and reservation management systems . And the technology sounds neat but you still find yourself asking, ‘Does my business really need an online reservation system ?

The answer is “Yes, and you need it yesterday.”

Think of it this way: If a diner’s been on a popular restaurant’s waitlist for an hour despite reserving their table in advance, it’s clear that the table management strategy for that eatery is falling behind. Do you think they’re overbooking and under-seating by using a manual reservation system or a digital restaurant reservation system? Restaurant staff can depend on platforms like Tablein, Eat App, OpenTable, and even Yelp for customer and table management—can you say the same for your company?

Adopting a new technology always takes a little effort, and it can sometimes be difficult to know which new systems will actually be worth the trouble. In this article, we’ll cover what makes reservation management systems so innovative, how online reservations help businesses succeed, and exactly why you’re better off picking up a solid reservation software solution as soon as you can.

What Is a Reservation Management System?

Let’s start with the basics. At its core, a reservation management system , also called an online reservation system , is a computer application that allows you to digitize your reservation calendar. It’s an alternative to tracking everything on paper (which is tedious, time-consuming, and troublesome at best), and to using spreadsheets or a calendar app on your desktop or mobile device (which isn’t much better).

The primary advantage here is that, unlike a manual system you have to slave over to keep up to date, reservation software is designed specifically to manage reservations for you. In other words, it automates a lot of the things you’re doing by hand, things that are taking up your time, and things that can really screw up your process if you make an error.

Beyond that, reservation systems allow customers, guests, or participants to book online. We’ll discuss how reservation software impacts your bottom line later (hint: It’s all good news). What’s important to know for now is that you can’t really offer self-service booking without it.

What’s more, most reservation systems include additional tools designed around your specific industry, empowering you to better meet the needs of those you serve. Some of these tools include:

Analytics
Marketing automation
Digital waivers
Resource management
Task management
Website Widgets

Who Were Reservation Management Systems Designed for?

A lot of businesses in a variety of industries need help managing bookings and reservations, so the next question is whether or not there are systems designed to help your business.

Currently, reservation systems are in use in several industries, including:

Transportation
Hospitality
Events
Fitness and wellness classes
Tours and activities

Most people are familiar with online booking for tours and other vacation activities, but you can take advantage of a reservation management system in virtually any service industry. It's always important to know how many people to expect for event planning, and you'll need to ensure that there are no errors with paper reservations when you're scheduling diners in food service, for example. Going digital is an easy way to simplify the process for everyone, avoid errors, and ensure that no schedules overlap.

Of course, different industries often go by different names. The term “reservation management system” most frequently refers to the hospitality industry, but it can also apply to online booking software and reservation systems, among other terms.

In other words, if you take reservations (as opposed to appointments, which have their own digital solutions), odds are there’s a tool out there that will meet your specific needs.

My Manual Process Works Just Fine, Thank You

When we’re judging a new technology, system, or tool, one of the most important things we have to consider is just how much trouble we’re having doing things the old-fashioned way. Understanding what a reservation system is can highlight the inefficiencies of manual processes.

So, let’s take a look at manual processes, and see if we can give ourselves that frame of reference.

Manual Process Blues

Firstly, if you’re managing reservations manually, you’re doing everything yourself. Taking reservations, making cancellations, and letting customers know what times are available are just the start.

Taking deposits and giving refunds are both complicated tasks since you have to get the card information every time (as you have no way to securely store card information and tie it to customers’ bookings).

Then there’s the human factor. With a manual system, it’s easy to overbook, misplace the schedule, or write down incorrect (or incomplete) information. If multiple people are managing the schedule, it can be even harder to avoid mistakes.

If you’re working on paper, you have to deal with legibility. If you’re using an offline app, you have to make sure you’re working from the most recent version of the calendar.

Beyond that, you can’t really collect demographic information or build a customer database. Or, you can, but you don’t have an easy way to organize it and learn from it.

The bottom line is that manual reservation management is inconvenient at best and a significant drain on revenues at worst. It’s also a bad user experience for your customers who have to call in to make a reservation. Let’s be honest with ourselves: There are definitely things about the process we wish we could change.

Schedule a demo today and learn how Resmark can help automate your process.

How Reservation Management Systems Help

Reservation management systems address all of those problems. They centralize all of your important information: Your schedule, your customer's personal info, credit card information, and more. They also make it easy to offer online booking, which takes a huge load off of your shoulders and promotes sales.

In addition to the more general pain points that reservation software addresses, these systems are also typically built to address industry-specific concerns. Below are some examples.

Hospitality

Working with a hotel website? You want a hotel reservation software that meets your industry-specific needs. Your ideal online reservation software allows you to manage inventory (your available rooms), room statuses (like “needs cleaning” or “under maintenance”), and payments, whether you manage small hostels or luxury resorts. Additionally, they often include the capability for key card management, TV and pay-per-view control, and supervision of the wifi. Some types of hotel reservation software even include loyalty program tools.

Finally, a solid hospitality management system includes distribution channel management throughout the hotel industry, enabling resellers to manage their own hotel reservation system based on your live inventory and giving you control over how they do it and how much of a cut they get.

Events

Event management systems are typically split into two types based on who’s using them: event managers, and venue managers. Some systems are designed specifically to answer a single use case, some are designed to handle both, and some brands have two separate tools, one for each kind of user.

Event Managers

Event managers need granular control over individual guests, vendors (like caterers, bartenders, and retailers), and often the very floor space in the venue.

Reservation management systems give them all of that, allowing them to manage inventory, coordinate with vendors, and sometimes even plan floor space in a virtual mockup of the venue.

Beyond that, there’s often functionality to facilitate food service or retail transactions (including POS integration). The system allows you to collect and store information on the typically large number of attendees or guests, group those guests together as needed, and even store payment information for each of them.

Finally, for events that need it, some systems feature digital waiver functionality, allowing you to administer forms like liability releases online. Others take the process a step further, allowing for custom promotions to boost attendance.

Venue managers

For venue managers, the reservation management system looks more similar to hospitality systems: You have available venues or rooms, and you rent them out to event managers who organize the whole event. With these systems, you don’t need to make the reservations for the individual guests yourself, just the event organizers who are using the space.

To facilitate that, these systems allow you to set up your available spaces, track multiple event reservations simultaneously, and take payments from the organizers. More advanced systems even allow you to take partial payments (like deposits) and track which customers haven’t paid in full yet.

Tours And Activities

The “tours and activities” category is probably the biggest umbrella term, with the widest range of businesses included. Hospitality is pretty straightforward, and events come in a lot of varieties, but only this group includes businesses as different as whitewater rafting tours, day spas, yoga studios, and sports camps.

For these types of businesses, the most important feature in their reservation management system is often online booking. As most of these businesses tend to be small and with many depending on constant influxes of new customers, online visibility and availability are key, so showing up in a Google result with an online booking option is critical.

There are also pricing tiers to consider, which some systems facilitate. Many of these businesses need to accommodate for different pricing based on age (e.g. child/adult/senior), packages (e.g. 3-day vs. 5-day trip, VIP tickets, different seating tiers, etc.), or other factors.

A few systems also include discount capabilities, including automatic discounts such as those based on time frame or group size, and manual discounts such as discount codes. Still, others integrate with online travel agencies (OTAs) and other websites to help make the most of your online presence.

Beyond that, some facilitate resource management (allowing you to allocate vehicles, guides, or other inventory to a reservation or group) and task management (allowing you to create schedules for your staff).

Finally, there are a number of additional tools that some systems include to create a more complete product (and thus make your life easier), like marketing automation, lead generation, digital waivers, and distribution management .

Schedule a demo today and learn how Resmark can help your business

Analytics

There are a number of other bonus features that many of these systems share, regardless of industry, but perhaps the most important is analytics.

With manual systems, whatever information you gather during your sales process—customer demographics, sales numbers, effectiveness of pricing, etc.—is trapped on paper, in cold spreadsheets, or whatever static system you’re using. The information isn’t organized or aggregated in any useful way, and gaining insight into business trends is difficult (if not impossible) as a result.

With a reservation management system, all of that information is gathered, organized, and displayed for you to study. You can learn important things like whether most of your customers are local, domestic, or international; what age group is most likely to do business with you; what time of year (or even time of week) has the highest (or lowest) sales; and more.

These insights can be used to refine your business strategies, and to make important decisions about who you advertise to, what your prices should be, what channels you use to reach your potential customers, or even what new products or services to offer in the future. In other words, it’s one of those business needs you don’t realize you’re missing until you realize it exists.

The Importance of Adoption

Holding out on adopting a new technology makes sense. There are plenty of examples in the last 40 years of early adopters who got burned when a new tech fad never caught on. Consider how Betamax lost to VHS, or how HDDVD lost to Bluray, for example.

For nearly every one of those examples, however, there’s a Blockbuster/Netflix type example, whereby failing to adapt to the new technology led to a whole industry falling into obscurity. We’re here to tell you that reservation management systems fall into the latter category.

And as the technology gets better and better, the number of businesses not using these systems will continue to shrink.

At this point, the question isn’t “Do I really need one of these systems?” It’s “Will I be a Blockbuster or a Netflix?”

The Need to Pivot

When you really boil it down to the basics, businesses only have three speeds: Growing, struggling, or failing.

To be growing, two things must be true: Your revenues are increasing, and the rate at which they’re increasing is also increasing. Otherwise, even if revenues are going up over time, your business isn’t scaling. In other words, you’re holding steady when you should be climbing upward.

If you’re not currently using a digital system, odds are you’re not in the first category currently. And even if you are, the rate at which your growth is compounding could probably stand to be a little more robust.

Businesses like yours that have switched to a digital system have been seeing those kinds of growth. By utilizing booking software, they no longer limit themselves to customers within certain time zones, or who share a common language, because they no longer have to book over the phone. A digital system allows customers to book online as easily as they might discover your business on social media.

By switching to a digital system, these businesses are cutting their overhead dramatically (despite paying for a new solution). They’re enjoying a smoother work experience and offering a smoother customer experience. Most importantly, they’re not giving their competitors the chance to gain a major advantage over them.

Reservation management systems aren’t in the early adoption stages of the technology lifecycle. They’ve been around for over a decade, and they represent a significant advancement in the processes used by businesses that take direct bookings. It’s no longer a risky venture—it’s a necessary business investment if you want to grow your business.

Do Online Bookings Promote Sales?

On that note, let’s talk about how a reservation system can help your business grow. Specifically, let’s talk about how a digital booking process promotes sales.

When it comes to deciding whether to offer online booking, you have to ask yourself: How much time (and money) do you spend online, especially on your phone? Businesses may still be struggling with the decision to transition to digital systems, but users and customers are migrating to an all-online behavior pattern with remarkable speed.

With internet-ready computer devices (especially mobiles like tablets and smartphones) becoming more and more common even around the world, the internet is more populated than ever. And, importantly, users looking for things online want to find those things online, not a phone number and an instruction to call and get answers.

Take a look at your own behavior: When you want to learn about a business, a location, or an activity, how do you research it? Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past ten years, you pull out your phone and look it up on Google (or Bing; we don’t judge).

Now, ask yourself this: How frustrated have you been when you couldn’t find an answer online, especially when it came to doing business with a company? Have you ever been irritated that a company didn’t just have its prices posted online or that you couldn’t order a product or food item through an app?

That extra step of having to email, or call, or anything that requires another person to respond for you to get what you want is often a bridge too far for customers, and they go looking for another website with the ease they’re looking for, where they can see this information at a glance.

What’s more, the rising generations (late millennials, Gen Z, and younger) are much less inclined to make a phone call unless it’s absolutely necessary. This means that they may be willing to call you to navigate the reservation process if they’re really set on giving you their business, but not everyone will be willing to take that step. Why make them jump through the hoop to give you their money? Or, even worse, why lose out on sales when they take their travel budget to a competitor who’s got an online reservation system in place?

Bottom line: You’ll be more likely to get the sale if you remove as many obstacles as you can. You should start with the requirement to call before they can give you their business. Modern customers turn to online ordering for everything from groceries to dinner. Schedule a demo today and start making more online sales .

Answering Other “Reservations”

After reading all of that, you may still have some outstanding...you know...reservations...about using a reservation management system. So let’s take a look at a few of them.

Are my customers' information and business data safe with a reservation management system?

This will depend on the solution, as every brand handles data privacy differently. Some systems actually encrypt your data to protect it in the event of a breach, but this isn’t particularly common. What’s more common is for brands to use a secure data warehousing solution, like Amazon Web Services.

These web hosts come with their own suite of protections against cybercriminals, focusing on prevention rather than making the data difficult to use if stolen. With most software, you’ll offer your customers a secure checkout page, too, increasing their trust and decision to book with you in the first place.

We feel it important to note here, however, that some of these companies have funny opinions about who should own your data. In other words, they retain ownership of your data and merely grant you access to it on their terms.

With these solutions, you may find that you have to ask permission to do things like exporting your data, and they will often hold the data hostage if you try and switch to another system.

Our advice? Include these topics in the list of questions you ask during a demo. Drill any sales agent you speak with about privacy policies, security service, and data ownership. These are things you don’t want to be blindsided by—especially when the realization could come in the form of online attacks and malware.

Most of these SaaS companies are startups—how do I know they’ll be around in a year or two?

This one is a genuine concern, as only half of startups make it to their fifth year, and only a third last a whole decade. And even in the reservation management system market, there have been some pretty public failures. So how do you know if a company is going to stick around?

There are two main characteristics to look at when estimating the potential longevity of a startup: how old they are and whether or not they’re a standalone company.

With the former, the older they are, the more likely it is that they’ve been able to develop and maintain stable (and positive) cash flows. With the latter, standalone startups are on their own if they face lean times, whereas brands that are part of larger companies have a more diversified portfolio (i.e. they’re not putting all their eggs in a single basket).

Beyond that, it can be difficult to judge how safe a bet a system is, so you’ll just have to take this as one aspect among many that need to be considered when making a decision.

Will a new digital system be difficult to learn how to use?

Again, this will depend on the system you decide to use, but most SaaS companies take user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design very seriously, considering that a cumbersome and clunky system can drive away clients. We can also make a couple of general statements that are applicable to these systems at large.

First, reservation management systems take abstract, freeform manual processes and make them concrete, repeatable workflows. Everyone has the same interface, the same buttons, and the same steps to accomplish the same tasks. And, typically, all of those tasks have tutorials that can walk you through the process if you ever have questions.

Then, there’s the fact that everything is kept in a central location that’s easily accessible. Records are organized, stored, and are easily retrievable. Moreover, processing payments is much simpler, with the system handling that for you through a payment gateway (and making refunds as easy as pressing a single button). Naturally, these efforts lead to improved ease of use.

Of course, there’s a bit of a learning curve when starting with a reservation management system, but much like learning how to use a new smartphone, the time it takes to adjust is comparatively brief, and the benefits you gain far outweigh that cost. Ideally, your new reservation software will come with communicative technical support and customer service teams who are ready to lend a hand in helping you integrate their program.

Schedule a demo today and learn how easy it is to use Resmark.

How do I offer online booking if I don’t have a website?

This one’s a hard one, as you technically need somewhere to put your “book now” button. “But what if I don’t know the first thing about building a website?” It’s OK. Not everyone is a web developer, and you don’t have to be to build a website.

While larger companies often want a custom website (and can afford to pay experts to build it), the same isn’t necessary for small businesses that don’t have numerous and complicated web design needs. Because of this, there’s a much simpler solution: Using a website builder.

Solutions like Wix and Squarespace allow you to build a beautiful website quickly by taking all of the complexity out of it. Rather than coding a website yourself in JavaScript or HTML, you’re just dragging and dropping design elements onto the page and customizing things how you like. Even that grandparent of yours who doesn’t know how to send a text can do it.

Then, once you have your website live, most reservation systems allow you to integrate your booking button directly on the page, and they guide you through the process to make it easier. In other words, what we’re saying is that it’s nowhere near as difficult as you probably imagine.

How much does do reservation systems cost?

It probably sounds like you're listening to this on repeat by now, but costs vary by brand, and they can get pretty complicated. We go in-depth in our “ What Does a Booking System Cost? ” post, but we’ll cover it briefly here.

Some solutions charge subscription fees, and you pay for the level of service you want (number of bookings, number of users, number of products you’re selling, etc.). This can get up to several hundred dollars a month for premium subscription tiers.

Some solutions charge per transaction, either a flat rate or a percentage fee. These fees can get as low as about 10¢ (for flat rates) or 1% (for percentages).

These lower fees usually come in concert with some higher fees somewhere else, however. They might be on top of a subscription fee, for example, or you might pay the lower fee for offline booking but pay a higher fee for customers that book online (fees that are often 6–10%).

For comparison, we have two pricing models with our RESMARK reservation system: A universal 3.5% on all transactions, or a 2% transaction fee, and a $95 a month subscription fee. There’s no difference in features or service—it’s just a matter of preference. Some companies don’t want to pay the subscription, and some want a lower transaction fee.

As you look at the pricing for different brands, keep a few things in mind. First, most brands break up their service into different tiers and lock capabilities, customer service, or other features behind higher tiers. Second, a lot of brands will either avoid listing their pricing or try to hide the additional fees, so don’t be afraid to ask the hard questions or do some digging.

Third, some solutions use a little bit of everything in their pricing: Subscriptions, flat fees, percentage rates, and anything else they can work in, so be on the lookout for really complicated cost structures.

Fourth, a lot of systems offer a free trial period, giving you time to try out the solution before you fully commit. Not all of them do, though, so ask about it before you sign up. The last thing you need is to commit to a solution that you learn doesn't meet your needs after the fact.

Of course, you should also consider the return on your investment. If a particular reservation software will raise your profits significantly, it may be worth a higher price tag upfront! It’s up to you to weigh the pros and cons to make the right decision for your company.

If I don’t like a solution, how hard will it be to switch to a new one?

We’re not going to point fingers (at least not in this post), but there are definitely some players in the market that make switching to another solution difficult. We’re not really sure what the business strategy is with that, because it certainly isn’t good customer service, and it doesn’t really make their users any more inclined to like them, either as a business or as a solution.

The most common way brands try to keep you from switching is by holding your data hostage. Either they won’t let you export all of your customer information so you can import it into a new solution (so you effectively lose all of your business history for the duration of your time using the tool), or they lock you out of the system—meaning your current schedule, your customer info, and even the payment processing you’re waiting on is inaccessible.

Sometimes, reservation systems do both.

Some of the biggest offenders in this regard are the high-profile companies in the space. At best, this tactic is bullying, and at worst, it’s extortion. There is no legitimate reason for a reservation management system to try and force you to use their solution, and we can’t think of any good that comes from it.

Our advice: Check out online reviews for the system you're evaluating, or ask for some references. If any of them say that the company won't let you export your data, keep your distance. And don’t bother asking about it during a demo; most sales agents are instructed to deny or avoid answering these accusations, so you can never trust you’re getting a straight answer.

How will I know if a solution will work for my business?

This really could be a post all on its own (and we at least partially address the issue here ), but finding out if a reservation management system will work for you is all about identifying your business’s unique needs and then asking the right questions of the sales team.

The questions we’ve answered above are a good start, as are the questions in the post we just linked. Ultimately, though, what you’re looking for is anything that makes your process different than others in your industry. Here are some examples:

Do you take deposits?
Do you frequently offer discounts?
Do you need to manage reseller accounts?
Do you have a lot of different offerings to manage?
Do you need a waiver solution?
Do you need easy integration with your existing website?
How flexible does your pricing need to be?
Do you need to collect specific information from each of your participants?
Do you want to see your e-commerce data show up in Google Analytics?

It's a lot to keep up with, but it's important that you find the answers to all of these questions before you commit to a solution. This will help you find a solution cheaper, ensure that the solution actually does make things easier for you, and having detailed analytics can even help you scale your business in the future.

Even with all the solutions on the market, it can be hard to find a comprehensive tool that does everything you need. It’s just hard for a given solution to anticipate every need for every use case.

RESMARK, for example, includes functionality for digital waivers, reseller management, and marketing automation, but it isn’t built to facilitate retail or food service transactions. That doesn’t mean that you can’t find a solution that works for your business, though.

Many have workarounds to accomplish certain tasks while they develop the feature, and there are often 3rd-party tools that can integrate and offer the features you’re looking for. Just be sure to discuss any and all needs you have for your process with the sales agent you speak with, so you can identify from the start whether a system will be a good fit for your business.

Conclusion

The bottom line here is that using a digital reservation management system is an excellent way to reduce costs, improve user experience, and speed up your processes. And with solutions getting easier and easier to use, there are a few remaining reasons to continue avoiding using one of these systems. Just be sure you do your due diligence vetting the options before you commit to one.

If you have more questions about reservation management systems, why they’re important, or how they can help your business, get in touch with us . We can help you identify what your unique needs are and aid you in finding a solution that works (even if it isn’t ours). And if you are in the tour, activity, and event industry, you can try our solution for free .

Ultimately, though, whether you decide to use our solution or decide to use something else, we just want you to hav.

More Bookings with Less Effort.

The Importance of Online Reviews and How to Manage Them

nikki@resmarkweb.com (Nikki DeSantis) — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 18:35:04 GMT

When was the last time you booked something without checking the reviews first? If you’re like most people, probably never. Travelers rely heavily on online feedback to decide which tours are worth their time and money. For tour operators, this makes reviews one of the most powerful tools for building trust, and one of the biggest threats if left unmanaged.

A great review can give your business instant credibility. But a string of bad ones, or even just a few left unanswered, can quietly chip away at your reputation. Whether you're running zipline adventures or guided city walks, how you handle your online reviews directly affects your visibility, bookings, and brand perception.

In this post, we’ll break down why reviews matter so much in the tourism world and how you can take control of them to drive more growth.

Why Online Reviews Are Crucial for Tour Operators

Today’s travelers aren’t just looking at your website or social media. They’re checking Google, TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Facebook to see what real customers are saying. Reviews function as digital word-of-mouth. In a business built on trust and experience, that’s gold.

A few key stats:

95% of consumers read online reviews before making a booking.
More than half of travelers won’t book a tour with no reviews at all.
Reviews influence not only if people book, but also where you appear in search results.

If you're working to improve your SEO for tour operators or gain visibility on local search maps , recent and positive reviews are a major ranking factor. In other words, good reviews help you get found and help you get chosen.

The Cost of Ignoring Negative Reviews

Even if you deliver an incredible guest experience, a single bad review left unaddressed can fester and shape public perception. But here’s the good news. Most people don’t expect perfection. They expect responsiveness.

When you reply professionally to negative feedback, you:

Show that you care about customer satisfaction.
Provide context for future customers reading the review.
Sometimes win back the unhappy guest.

Avoid canned responses. Personalized replies show you’re paying attention and open to feedback.

Proactive Review Generation = More Bookings

Instead of passively waiting for reviews, build a system that consistently encourages feedback from happy guests. Here’s how:

1. Ask at the Right Time

Send a post-tour email when the experience is still fresh. Better yet, integrate this into your reservation software, like Resmark Systems Cruise Control, to automate the timing.

2. Make It Easy

Include direct links to your preferred platforms (Google, TripAdvisor, Facebook). The fewer clicks it takes, the more likely they’ll leave a review.

3. Use Waivers as a Review Funnel

If you’re already collecting digital waivers, this is a powerful opportunity to gather feedback. Learn how to turn digital waivers into a marketing powerhouse in this WaiverSign blog post .

Responding to Reviews: A Tour Operator’s Playbook

Positive Reviews:

Say thank you.
Personalize your response with details (e.g., “We’re so glad you loved kayaking through the caves!”).
Mention something about your business values or team. This reinforces your brand.

Negative Reviews:

Stay calm and courteous. Don’t get defensive.
Apologize for the experience, even if it wasn’t entirely your fault.
Offer to make it right privately (email or phone), but respond publicly first.

Neutral Reviews:

These are a chance to shine. Thank them, address any concerns, and highlight improvements you’re making.

Monitoring and Managing Reviews Efficiently

It’s tough to juggle all the places where people leave reviews! Consider using tools like the ones listed below that consolidate review monitoring and notifications in one dashboard. This allows you to stay on top of new feedback without getting overwhelmed.

Podium
Helps you collect reviews via text message and manage feedback from Google, Facebook, and more in one dashboard. Great for small to mid-sized tour operators.

Birdeye
An all-in-one reputation and customer experience platform that lets you request, track, and respond to reviews across 150+ sites, including TripAdvisor and Yelp.

If you’re too busy running tours to keep up, partnering with a marketing team that specializes in tourism can make a big difference. ResmarkWeb offers tailored marketing services to help you grow your brand, reputation, and revenue.

Build Trust. Boost Bookings. Grow Smarter.

Online reviews are more than just a vanity metric. They’re a core part of your marketing strategy. They affect your search rankings, influence buyer behavior, and offer invaluable insight into how your guests perceive your business.

By putting systems in place to generate, respond to, and learn from reviews, you’ll stand out from the competition and build a more resilient, reputation-driven tour company.

Want more tips? Browse our tour operator blog for educational content designed to help you grow smarter.

FAQs: Managing Reviews for Tour Operators

Q: How do online reviews influence my tour company's SEO?
A: Search engines prioritize businesses with frequent, high-quality reviews. Positive reviews help boost your visibility on Google Maps and in local search results, making it easier for new customers to find your tours.

Q: What’s the best way to ask for reviews after a tour?
A: Send a follow-up email 24–48 hours after the tour with direct links to Google, TripAdvisor, or Facebook. Use your reservation software to automate this for consistency.

Q: Should I respond to all reviews, even short or basic ones?
A: Yes. A quick thank-you goes a long way and shows potential guests that you’re engaged and appreciative. It’s part of building a strong online presence.

Q: Can reviews improve my visibility on travel platforms like TripAdvisor?
A: Absolutely. Many platforms use review quantity, frequency, and quality to rank listings. More recent reviews often mean higher placement in search results within those platforms.

Q: Can my reservation software help with review collection?
A: Yes. Tools like Resmark Systems can automate post-tour emails, prompting guests to leave reviews at just the right time.

Q: Should I focus on Google reviews or TripAdvisor?
A: Both are valuable. Google helps with local SEO and visibility in map results. TripAdvisor builds trust with travelers who research multiple tour options. Aim to collect reviews on both platforms.

Q: Can I use reviews in my marketing materials?
A: Definitely. Highlight top reviews on your website, in emails, and on social media. Real guest feedback builds trust and provides social proof.

Q: Where should reviews be displayed on my website?
A: Place them on high-traffic pages like your homepage, tour detail pages, and booking checkout. Testimonials near a “Book Now” button can improve conversion rates.

Q: How do reviews affect my Google Business Profile?
A: Reviews are one of the top ranking factors for your Google Business Profile. Consistent, positive reviews help you appear in the local 3-pack and drive more organic traffic.

Q: What if I get a fake or unfair review?
A : Flag it through the platform’s reporting system and respond professionally to clarify the situation. Don’t argue. Focus on facts and keep it respectful.

Need help managing your reviews or building a review strategy into your broader marketing plan? We’d love to help.

Top 7 Tour Booking Software Platforms: Which One is Right for Your Business?

nikki@resmarkweb.com (Nikki DeSantis) — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 08:35:00 GMT

Choosing the right booking software for your tour business is so important. With so many options available, each offering different features, pricing structures, and integrations, the decision-making process can feel overwhelming. Every software platform claims to be the best, but the right choice depends on your specific business needs.

Selecting the right tour booking software goes beyond just features - it impacts your operations, customer experience, and overall revenue. Since it’s a significant investment of both time and money, making an informed decision is essential.

To simplify the process, we’ve compiled a list of the best tour booking software platforms that many tour operators are using or considering.

Why Use Tour Booking Software?

Before diving into the specifics of each platform, let’s explore why upgrading from manual systems (like spreadsheets) or basic booking software to a dedicated tour booking system can transform your business:

24/7 Online Booking - Enable customers to book anytime based on real-time availability.
Centralized Management - Sync bookings across your website, OTAs, and other sales channels.
Reduced Overbooking Risks - Automated inventory management helps prevent double bookings.
Enhanced Customer Experience - Features like automated reminders, follow-ups, and flexible payment options improve service.
Revenue Expansion - Reach new sales channels, increasing visibility and opportunities for bookings.

Top Tour Booking Software Platforms

1. Resmark

Resmark is more than just a booking engine—it’s a comprehensive tour booking system built for businesses that need an all-in-one solution. From reservation management to integrated marketing, Resmark offers a robust set of tools to support business growth. One of its standout features is its exceptional customer support, providing hands-on assistance, onboarding, and training.

Key Features:

US-based customer support
Customizable online booking engine
Automated follow-ups and remarketing tools
OTA and reseller integration
Built-in waiver and liability management
Real-Time Availability
Multi-Activity Bookings
Tour Pickups & Transfers
Sell & Redeem Gift Cards
Integrated custom websites and SEO packages

Pricing:

Option 1: $15 per month + $500 setup fee + 3.5% transaction fee (Ideal for seasonal businesses or those passing the fee to customers)
Option 2: $95 per month + 2.5% transaction fee (Best for year-round operators or those preferring a lower per-transaction fee)
Enterprise: Custom pricing for businesses processing over $3 million annually.

2. Peek Pro

Peek Pro is designed for growing tour businesses, providing a user-friendly booking system with built-in waivers, automated messaging, and a self-service customer portal for seamless booking modifications.

Key Features :

Dynamic Pricing
Robust POS system
Tailored follow-ups
Add-ons & Bundles

Pricing :

6% per booking

3. FareHarbor

FareHarbor is a widely used platform known for its powerful features and extensive integrations, allowing tour operators to efficiently manage bookings and sales channels.

Key Features :

Custom booking dashboard
Inventory automations
Customizable reporting tools
Mobile app for on-the-go booking management

Pricing :

No subscription fees; charges approximately 6% per booking

Learn how Resmark compares to FareHarbor .

Check out this video showcasing the booking flow process.

4. Xola

Xola offers an intuitive booking platform that supports both online and in-person reservations. It integrates seamlessly with marketing and CRM tools, making it a great choice for businesses looking to streamline operations.

Key Features:

Easy-to-use booking interface
Marketing automation tools
Integrated payment processing
Mobile app for managing reservations

Pricing:

6% fee charged to customers

5. Rezdy

Rezdy is a global booking platform specializing in B2B reseller tools. It helps tour operators connect with OTAs and travel agencies while offering powerful channel management tools.

Key Features :

Real-time booking
Automated communications
Channel manager for third-party resellers
Payment processing and invoicing

Pricing :

Offers multiple plans. The most popular plan is $99 per month + 3% per online booking.

6. Checkfront

Now merged with Rezdy, Checkfront is a cloud-based booking platform offering customizable booking systems, POS integrations, and advanced reporting tools.

Key Features :

Real-time availability calendar
Automated notifications
Integrated payment processing
Channel management

Pricing :

€99 per month + 3% online booking fee.

7. Regiondo

Regiondo is a tour booking platform tailored for European operators. Its real-time OTA connectivity and customizable website widgets make managing reservations and marketing efforts seamless.

Key Features :

Real-time booking and availability management
Integrated payment processing
Channel management with over 200 sales channels
Comprehensive reporting and analytics

Pricing :

Custom pricing with multiple package options. Their starter program is 49€ per month.

Which Tour Booking Software is Best for Your Business?

The right tour booking software depends on your business size, goals, and budget. Here’s a quick breakdown:

Best for Small Businesses: Xola, Checkfront, or Regiondo
Best for Growing Tour Operators: Resmark, FareHarbor, or Peek Pro
Best for OTA Connectivity: Rezdy

If you're looking for a feature-rich platform with outstanding customer support, Resmark is a top contender for tour operators aiming to scale confidently and efficiently.

Before making a decision, consider what your business truly needs and test a few platforms to find the best fit for your operations.

Book a call with Resmark to see if it’s the right fit for your tour business.

How to Name Your Tours or Trips

nikki@resmarkweb.com (Nikki DeSantis) — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 18:57:46 GMT

Choosing the right name for your tours or trips is crucial for attracting customers, improving brand recognition, and increasing bookings. A well-thought-out tour name not only makes your offerings stand out but also enhances your search engine visibility, driving more traffic and conversions.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through best practices, creative strategies, and common pitfalls to help you craft memorable and effective tour names.

Why a Memorable Tour Name Matters

Your tour name is often the first impression potential customers have of your business. A compelling and well-branded name can:

Improve marketing efforts by making promotions more effective
Increase customer recall and word-of-mouth recommendations
Differentiate your tours from competitors
Boost search engine rankings when integrated with the right keywords

A great tour name should spark curiosity, accurately describe the experience, and be easy to remember.

Key Elements of an Effective Tour Name

To create a compelling and high-converting tour name, consider the following elements:

Reflect the Experience

Your tour name should give potential customers a clear idea of what they can expect. Whether it's an adventure-packed whitewater rafting trip or a serene wine-tasting tour, the name should evoke the essence of the experience.

Keep It Simple and Descriptive

Avoid overly complex or vague names. Simplicity enhances memorability and ensures that customers immediately understand what your tour offers. Names like “Sunset Kayak Tour” or “Historic Walking Tour of Charleston” are straightforward yet effective.

Incorporate Relevant Keywords

Using relevant keywords improves search engine optimization and helps potential customers find your tours online. Consider integrating terms like “hiking tour in Colorado” , “food tour in New York” , or “wildlife safari in Kenya.” Learn more about SEO strategies for tour operators .

Here's an example of our ResmarkWeb client, All Ways Adventures, using relevant terms.

Below is another example of a Resmark and ResmarkWeb client, Moab Adventure Center, using simple yet descriptive and relevant keywords.

Creative Strategies for Naming Your Tours

If you want your tour names to stand out, try these innovative approaches:

Use Alliteration and Rhymes

Alliteration (repeating consonant sounds) and rhymes make names catchy and easier to remember. Examples include:

Pedal & Pour Bike Tour
Savannah Secrets Walking Tour
Bites & Sights Food Tour

Incorporate Local Language or Slang

Using local phrases or cultural references can add authenticity and charm to your tour name. Examples include:

Pura Vida Costa Rica Adventures
Aloha Spirit Surf Camp
Outback Explorer Safari

Watch a webinar on tourism marketing strategies .

Common Mistakes to Avoid

When naming your tours, steer clear of these common pitfalls:

Being too vague – A name like “Fun Adventure Tour” doesn’t tell customers what to expect.
Using hard-to-spell words – Complicated names reduce searchability and recall.
Ignoring SEO – Without keywords, your tours may not rank well in search results.
Overcomplicating the name – Long or complex names are harder to remember and type into a search bar.

Tour Name Ideas to Inspire Your Next Adventure

Here are some creative tour name ideas based on different travel experiences:

Adventure Tours:

Wild Rapids Whitewater Expedition
Peak Pursuit Hiking Adventure
Zip & Dip Jungle Excursion

Cultural & Food Tours:

Flavors of Florence Food Walk
Hidden Gems of Tokyo Tour
Bourbon & Blues New Orleans Experience

Sightseeing & Walking Tours:

Secrets of Old London Walking Tour
Twilight Ghost Walk in Edinburgh
San Francisco Skyline Cruise

Ready to Name and Grow Your Tours?

A strong tour name plays a vital role in attracting customers, increasing brand recognition, and improving search rankings. But beyond naming, you need robust tools to manage your bookings, marketing, and overall business growth.

Resmark Systems provides industry-leading tour operator software with online booking, waivers, marketing automation, and more. Schedule a free demo today and take your tour business to the next level!

Webinar Replay | 10 Game-Changing Tips to Simplify Guide Scheduling

nikki@resmarkweb.com (Nikki DeSantis) — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 20:15:39 GMT

Missed the Live Webinar? Watch the Replay Now!

Are you tired of juggling schedules, fixing last-minute changes, and managing guide frustrations? This operations-focused discussion brings together industry experts who share 10 powerful tips to streamline your scheduling process and boost team efficiency. Whether you want to refine your current systems or explore tools to simplify scheduling, this session is packed with actionable insights for tour businesses of all sizes.

What You’ll Learn:

How to solve common scheduling challenges that slow down your operations
Proven tips to save time, reduce errors, and create a guide-friendly scheduling process
Strategies for managing time-off requests, multi-day scheduling, and guide availability
The unexpected benefits of integrating scheduling and reservation systems to eliminate inefficiencies
Bonus insights from industry pros on creating a smoother, more efficient scheduling process

Looking for tools to simplify your scheduling process? Check out Trakkup for innovative solutions tailored for tour businesses.

Meet the Experts

Aaron Farr

(Far left) With extensive experience across various guiding companies, Aaron gained firsthand insight into the strengths and limitations of different scheduling systems. Leveraging a background in software engineering, he became the visionary behind Trakkup, addressing persistent challenges in employee management processes for outfitters and driving innovative solutions in the industry.

Carter Lloyd

(Middle) Carter serves as the River Operations Manager for Western River Expeditions, based in the Moab office. With a decade of experience with the company, Carter has spent 10 seasons honing his expertise, including 4 years working as a skilled river guide. His deep understanding of river operations and passion for outdoor adventure make him an integral part of the Western River Expeditions team.

Erik Weiseth

(Far Right) Erik is the managing partner of Orange Torpedo Trips, Briggs Rogue River Trips, and Whitewater Cowboys. Erik has been with this collection of brands for over 20 years and they offer offers whitewater adventures and outfitting on ten sections of rivers across three states with trips ranging from four hours to 14 days. In this role Erik oversees roughly 100-130 seasonal employees. In addition Erik serves at the pleasure of the Governor of Idaho on the Idaho Outfitter and Guides Licensing Board and is the Vice President of the Idaho Outfitters and Guides Association. Erik is a founding board member and former Board President for LEAP, an organization that supports those affected by significant health issues, psychological distress, and socioeconomic adversity through wilderness and river experiences.nErik lives in McCall, Idaho with his wife and two kids.

Webinar Transcript: 10 Game-Changing Tips to Simplify Guide Scheduling

Introduction

Brandon Lake (Western River Expeditions, @17:26)
Welcome to our webinar and discussion today on 10 Game-Changing Tips to Simplify Guide Scheduling for your business. I’m excited to have our guests here and look forward to an awesome discussion. I hope you’ll come away with insights not just about the platform we’ll be highlighting, but also general tips you can use to improve guide management, scheduling, and everything related to that.

Introducing Our Guests

We have three wonderful guests with us:

Aaron Farr – A river guide for the past five years and a computer science major. He’s combined these two passions to create something that has really benefited guide scheduling.
Carter Lloyd – Operations Manager for Moab Adventure Center and Western River Expeditions for the last five years. Carter has extensive experience managing guide schedules and will share challenges he faced with older methods and how new tools have helped.
Eric Wieseth – Has been in the tour operation industry for 22 years. He started out guiding, then spent 18 years as an Operations Manager and eventually became an owner at Orange Torpedo Tours in Idaho and Oregon. Eric brings a unique perspective and has also implemented these tools in his operation.

1. The Origin Story: From Spreadsheets to a Streamlined Application

1.1 Aaron Farr on Trakkup’s Beginnings

Aaron Farr (@20:37)
Thank you, Brandon. As you mentioned, I’ve been working for Carter for several years as a river guide, and about three years ago, I realized there were major issues with our old scheduling system. Carter was using a large spreadsheet that took hours to manage. He had to check daily passenger counts in Resmark, update assignments in the spreadsheet, track last-minute changes, and handle time-off requests—all of which were difficult to keep straight.

Communication was also a big challenge because any change meant Carter had to call multiple guides to let them know their assignments had shifted. Different employees were qualified for different tours, and it was tough to stay on top of that with spreadsheets alone.

Because I’m also a computer science major, I started thinking about how we could automate much of what Carter was doing by hand. That’s how Trakkup got started. We built a system that ties directly into Resmark so it automatically pulls in daily tours and bookings. Then we layered on tools to manage scheduling, qualifications, time-off requests, and mobile app access for guides. Over time, we tested it with Carter, Eric, and others to make sure it fit the demands of tour operators.

(Aaron shares his screen to show the old spreadsheet versus the new Trakkup interface.)

Trakkup solves a lot of those manual issues. We pull the data from Resmark automatically, so if a tour needs scheduling, it just appears. You can open a tour, see how many passengers you have, and then schedule the qualified guides. We also built in features like time-off requests, a mobile app so guides can view their schedules, and more, all specifically tailored to tour operators.

2. Challenges and Solutions from an Operations Manager’s View

2.1 Carter Lloyd on Moving from Spreadsheets to Trakkup

Brandon Lake
Carter, walk us through the challenges you faced before using Trakkup —some of which Aaron touched on—and how the new platform solved them.

Carter Lloyd (@25:10)
Sure. Previously, I used a spreadsheet to handle our trips, which worked but was very time-intensive. I had to open Resmark on one screen and manually copy all the upcoming trips into the spreadsheet on another screen. We run many different types of tours, and passenger counts are always changing, so it was easy to miss details.

I also had to track time-off requests manually through email. If a guide emailed me about certain dates off, I had to remember to plug that into the spreadsheet. Sometimes emails got lost, and guides weren’t always confident their requests were noted.

Another issue was updating guides about schedule changes. If I switched something in the spreadsheet, I had to call or text every affected guide to make sure they saw it. We also had a visibility problem—everyone could see the entire schedule, so they’d compare trips and wonder why they weren’t assigned to a certain tour.

With Trakkup , these problems have largely disappeared:

Automatic Importing: Trips from Resmark appear automatically in Trakkup , so I don’t have to manually enter anything. If passenger counts change, it updates here.
Time-Off Requests: Guides submit their requests through Trakkup , and I approve or deny them. Nothing gets lost in my inbox anymore.
Role-Based Scheduling: Guides can be assigned roles (trainee, guide, trip leader) based on their certifications. Trakkup won’t let me assign someone to a trip they aren’t qualified for, which used to be tricky to track in spreadsheets.
Individual Schedules: Each guide can only see their own schedule and who they’re working with, not everyone else’s. This cuts down on comparison or frustration.

(Carter shares screens of his old spreadsheet vs. the new Trakkup interface.)

2.2 Tips for Managing Guides

Brandon Lake
Outside of the technology, what have you learned about managing guides over the years?

Carter Lloyd
The biggest thing is setting expectations early—ideally during the hiring process. Our operation runs multi-day and day trips, and typically you move onto the multi-day trips once you gain enough experience. Communicating the why behind certain scheduling decisions can really help.

I also keep to a schedule for scheduling. My team knows I’ll have their schedule ready at least two weeks out. That consistency gives them confidence and reduces stress, even if adjustments happen later.

3. A Broader Industry Perspective

3.1 Eric Wieseth’s Challenges Before Trakkup

Brandon Lake
Eric, you have 22 years in the industry, guiding and managing, then owning Orange Torpedo Tours. Tell us about the challenges you faced before using Trakkup .

Eric Wieseth (@39:00)
Our operation has grown to around 130 to 150 employees in multiple states, offering everything from short half-day trips to long multi-day trips. We also have a rental business that sometimes overlaps with guided trips, sharing staff across different roles (guiding, shuttling, office, etc.).

I tried many different scheduling tools—everything from spreadsheets to Google Calendar. The core problems were:

Double-Entry and Mistakes: I would manually enter trips into the schedule from Resmark, which led to typos like mixing up an AM trip for a PM trip.
Double-Booking Guides: With so many trips, it was easy to accidentally assign a guide to overlapping tours.
Lack of Integration: No off-the-shelf scheduling system truly handled multi-day tours. They worked for restaurants or shift work, but not for day-by-day or multi-day patterns.
Delayed Information: Guides usually only got trip details at the last minute, which left them little time to prepare for special requests.

3.2 How Trakkup Helped Eric’s Operation

(Eric shares his screen, showing Trakkup for July.)

Automatic Sync: Because Trakkup integrates with Resmark, trips get pulled in automatically. No more manual entry or fear of transcription errors.
Geographic & Category Filters: We can separate our Idaho and Oregon schedules, so each location sees only the relevant trips and staff. Or we can toggle to view everything.
Qualification Matching: It shows me who’s already booked and which guides have the right certifications for a certain trip. This stops me from double-booking.
Equipment Scheduling: We often manage rafts, vans, and other equipment. Trakkup lets us assign equipment to each trip so there’s no conflict when two trips overlap and need the same raft or vehicle.
Guide App: Our guides use the Trakkup app on their phones. They see their schedule, who else is guiding, guest details (like birthdays, dietary needs), and equipment details. They can even swap trips or request time off without calling me at 9 p.m.

3.3 Eric’s Advice on Guide Management

Schedule Early, Then Adjust
Even though day-trip numbers can fluctuate until the last minute, try putting out schedules at least a week or two in advance. Guides appreciate consistency, even if changes occur.
Communicate the ‘Why’
Explain why you need certain people on certain trips. If someone’s skill set is essential, tell them so they understand the reasoning.
Empower Your Staff
Provide them with as much information as possible—passenger details, trip nuances—so they can deliver a great experience.

4. Q&A Session

4.1 Integration and Data Flow

Question: Is Trakkup a two-way sync with Resmark?
Answer (Aaron Farr): Currently, it’s one-directional for tours and passenger data flowing from Resmark into Trakkup . We don’t push schedule info back into Resmark. All employee, scheduling, and qualification data lives in Trakkup , and we retrieve bookings and updates from Resmark very frequently so it stays in sync.

4.2 Using Trakkup for Payroll

Question : Can I pull guide schedules for payroll?
Answer (Eric & Carter): We each use a separate payroll system. We do use Trakkup to verify shifts against timesheets and ensure nobody forgets to log trips. Trakkup is also handy for confirming tips distribution because it clearly shows who was on each trip.

4.3 Tracking Waivers and Checklist Items

Some operators ask about linking waivers or pre-trip checklists. The data in Resmark’s manifest can appear in Trakkup , so if waiver status is in that manifest, guides can see who has or hasn’t completed waivers. Additional checklist features can be explored, as Trakkup is open to adding functionalities requested by operators.

4.4 Freelance or ‘Offer First’ Scheduling

Some businesses let guides pick which tours they want (instead of assigning them outright). Trakkup can handle basic “approve/reject” for shifts, though advanced “offer first, accept if available” workflows would require custom development. If you’re using a freelance model, talk with the Trakkup team about potential solutions.

4.5 Using Trakkup with Other Booking Systems

If you’re not on Resmark, Trakkup can still be used as a standalone scheduling tool. You’d manually enter your trips or shifts. However, the full integration benefits—automatic importing, up-to-date passenger counts—are currently best realized with Resmark. The Trakkup team can explore additional integrations if there’s enough interest and feasibility.

5. Pricing Overview

Trakkup is offered at $2.50 per scheduled employee per month, with a $10/month minimum. This includes mobile app access, time-off request management, equipment scheduling, and all other features shown. The cost scales up or down with your active staff count, which helps seasonal operations control expenses.

6. Next Steps

If you’d like to learn more or schedule a demo:

Email the Trakkup team directly : [Aaron Farr’s contact was provided during the webinar.]

Resmark clients : Contact Resmark support, who can guide you through setting up Trakkup .

Not using Resmark yet? Consider exploring it for a full booking-and-scheduling ecosystem or discuss a standalone Trakkup setup.

Final Thoughts

Brandon Lake
Thank you to everyone for joining and for all the excellent questions. A huge thanks to Aaron, Carter, and Eric for sharing their experiences. We hope you’ve gained some insights on simplifying your guide scheduling and discovered how a platform like Trakkup —working in tandem with Resmark—can streamline operations, save hours of manual work, and reduce scheduling headaches. If you have more questions or want a personalized demo, feel free to reach out.

Resmark Booking Reservation Pricing: Simple, Transparent Options

nikki@resmarkweb.com (Nikki DeSantis) — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 13:46:56 GMT

When it comes to running a successful tour business, one of the most common questions is: How much does reservation software cost? Pricing can vary widely depending on your business’s size, needs, and features, and finding the right option can feel overwhelming.

At Resmark Systems, we believe in transparent, all-inclusive pricing designed to make your decision easier. Whether you’re a seasonal operator or managing a high-volume business, we have flexible options to suit your needs.

In this post, we’ll break down Resmark’s pricing structure, highlight what’s included in each package, and explain why our reservation software is the best value for tour businesses of all sizes.

Resmark Reservation Software Pricing: Simple and Flexible

We understand that every business is different, so we offer pricing options tailored to fit operations both large and small.

Option 1: Affordable for Smaller Operations
Price: $15 per month
Set-Up Fee: $500
Platform Fee: 3.5%
Best For: Smaller businesses or those with lower revenue looking for cost-effective software.

Option 2: Scalable for Growing Businesses
Price: $95 per month
Set-Up Fee: $0
Platform Fee: 2.5%
Best For: Businesses with steady or higher revenue looking to reduce platform costs.

Option 3: Enterprise - Custom Solutions for High-Volume Businesses
Pricing: Custom
Best For: Businesses processing over $3 million annually.

*For high-volume operators, we’ll work with you to create a custom plan that provides tailored features, integrations, and support to maximize value.

What’s Included in Every Package?

Regardless of the plan you choose, all Resmark pricing packages include the following features to streamline your booking process, increase efficiency, and improve customer experience:

Unlimited Users: Add as many users as you need without additional costs.
Unlimited Bookings: Handle both in-house and online bookings without restrictions.
Unlimited Premium Support: Get access to our knowledgeable support team whenever you need help.
Lead Generation & Automated Follow-Up: Automate emails and follow-ups to convert leads into paying customers.
Waiver Integration: Collect liability waivers digitally with no extra cost.
Private Booking Links: Share unique booking links for group bookings or private events.

Additionally, Resmark includes WaiverSign, our built-in liability waiver solution, which would typically cost you $120 per month if purchased separately. With Resmark, this service is included for free.

How is the Platform Fee Calculated?

The Resmark platform fee applies to all bookings and reservations recorded in the system. This fee covers more than just payment processing — it supports your complete guest management operations. With Resmark, you’re not just accepting payments; you’re managing your entire booking process, including automated communications, CRM, digital waivers, tour manifests, reporting, accounting, and much more. Rather than overcharging for online bookings, we apply a low, affordable fee that enables you to use Resmark to enhance your operations as a whole.

How is the Fee Applied?

Unlike other platforms that hide their costs by skimming transaction fees at the point of purchase without revealing how much you're actually earning, Resmark ensures that every dollar that’s transacted makes its way to your bank account.

At the end of each month, we calculate the platform fees owed and send you an invoice. This allows you to have complete control over your finances and accounting, with full transparency and no surprises.

What About Credit Card Processing Fees?

Credit card processing fees are handled separately by our payments partner. As part of the onboarding process, we introduce you to our partner, who will assist with setting up your credit card processing. This typically takes 1-2 days. They will also guide you on how to handle disputes and chargebacks, ensuring you’re well-prepared for any challenges related to payment processing.

Key Features That Set Resmark Apart

Our reservation software is built specifically for tour operators to help you streamline operations, boost sales, and improve customer experience. Here are just a few features that make Resmark a standout choice:

24/7 Online Reservations:
With Resmark’s easy-to-integrate booking widgets, your customers can book tours directly on your website at any time. Our real-time availability ensures you never miss a booking and prevents overbookings. Whether it’s through your website or via mobile, your guests will experience seamless and hassle-free booking.
Customizable Pricing & Payments:
Resmark allows you to tailor pricing for different customer segments—adults, children, seniors, or custom tiers. Collect deposits, full payments, or hold credit cards for future charges. You can even sell gift cards directly on your website.
Powerful Back-Office Management:
Gain full control over your operations with Resmark’s back-office features:
Real-Time Dashboard to track all bookings, payments, and customer details.
Customizable Tour Manifests to see who’s booked for each tour.
Task Management for easy tracking of follow-ups, leads, and bookings.
Flexible Payment Options to collect payments online, over the phone, or in-person.
Lead Generation & Follow-Up:
With Resmark’s Lead Form Builder, you can capture new inquiries and automatically follow up with them via personalized emails. This allows you to nurture leads into loyal customers and maximize your bookings.
Digital Waiver Integration:
With WaiverSign, you can automate waiver collection for every booking. This feature simplifies the process for both you and your guests, with signatures collected via mobile, desktop, or even a kiosk on-site.
Payment Security:
Rest easy knowing that all payments are processed securely through Resmark’s integrated system. We use the latest fraud prevention tools and provide support for chargebacks and data breach protection.

Comparing Resmark to Other Reservation Systems

When you’re shopping for tour operator reservation software, it’s essential to understand how Resmark stacks up against other options.

Why Resmark Stands Out:

Comprehensive Pricing: Unlike some competitors who charge additional fees for features like waiver integrations or customer support, Resmark’s pricing covers everything you need to run your business effectively.
Customizable Solutions: Resmark offers robust features like multi-activity booking and flexible payment options that can be tailored to your business’s needs.
No Hidden Fees: With Resmark, you won’t encounter unexpected charges. We provide all-inclusive pricing that ensures you have everything you need from day one.

Why Choose Resmark?

Selecting the right reservation software is crucial to the success of your tour business. With Resmark Systems, you can be confident in your choice because:

We offer transparent pricing with no hidden fees.
Our system is designed specifically for tour operators, with all the tools you need to increase bookings and improve efficiency.
Our 24/7 support ensures you always have assistance when you need it.

Take a look at our pricing packages, compare them to other options, and see for yourself why Resmark is the best value for tour operators. Ready to get started? Contact us for a demo and see how Resmark can streamline your operations and grow your business!

How to Start a Tour Business: Insights from the Pros on Creating Unforgettable Experiences

nikki@resmarkweb.com (Nikki DeSantis) — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 11:05:37 GMT

Starting a tour company is an exciting opportunity to share your passion for travel, culture, and adventure with others—while also building a profitable business. However, like any entrepreneurial venture, it comes with its challenges. From securing financing to finding the right tools and resources, the path to success can feel overwhelming. But the journey is worth it, especially when you have the right mindset.

Now, before we dive into the essentials, let’s hear from some seasoned tour operators who’ve been through it all. We asked them, "If you could give any words of advice to a tour operator starting out, what would it be?" Here’s what they had to say:

Words of Wisdom from Leading Tour Operators

“ Dream big! Create a unique experience and they will come! Don’t be afraid to be different! Build your story! ”
– Peter, Saco River Tubing
Peter encourages you to think creatively and craft something truly unique that stands out from the competition.

"Focus on quality over quantity—less is more!...Be sure to get your margins down, taking into account company overhead and anticipating future costs that come with growth, such as new hires and software...Start systematizing early—SOPs, processes, management systems. You'll thank yourself later!”

– Ashley Blake, Founder of Traverse Journeys

Ashley advises prioritizing quality, planning for growth, and creating streamlined systems from the beginning to build a sustainable and scalable business.

“ Running a tour company means you’ll be doing everything else except the tours! Get ready to wear lots of different hats. ”
– Dave, Four Season Guides
Dave highlights the reality of tour operations—while leading tours is exciting, much of your time will be spent on the operational side, from marketing to customer service.

“I would advise new outfitters to focus on an outstanding and comprehensive training program for all of their guides and take steps to provide a solid foundation for a positive company culture...I’d also advise them to refrain from the temptation to cut corners and focus on running high-quality river trips for all of their guests. It will pay off over time.”
– Keith "Luther" Stephens, Whitewater Voyages
Keith underscores the importance of investing in guide training, cultivating a strong company culture, and maintaining high standards to ensure long-term success.

“Running an adventure company is much like a real adventure, it is full of unknowns, victories, setbacks, lessons, and challenges. In the end, it’s not grand leaps but steady effort, perseverance, and small optimizations that keep you on the path to success.”
– Nathan Mielke, All Ways Adventure
Nathan compares running a business to an adventure, highlighting the importance of resilience, continuous improvement, and persistence as keys to long-term success.

“ Focus on PEOPLE, PRODUCT, and PROCESS. Hire people with great personalities, nail the product, and create a process that turns customers into repeat clients. ”
– Brandon, Western River Expeditions and Moab Adventure Center
Brandon emphasizes the importance of building the right team, perfecting your product, and creating efficient systems to keep customers coming back.

“ Always be prepared for competition to come up out of nowhere. When that happens, be ready to shift your business in new ways to stand tall and differentiate yourself from them. ”
– Jim, Wine Tours of Sedona
Jim’s words remind us that competition will always be a factor, and being adaptable is key to staying ahead in the tourism industry.

“Maintain the brilliance of your brand by staying well informed of local, national, and global events, especially on economic matters in all markets. Have plans for any unseen developments and be ready to adapt to any conditions best to one’s own capacity.”
– Dave, Oround Oahu Tours
Dave emphasizes the need to stay informed, plan for unexpected challenges, and adapt to changing conditions to safeguard the success of your brand.

Every tour operator’s success story is different, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach. But hopefully, these words of wisdom have inspired you to take the leap and start your own journey. Now, let’s move on to the basics and essential steps to help you get started!

1. Find Your Niche and Define Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

One of the most important steps in starting your tour company is defining your niche. Your niche determines the type of travelers you will attract and how you will differentiate your business from the competition. The tourism industry is diverse, and people seek unique experiences that speak to their interests, so carving out a niche is essential.

Ask yourself: What type of tours do I feel most passionate about? Your niche could be anything from adventure travel, luxury tours, and wellness retreats, to family-friendly vacations, cultural experiences, or eco-tourism. You’ll want to choose a niche that excites you, as passion is key to running a successful tour company.

Additionally, defining your unique selling proposition (USP) will help you stand out. Your USP is what makes your tours special. It could be anything from your commitment to sustainability, personalized customer service, or focusing on off-the-beaten-path destinations. Your USP should be tied to your mission and vision, providing clarity on why your customers should choose your tours over others. Defining your USP early on helps guide every aspect of your business, from your branding to your marketing strategy.

Example Niches to Consider:

Adventure Travel : Tours focused on activities like hiking, mountain biking, and kayaking for thrill-seekers.
Luxury Travel : High-end, customized experiences for travelers seeking luxury accommodations, gourmet dining, and VIP treatment.
Wellness and Spa Retreats : Tours that center on rejuvenation through yoga, meditation, spa treatments, and healthy living.
Family Travel : Family-friendly experiences with activities suited for all ages, from kids to grandparents.
Sustainable and Eco-Tourism : Tours that emphasize minimizing environmental impact and supporting local communities.
Culinary Tours : Focused on food and drink, including cooking classes, wine tastings, and restaurant tours.

Once you’ve identified your niche, develop a strong mission and vision to help communicate what your company stands for and the value you aim to provide. This clarity will resonate with potential customers who align with your values and interests.

2. Develop Your Business Plan

A business plan serves as a blueprint for your tour company, outlining how you’ll execute your ideas and ultimately achieve success. It’s your roadmap and will help you navigate the many challenges you’ll face along the way.

Your business plan should include:

Mission and Vision : These should reflect your values and the reason why you’re starting your tour company. Your mission is why you exist, and your vision is the future you hope to create.
Target Market : Define the audience you want to attract. What’s your demographic? Are they budget travelers, luxury seekers, or adventure enthusiasts? Understanding your target market is crucial for marketing, pricing, and crafting tailored experiences.
Pricing Strategy : Determine how you will price your tours. Make sure your pricing is competitive with others in your niche but also reflects the value you provide. Be sure to account for all costs—marketing, guides, transportation, etc.
Marketing Plan : A clear marketing strategy should focus on SEO, content marketing, social media, and partnerships with other businesses, like travel agencies or DMOs.
Operational Plan : This includes the day-to-day management of your business—tour scheduling, customer service, managing bookings, and logistics.
Financial Projections : Develop financial forecasts to understand how much money you’ll need to cover initial costs, ongoing expenses, and how long it will take to break even. This will also help you understand if your pricing strategy is feasible.

A well-thought-out business plan gives you the structure and framework to grow your tour company steadily and sustainably.

Side note, you don’t have to have everything figured out! You can create a draft and refine it as you’re discovering what will be best for your new tour business.

3. Get the Right Tools and Resources

Running a tour company requires tools that can streamline operations, manage bookings, handle customer inquiries, and help grow your business. From software to professional services, the right resources will allow you to focus on delivering great experiences for your clients.

Booking Software : One of the most important tools you’ll need is booking software. Resmark is a comprehensive platform specifically designed for tour operators. It helps you manage reservations, payments, customer data, and communication. Having a reliable and efficient booking system not only saves you time but also enhances your customer experience. To see it in action, book a demo here .
CRM and Communication Tools : Effective communication is key in maintaining customer relationships. A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is essential for tracking leads, automating email campaigns, and storing customer information. Below are several customer management tools we see Tour Operators using:
HubSpot
MailChimp
Constant Contact
Zoho CRM
Salesforce
ActiveCampaign
ResmarkWeb CRM : Coming Soon
CruiseControl : Although not a CRM, it is an automated email system for Remark bookings.
Legal and Insurance : Make sure your business is legally compliant. You will need to register your company and obtain the appropriate liability insurance to protect against accidents or unforeseen circumstances during tours. Look for insurance providers who specialize in the travel or tour industry for coverage tailored to your needs.
Digital Waivers : As you run tours, it’s important to have legal waivers in place to protect both you and your clients. Use platforms like WaiverSign to create digital waivers that customers can sign before attending your tours.
Financing : Securing financing is often required to cover start-up costs. You can look into small business loans or explore crowdfunding platforms. It’s important to have your financials organized and create detailed projections, so you know exactly how much capital you’ll need.
Consulting and Mentorship : Starting a tour company can be overwhelming, which is why seeking out expert guidance is invaluable. Companies like Guest Focus , Cultivate Advisors , and online communities such as The Sunshine Tribe on Facebook can provide the mentorship and industry insights that help you grow.

4. Build Your Online Presence

Building an online presence is critical to attracting customers. Your website should serve as the foundation of your online marketing efforts.

Website & SEO : Your website is a key part of your business and should provide potential customers with all the information they need about your tours, including details on destinations, itineraries, pricing, FAQs, and customer testimonials. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly, as many people use smartphones to book tours. To increase your visibility, implement Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by targeting relevant keywords related to your tours. This will help you rank higher in search results and attract more customers. If you'd like a quote for a custom, affordable website & SEO, book a call here .
Social Media : Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube are excellent ways to showcase your tours, share travel tips, and engage with potential customers. Start by posting organic content—photos, videos, and customer reviews—to build your community. You don’t need to rely on paid ads initially; organic content and word-of-mouth will help build your reputation over time.

5. Start Getting Reviews and Testimonials

Customer reviews and testimonials are among the most influential factors in attracting new clients. Word-of-mouth has always been a powerful marketing tool, but today, reviews are often the first place potential customers look before making a decision.

Encourage satisfied clients to leave reviews on popular platforms like TripAdvisor and Google. A strong collection of positive reviews can significantly increase trust and credibility for your business. Ensure you respond to all reviews—positive or negative—professionally, showing your commitment to customer satisfaction.

* Don’t let this slip through the cracks. We often see tour operators neglecting this, perhaps because they don’t understand its importance. This is truly CRUCIAL for your success. Ask every single happy customer to leave you a 5-star review! If they don’t right away…ask again.

6. Hiring the Right People

Even if you’re starting as a one-person operation, it’s important to hire the right team members to ensure the success of your business. As your tour company grows, hiring people who align with your brand’s values and culture will help you scale smoothly.

You can start by hiring virtual assistants or freelance help to handle marketing, customer support, or administrative tasks. Websites like Upwork , Fiverr , and Onlinejobs.PH allow you to find skilled professionals for one-off tasks or ongoing work at an affordable rate.

Of course, as your business grows, you’ll need to hire tour guides who are knowledgeable, friendly, and passionate about your niche. Guides are often the face of your business, so ensuring they align with your brand’s ethos is key.

7. Create a Brand Identity

Your brand identity is the face of your company and helps communicate your unique position in the market. It goes beyond just a logo—your identity encompasses your tone, visual style, and how you communicate with your customers. Create a bold and memorable logo and select a color scheme that reflects YOUR business . Ensure that your branding is consistent across all platforms, from your website and social media to email marketing and printed materials. A cohesive brand identity will help you stand out and be instantly recognizable.

Common Questions We See (FAQ)

1. How do I fund my new tour company?
You can secure funding through small business loans, crowdfunding, or grants. Make sure to prepare a solid business plan to attract investors.

2. How do I find the right tour guides?
Look for passionate, knowledgeable guides with strong communication skills. Post ads on job boards, tourism networks, and conduct interviews to ensure they fit your company’s culture.

3. How do I market my tour company?
Start with a well-optimized website, focus on SEO, and use social media to share your tours. Partner with local businesses, and consider ads once you’ve built a strong foundation. Also, don’t forget the power of sending emails.

4. What legal steps do I need to take?
Register your business, get liability insurance, and ensure you have proper contracts and waivers. Check if you need any local permits for specific tours.

5. How can I ensure customer satisfaction?
Offer great service, engage with clients, and always ask for feedback. Personalize the experience and build relationships through loyalty programs.

6. What tools do I need to run my business?
You’ll need booking software, CRM tools for customer management, and digital waivers for legal protection. Invest in the right tools to streamline your operations.

7. How do I set competitive pricing for my tours?
Research your market, consider your costs, and determine a price that reflects the value of your experience. Stay competitive but ensure profitability.

8. How can I build my online presence?
Create a user-friendly website, focus on SEO, and use social media platforms to showcase your tours. Organic content and customer reviews will help build credibility. Below are a few guides that might help you out:
- Tour Operators: Create and Optimize Your Google Business Profile
- Beginners Guide to Local SEO for Tour Operators
- The Best Guide to Digital Marketing for Tour Operators

9. How do I deal with competition?
Stay agile and be ready to adapt. Differentiate your business through unique experiences, strong branding, and exceptional customer service.

10. Can I run a tour business with a small team?
Yes, you can start small by outsourcing tasks or hiring part-time help. As your business grows, you can expand your team to meet demand.

Ready to Start Your Tour Business? Let’s Build It Together!

Starting your own tour business is so exciting and rewarding, but it requires a great deal of planning, effort, and passion. By following the insights shared in this guide, you can establish a solid foundation for your business and create unforgettable experiences for your clients.

Remember, the most successful tour companies are those that offer unique, personalized experiences that cater to the needs and desires of their target audience.

Don’t forget to focus on building a strong brand identity, investing in the right tools, and understanding the importance of customer relationships. By incorporating the right blend of innovation, passion, and dedication, your tour business can not only survive but thrive in today’s competitive market. Dream big, stay focused, and embrace the adventure—because as Peter from Saco River Tubing said, "They will come!"

If you're ready to take the leap and start building a tour business, start off right by creating a custom website and SEO strategy with ResmarkWeb , and build your tours through Resmark Systems . Let us be your partner and help you every step of the way. After all, we are tour operators too. ��

How to Reduce No-Shows for Your Tours: 13 Key Strategies for Tour Operators

nikki@resmarkweb.com (Nikki DeSantis) — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 17:03:00 GMT

Have you ever experienced a no-show and wondered, 'What could I have done differently to prevent this?!'

No-shows are one of the most frustrating challenges faced by tour operators. When a customer fails to show up for a tour, the immediate impact is lost revenue, but the ripple effect is much wider. It can lead to wasted resources, an underutilized workforce, and scheduling disruptions. For small tour operators, this can even mean the difference between a profitable day and a lost opportunity.

Optimizing your strategies for no-shows is crucial because it directly affects your bottom line. By reducing the number of no-shows, you ensure that your tours remain profitable, your resources are used efficiently, and your employees are motivated. More importantly, minimizing no-shows ensures that you deliver a smooth and positive experience for the customers who do show up, increasing satisfaction, the likelihood of repeat bookings, and word-of-mouth referrals.

In this blog post, we’ll explore 14 key strategies that will help you reduce no-shows and make your tours more efficient.

Why Reducing No-Shows is Essential for Your Business

Reducing no-shows isn't just a matter of improving your revenue; it's about optimizing your entire operation. No-shows not only result in lost sales, but they can also disrupt scheduling, prevent you from offering your tours to other paying customers, and strain your team.

Here are some additional reasons why you should focus on reducing no-shows:

Maximized Revenue : Each no-show represents a potential sale that wasn’t made. If you’re not optimizing your bookings, you’re missing out on opportunities to increase your profits.
Resource Optimization : When a guest doesn’t show up, any resources (guides, equipment, transportation) that were allocated to them are now underused, leading to inefficiencies in your operations. By reducing no-shows, you make the most of what you have.
Better Customer Experience : Frequent no-shows can impact the experiences of those who do show up. It’s frustrating to have a tour with too few participants or for your team to be left scrambling to fill gaps.
Employee Morale : Constant last-minute cancellations or no-shows can demoralize your staff, particularly when they’re left with empty schedules or an increased workload to compensate for cancellations. This can affect the quality of service and customer satisfaction.
Long-Term Sustainability : A business that fails to reduce no-shows may have trouble staying afloat in a competitive industry. Reducing no-shows helps stabilize your revenue stream, ensuring that your business remains financially healthy.

1. Tailor Your Cancellation Policy

A well-structured cancellation policy is essential for managing no-shows effectively. When creating your policy, make sure it is clear, fair, and straightforward. Consider offering flexibility for customers who need to change plans, but ensure the policy protects your business from loss.

For instance, you could offer a free cancellation window (such as up to 48 hours before the tour), while implementing a non-refundable fee for cancellations made within 24 hours. For discounted bookings, you may want to make all cancellations non-refundable. This policy provides clear guidelines and minimizes the risk of no-shows.

You might also consider offering tiered policies , with more flexible terms for loyal customers or those booking last-minute tours. This flexibility encourages rebooking and helps maintain customer loyalty.

2. Leverage FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)

One of the most effective ways to reduce no-shows is by using FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). When customers feel like they might miss a unique or limited experience, they are more likely to commit to their bookings.

You can promote limited-time offers , exclusive events, or special experiences to create urgency. For example, highlight an upcoming “Midnight City Lights Tour” as a one-time event that offers a unique perspective of the city. Use social media and email marketing to build anticipation and remind customers of the special nature of your tours.

By creating a sense of urgency, you not only build excitement, but you also encourage guests to commit to their bookings early, minimizing the chances of them canceling at the last minute.

3. Implement a Deposit System

Requiring a deposit at the time of booking is a great way to encourage guests to commit. A deposit can range from 10-20% of the total booking fee and serves as a financial commitment from the guest. It also acts as a safeguard for your business, especially if a customer decides to cancel last minute.

A deposit system reduces the likelihood of no-shows because customers are less inclined to forfeit money they’ve already paid. For example, a snorkeling tour operator might ask for a 20% non-refundable deposit, ensuring that customers are committed to showing up.

4. Offer Pre-Event Online Check-In

Encouraging pre-event online check-ins is another way to confirm your customers' commitment. When guests check in online, they’re reaffirming their attendance and giving you an early indication of any potential issues. A quick check-in process, which can be done via a link sent by email or SMS, allows customers to confirm their participation.

You can also use this opportunity to engage your guests before the tour. Send them teaser content, such as a video showcasing highlights of the tour, or information about the tour’s unique aspects. For example, a walking tour could send a video of some key landmarks to build excitement and anticipation.

5. Provide Easy Rescheduling Options

Sometimes, life happens, and customers need to adjust their plans. Offering easy rescheduling options instead of forcing them to cancel outright can help you retain the customer and reduce no-shows. If your rescheduling process is simple and customer-friendly, guests are less likely to cancel altogether.

Allows customers to easily change the date or time of their booking. This flexibility gives them peace of mind knowing they can make changes without hassle. By making rescheduling easy, you can maintain a solid relationship with the customer while still retaining business.

6. Follow-Up with No-Shows

If a guest doesn’t show up for their tour, following up with them is an important step in understanding why they missed the tour and offering a chance to reschedule. Some no-shows are due to genuine reasons, such as personal emergencies or transportation issues. By reaching out to no-shows, you can show that you care about their experience and open up the possibility of rebooking.

In your follow-up communication, consider offering a voucher or a discount on a future booking to encourage them to rebook. This makes them feel valued and reduces the chance that they’ll leave your business with a negative impression.

7. Leverage Data Analytics

By using data, you can track no-show patterns and identify areas for improvement. Look at trends like booking times, customer demographics, and activities with higher no-show rates. This data allows you to adjust your strategies accordingly.

For example, you might discover that no-shows are more common for certain times of day or specific types of tours. With this data, you can make adjustments such as changing your cancellation policies, offering additional incentives for certain tours, or tweaking your marketing strategies to attract more committed customers.

8. Simplify the Booking Process

Make your booking process as simple and intuitive as possible. A streamlined, user-friendly booking experience reduces friction and encourages customers to complete their reservations. The easier it is for them to make a booking, the more likely they are to follow through.

Ensure your booking platform is mobile-friendly and easy to navigate. If a customer has a hassle-free experience booking their tour, they are more likely to follow through and show up for the activity.

Of course, Resmark Systems offers a seamless booking experience that is both user-friendly and optimized for mobile devices, ensuring that customers can easily make and manage their reservations anytime, anywhere. By using Resmark, you provide a smooth, efficient process that encourages customer commitment and reduces the risk of no-shows.

9. Encourage Travel Insurance

Offering travel insurance is a smart way to protect both your customers and your business. By encouraging customers to purchase insurance at the time of booking, you give them an added layer of security. If they need to cancel due to unforeseen circumstances, the insurance can cover the cost of the tour, reducing the financial impact on your business.

Travel insurance can help reduce no-shows, as customers will feel more confident booking without the fear of losing money due to last-minute changes.

Visit the Moab Adventure Center's page for guidance and inspiration on effectively communicating the benefits of travel insurance to travelers.

10. Offer Last-Minute Booking Discounts

When you have open spots due to last-minute cancellations, offering last-minute discounts can help fill those spots and prevent revenue loss. A discount for last-minute bookings can attract spontaneous customers, increasing the likelihood of securing a full tour.

For example, a kayaking tour operator might offer 15% off for anyone who books the day before the tour. Promoting these discounts via email and social media ensures you capture last-minute customers and fill your available slots.

11. Use Overbooking (Cautiously)

In some situations, overbooking can help offset the impact of no-shows. By booking a few more customers than your tour can comfortably accommodate, you increase the chances of filling all available spots. However, overbooking should be used carefully to avoid disappointing customers.

For instance, if you know that 10% of customers tend to cancel, you can overbook by that same percentage. This ensures that even if some guests fail to show up, your tour will still be full. Just be sure your resources (e.g., guides, equipment) can handle the overbooking without compromising the guest experience.

12. Use Automation for Booking and Reminders

Automating the booking process and reminder systems can significantly reduce human error and streamline your operations. Automated email or text reminders can be scheduled to go out at specific intervals, ensuring guests never forget about their tour. Also, you can automate follow-ups for cancellations or no-shows, providing a seamless and consistent experience for your customers.

Platforms like Resmark Systems offer robust automation tools that take much of the administrative burden off your shoulders. Our CruiseControl feature enables you to automate communications to customers, guests, and captured leads, making sure you never miss an opportunity to increase bookings or exceed expectations. Automatically trigger reservation confirmations, pre-trip reminders, payment notifications, packing lists, signature requests, and post-trip review invitations—all from one system.

With CruiseControl , you’ll have full visibility into your communications, including records of sent emails, customer actions like opens and clicks, and responses. This level of detail not only enhances sales opportunities but also empowers your customer service team to deliver exceptional support.

13. Encourage Loyalty Programs

Building customer loyalty through loyalty programs is a great way to keep guests returning and reduce cancellations. Reward customers for repeat bookings by offering discounts, upgrades, or exclusive experiences. When guests feel valued and appreciated, they’re more likely to honor their reservations and become long-term customers.

So, What Will You Do to Reduce No-Shows?

Reducing no-shows is crucial for the long-term success and sustainability of your tour and activity business. By proactively implementing the right strategies, you can minimize disruptions, enhance customer satisfaction, and ultimately increase your bottom line. From crafting clear cancellation policies to leveraging reminders, deposits, and flexible rescheduling options, these 14 strategies provide a comprehensive approach to tackling the no-show challenge.

However, it’s important to remember that the key to success lies in a seamless, customer-friendly process that also protects your business. That’s where tools like Resmark Systems can make all the difference. With Resmark’s powerful booking software, you can automate your reminder systems, manage cancellations with ease, and gather critical insights into customer behavior - enabling you to reduce no-shows more effectively.

Resmark helps you stay ahead of no-shows and helps you maximize every opportunity to convert a booking into a full tour. If you’re ready to streamline your booking process and reduce no-shows, consider exploring the features of Resmark and see how it can help take your tour business to the next level!!

Webinar Replay | AI Made Simple for Tour Operators

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 10:14:31 GMT

AI is transforming the way businesses operate, but for many tour operators, figuring out how to use it effectively can feel overwhelming. The good news? AI doesn’t have to replace the human touch—it can enhance it. With the right tools and strategies, AI can simplify your marketing, help you connect with your ideal guests, and drive more bookings without losing the personal connection that makes your business unique.

This webinar replay offers practical guidance for tour operators looking to embrace AI with confidence. From crafting personalized prompts to building an effective content strategy, you’ll walk away with actionable tools to save time and grow your business.

Check out this webinar replay with Kelsey Toner, founder of Guest Focus, where we explore AI-powered strategies for tour operators. Learn:

How to craft custom AI prompts that streamline marketing and generate guest-focused content
Insights on identifying and targeting your ideal guests for more effective campaigns
A step-by-step content strategy to keep your marketing fresh and drive direct bookings with the VIP Marketing Method™

Our Speaker

Kelsey Tonner, founder of Guest Focus Tour Business Coaching , has spent the last two decades guiding tour business owners to success. His expertise spans mentorship, consulting, speaking, experience design, guide training, and his work as an award-winning tour leader. Since 2015, Guest Focus programs have supported over 2,000 tour operators across 75+ countries. Kelsey has also shared his insights as a featured speaker at more than 35 industry events and conferences.

- Get your Marketing Blueprint: guestfocus.com/aiblueprint
- Book your free 45-minute strategy call: guestfocus.com/resmarkcall

Webinar Replay | Proven Strategies to Increase Direct Bookings

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 10:10:24 GMT

Driving more direct bookings is a top priority for many tour operators, but achieving it can feel overwhelming without the right strategies. Many businesses struggle with marketing complexities, identifying their most profitable customers, and creating systems that deliver consistent results. With the right approach, these challenges can be transformed into growth opportunities.

This webinar replay provides actionable insights to help tour operators simplify their marketing, boost sales, and build systems that drive sustainable growth. By focusing on what works, businesses can attract their ideal customers, increase online bookings, and generate repeat business with ease.

Check out this webinar replay, 9 Proven Strategies to Increase Direct Bookings in 2024, where we’ll cover key tactics for success. Learn:

How to simplify your marketing efforts and generate more sales
Ways to create a repeatable system that consistently attracts and converts customers
How to identify your most profitable customers and get more of them
3 keys to creating a surge in online sales
How to leverage existing customers to immediately generate additional bookings

Our Speaker

Brandon Lake transforms businesses. He's propelled his own adventure companies, Western River Expeditions & Moab Adventure Center, to multi-million dollar growth. His software ventures Resmark, WaiverSign, and ResmarkWeb have fueled billions in sales for tour operators globally. Firsthand experience building thriving companies shapes his powerful strategies for guiding other businesses to do the same. Outside the office, Brandon loves to explore the world with his wife and four children.

Webinar Replay | 5 Big Opportunities to 2x Your Tour Business

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 09:54:54 GMT

The travel and adventure industry is changing fast, bringing both challenges and opportunities for tour operators. As businesses adapt to shifting trends, they’re uncovering new ways to grow and thrive. With demand for unique and unforgettable experiences on the rise, staying competitive requires not only creativity but also a clear strategy and innovative solutions.

For tour operators, this evolving landscape offers a golden opportunity to expand their reach, increase sales, and streamline operations like never before. By embracing these changes, businesses can set themselves up for long-term success and profitability.

Check out this webinar replay with Josh Oakes, founder of The Sunshine Tribe , where we’ll dive into essential strategies for growth. Learn:

The 2 biggest mistakes tour operators make that limit growth
How to unlock three new sales channels in 2024
The key to building a scalable, highly profitable business
Actionable tips to optimize your offerings and attract new audiences

Our Speaker

Webinar Replay | How to Consistently Sell More Tours

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 10:04:10 GMT

The travel and tour industry is filled with both opportunities and challenges, and marketing effectively can make all the difference. Many tour operators struggle with common pitfalls that hold them back from reaching their ideal guests and maximizing their bookings. To succeed in this competitive landscape, it’s essential to focus your efforts and make informed decisions.

This webinar replay offers tour operators a chance to avoid costly mistakes and unlock new growth opportunities. By implementing the right strategies, businesses can attract their target guests, outshine the competition, and thrive—even on a tight budget.

Check out this webinar replay with Kelsey Tonner, founder of Guest Focus, where we’ll explore key marketing insights for tour operators. Learn:

The 4 expensive marketing mistakes most tour operators make (and how to avoid them)
The best ways to leverage organic, FREE marketing to reach your ideal guests
Why choosing and understanding your "Ideal Target Guest" (ITG) is your most important decision
How to focus your marketing efforts to attract guests cheaper and easier than your competition

Our Speaker

Google Analytics 4: What You Need to Know

blake@westernriver.com (Brandon Lake) — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 03:03:30 GMT

Have you caught wind of the latest development in Google Analytics? This news is the biggest in over a decade! As of July 1, 2023, your current Google Universal Analytics properties will cease processing new data from your website, necessitating the switch to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). It's imperative that you configure the new GA4 and start collecting data if you haven't done so already.

The new GA4 is markedly different from the current Google Analytics platform. You can avoid confusion and frustration by joining our upcoming webinar. Klint Rudolph, founding partner of The Xcite Group, will walk you through what you need to know about GA4, the advantages of setting it up now, and the tools you should start utilizing to enhance your marketing decisions.

The webinar offers the following benefits:

A thorough overview of the major disparities between GA4 and Universal Analytics
A step-by-step tutorial on how to migrate your current GA configuration to GA4
Pro tips to overcome crucial challenges during GA4 setup
Ways to use GA4's vital features to optimize your marketing campaigns
Instructions on how to set up sales funnels and access e-commerce data for Resmark users

Webinar Resources from Klint Rudolph

Introduction to Google Analytics 4

Brandon Lake:

Welcome, everyone. I'm Brandon Lake, I'm the founder and CEO of Resmark and WaiverSign. We are super excited to discuss Google Analytics 4 today. So as many of you are aware, what we now know as Universal Analytics, we'll stop processing data on July 1st, and we will be required to switch to Google Analytics 4 or GA4 or G4, as we now refer to it. So we've had GA4 set up on all of our business websites for some time now, and personally I am still quite confused by it. I'm frustrated by it. I know right where I want to go in the old Google Analytics, and so I just find myself going back to that. I know I need to learn the new one, but it's just different. So I struggle to find the same data in it. And I'm assuming many of you are in the same boat, if assuming you've set it up. And I'm assuming others are in a situation where you know about the looming change and you haven't yet set up Google Analytics 4.

So we are going to talk about all of that today. Help you understand how to set it up, how to get it configured, what some of the key reports are in it that you can start using now, how the data differs from the old analytics to the new analytics. I'm really excited to learn about it myself. So to walk us through all of that, we've brought in an expert, Klint Rudolph. He is with us today. We're very excited about that. Klint is actually a founding partner of the Xcite Group. They are a digital marketing and advertising agency out of Denver. And I think something fun about Klint is that he didn't always do this. He actually has a background in theater and stage performance and he was even a lead singer in a rock band. I mean, I'm hoping, Klint, we get a little bit of a performance somewhere here during the presentation. That's pretty awesome.

But Klint, he actually speaks, to those of you who have been to America Outdoors, you might have seen him speak there. He generally speaks every year at that conference. Really, really engaging speaker and has helped me understand a lot about several topics that relate to marketing and advertising and analytics and so forth. He's also been on a lot of podcasts. He's even spoken at Google headquarters and at national help conferences, so we're very excited to have Klint with us. Before I turn the time over to him, I wanted to point everyone's attention down to the lower right-hand corner of your screen. You will see down there two icons. One says questions and one says chat.

So you can use the chat to say hello to everyone in the group. You can talk to each other there. But if you'd like to have us answer one of your questions, and I'm assuming we will have a lot of questions today, go to that questions tab and you can plug in your questions as we go. Some of them, we will hold until the end and we'll answer them there. If it seems appropriate, I may interrupt Klint with a question here or there as we go. But I'm excited to get started, Klint. So let's go ahead and turn the time over to you and start walking us through this.

Klint Rudolph:

Awesome. All righty. Then I will turn my camera off, so people are focused on the screen and not my face. All righty. Everyone see my screen okay? Can you see it all right, Brandon?

Brandon Lake:

Yep, that looks good from my end.

Klint Rudolph:

Awesome. Great. Well, thanks, everybody. Thanks for having me and thanks for coming to the webinar today. Before we jump in completely, the thing that I love about this is I call this Introduction to Google Analytics 4. As Brandon alluded to, he gets frustrated in there, so do I. It is still a work in progress for Google and fundamentally it's very, very different than any analytics platform that they've ever had before. We'll talk a little bit about the nuances today, but the importance of introduction is to understand that things are constantly changing inside of GA4. If you already have it and you're poking around in there, you may go, "Yesterday this button was there and now it's gone." They are making a ton of changes. So this truly is an intro. We'll dive deep into a bunch of different things today, but just be aware that you have to try to have some patience as you skin your knees on this because it is brand new for Google as well, and they're making lots of changes.

So what are we going to cover today? We are going to talk about A, first, archiving your data. This webinar is designed under the assumption that you have already set up Google Analytics. If you have not, there's a slide coming up here in a few minutes and I'll stop and make a point of it. You can take a picture of the QR code with your phone and it'll take you to my webinar where I talk about if you haven't set it up at all. It's quite intensive and a lot to try to pack in an hour. So I have the QR code in here. If you're someone who has not set this up yet, you can go there and it will walk you through exactly how to do that. So this is under the assumption you've already got it set up and now what do you do? How do you configure it? How do you set up events and conversions and how the heck do you find reporting that makes sense and looks similar to what you're used to today?

So that is what we are going to do. GA4 is now, needs to be your primary source of analytics truth. As of July, Universal Analytics will no longer collect data, so it will stop. On July 23rd is the day that Google has said they will quit having any data be pushed in there. And also by the end of January of 2024, Universal Analytics will be deleted. Obviously, you could imagine across the world, the size and scope of all the data that's in there, so they have given us until January, and that's why the first section today we're going to talk about archiving, because it will be important for you to be able to go back and look at past data. Because Google Analytics 4 will only collect data from the moment you have it on your website, moving forward. It cannot bring in any old data.

I will put a caveat on that. There are rumors that Google is coming up with different tools and different ways to maybe migrate that data for us, but I would not count on that because it may be at the 24th hour and it's going to be hard to do everything you want. So I would suggest that we walk through what you can do to archive it now and not wait for Google. But there are rumors out there that Google is trying to come up with some way to help us migrate. All right, so how are we going to archive our data? The first thing is we have to make a really, really good plan. And what I mean by that is those of you who are in Universal Analytics all the time or even once in a while, make a list of the specific reports you refer to, so what places in Universal Analytics studio you go.

For example, one that I always go into is the acquisition reports and I look up source medium. I want to see things like how's my social media performing, how's my pay per click, what's going on with SEO, how am I growing my traffic, where am I losing my traffic. So make a list of those reports and then download them in the data intervals that you typically use today. That could be month over month, year over year, quarter over quarter. For those of you who are in the tour industry, that could be seasonally, this season compared to last season. Whatever it is that you normally look at, that's how you'll want to download or ingest, migrate or archive your data. There's multiple ways to do it. I have a link here in the deck and I'll send this deck.

Brandon, I don't know if there's a place for you to send it out or a place you guys can in a follow-up email say, "Here's the deck if you'd like." Because there are some helpful links throughout the deck that you may want to take advantage of, so we can figure that part out. But this link will take you to all the different ways. There are tons. I'm going to go through a couple today that are my recommendation. I like to do PDFs because that's the visualization of the actual screen in Universal Analytics that I'm used to doing. But then I also dump that into Google Sheets, so that I can manipulate the data later, however I choose, change date ranges, that kind of thing. So there are lots of ways that we can handle that. And the first, when you're inside of UA, whatever screen you're on, whatever report you're looking in, every screen in Universal Analytics, at the very top where I've circled in red, is an export button.

And if you click that button, it will bring a dropdown where you can do a PDF, Google Sheets, Excel file, CVS, however it is you want to do it. I like to do it in Google Sheets because I may share it with multiple people on my team and we don't all have Microsoft in the cloud, so then we end up sending Excel spreadsheet back and forth to everyone and it makes it hard to collaborate. I prefer the Google Sheets method, but either way is fine. So whenever you are in a report, you want to take the date range that you want, go into the report that you want, and then hit export and grab... Again, I like both the PDF version and the Google Sheets version. And the reason for that is the PDF version is going to look exactly how my screen looks now. It will be a basic picture of what you're looking at inside of Universal Analytics. So you can see the graphs, you can see your behavior, your acquisition, your goal conversion rates, all of those things.

The Google Sheet will literally be all of the data dumped into a spreadsheet format, which you could then make pivot tables or do any number of things to the data. So that's what my suggestion is. Make the plan, go in here and find the stuff that you really want at the date ranges you want, and then go hit that export button and do a PDF and a Google Sheet version so that you have all of the data that you want to go back to look at. I would suggest going back... Everyone's going to be a little different. People ask me all the time, "How far should I go back?" I don't know that it's necessary to go back any further than you examine reports now. So what I mean by that is I started Xcite 12 years ago. I'm not going back to 2010, 2011 when I started the company to look at my traffic from when we first started.

I typically look year over year, quarter over quarter and month over month. One caveat to that, especially if you are in the tour industry or event industry, is the pandemic messed up a lot of things for some people and it also boosted a lot of things for other people. So one of the things that I suggest is make sure you go back at least to 2019. So when you want to do date comparisons, we're not letting the data be skewed by either over exaggerated numbers from COVID or under exaggerated numbers from COVID, depending on how the pandemic in particular hit your business. If we go back to the entire year of 2019, we get a snapshot of how things were before. So we can use that as a crutch sometimes. That's my suggestion. I don't know that I would go back any further than 2019. You may have a specific reason, so go back as long as you would like.

So we now have a plan to archive all of our data and we've got a few months still to do it. Like I said, again, reminder, it will stop collecting data in July, but we will have until January before we have to make sure that we have all of the data archived. Alrighty. So we have our plan. Now what? Welcome to adulthood. You get mad when they rearrange the grocery store now. This is exactly what I feel like when every time I go into GA4. Nothing is where I want it to be. Nothing is the ease of use of 10 years of Universal Analytics that I know exactly where to go when I have a problem or I see a downturn in traffic or something's going on in my business. I knew exactly where to go to figure that stuff out. GA4 is very different, and so we have to fight our way through that. So let's talk about some of the major differences that annoy me, most of all, about GA4 compared to Universal.

First of all, I'm a big annotator. Whenever I launch a project, whenever I do a new marketing campaign, whenever there's something that's impactful that I'm doing for my business, launching a new website, start of the season, that may differ from year to year because of weather, all of those kind of things, annotations were a great way for me to mark and always have it in UA. Unfortunately, that is not the case in GA4. As of right now, there are no way to... there is no way to make annotated notes on specific days that you can refer back to inside of analytics. Now the rumor is that's something that's coming, but it is not something that is there right now. So one of the things that I suggest all the time is create yourself a Google sheet of notable dates and literally just do it as that, event and date.

And you can go and say, "Season started March 1st in 2023," or, "Season started, not till April 20th, 2023. Launch new website, new version of the website on April 19th." Just so that whenever you are looking for comparison ranges and you see something funky, you can go to that sheet and go, "Ah, that's right. I launched that campaign that day." So make sure that that is something that you are paying attention to. What is important about the... Take a step backwards here real quick and go back to the archiving data. One of the things that's really important, and I'm going to go back a couple slides just so we can pull that screen up, it's important when you pull your Excel, or excuse me, your PDF reporting, if you want to be able to see all of your annotations that you may have had in there before. You want to make sure that you click the little arrow right here that will expose them before you hit export.

If you don't hit that arrow, that's the little dropdown right in the middle, if you can't probably see him on my cursor on the screen, but there's a little square, a little rectangle with a black down arrow, little triangle pointing down in the middle of the screen there between the September and the October. And that's where you will be able to push down and any annotations that you have during the timeframe that you have set on the date range in the upper right will appear. So caveat to that, if you don't expand that, they will not show up. If you want them for later, make sure that that's something that you do. All right, let's go back here. Next is something that I used all the time, which were different views in Universal Analytics. If you remember the three columns when you were in the admin, you had account in the left, property in the middle, and view on the right.

I thought it was very helpful to create different views for different things. I always had a test view when I was testing out new conversions or I was testing out new things I wanted to track. And so make sure that... It was something that I love doing. Unfortunately, there is not a way to do different views yet in GA4. There is something for testing and that's called debug view, and I go into that in huge detail in my first webinar that I'll have the QR code here in a second for you, that shows exactly how to use debug view and when you're testing new events. Again, that could be an hour webinar by itself. Next notable is that there's no scheduled emails. I would go in and set alerts for different things all the time. If my site load speed was more than X, send me an email. If my traffic dropped or rose by more than X percentage or Y, please send me an email.

Right now. There's no way to schedule those emailed alerts that some of us got really used to in UA, and so that's another thing that's a little annoying about GA. Again, it's very new and they're making changes all the time. If you want to look at a full list of comparisons, this link is here for you. But I will say that that page has changed quite a bit because they have done some things that are now part of GA4 that when I first started looking, they were in that link that said, "These are major differences." So it's still a moving, changing, living, breathing animal. All right, so how do we track events in GA4? If you were someone who tracked events in Universal Analytics, the labels event category, action and label are probably very familiar to you. That was a way for me to track things, chat, all sorts of different things, button clicks on the site, and that's going away.

The good news is this is where Google has made a significant improvement and we're going to talk about how and why it's different before I actually talk about how to track these events. So one important thing to note is that Universal Analytics, that we're all used to, is based on sessions and page views. So browser cookies, someone starts a session and goes to a page view of your site. In stark contrast, the GA4 data model is solely based on events and parameters. So first party data and Google signals are those parameters, and the events are things that we create. So a page view in Universal Analytics, that was actually a cookie based on someone's browser, is now an event. And so both UA and GA4 collect, process and report data very, very differently. Let's get into that a little bit, so we have a little bit of understanding.

I won't get too geek-speak here because that's even above my pay grade, but this is sort of the what's the difference between session and event-based for dummies. In Universal Analytics, in Universal Analytics property, sorry, analytics groups data into sessions. And these sessions are the foundation of all reporting that we're used to looking at. So a session is defined as a group of user interactions with your website that take place within a given timeframe. During that session, analytics collects and stores those user interactions, such as page views, events, e-commerce transactions as hits. A single session can contain multiple hits, depending on how a user is interacting with your website. They may visit six different page views, complete an event, and then go make a purchase. So that would be multiple hits that the data layer is sending into Universal Analytics.

In contrast, GA4 uses an event-based model. So you still see session data, but analytics collects and stores user interactions with your website or app as events. And why this is important is events provide insight on what's happening in your website, such as page views, button clicks, video views, user interactions, system events. And these events can collect and send pieces of information that are more fully... that can more fully specify the action the user took or add further context. So this information could include things like the value of a purchase, the title of a page a user visited, or the geographic location of the user. Those were all things that we could find in various ways in Universal Analytics, but they were in different reports because of the way that the session model works.

The event model works in such a way where I could be having all of that passed into one place. When we get to the reporting section, I'll show you a little bit more about what that means, but the version for dummies is session-based is really black and white and not a lot of area for us to fill in the details. Event-based allows us to have a lot more context to what was going on and therefore to me, much more useful reporting. All right, so what's the difference with category action and label going away? Compared to Universal Analytics, the data model in Google Analytics 4 is much more flexible. This means that there are fewer restrictions and required fields or parameters compared to Universal Analytics. The most notable difference regarding events is that parameters that you could send together with every event to Universal Analytics. So outside of custom dimensions, we had to do a category, we had to do an action, and then label and value were optional.

And you could make those hard or you could make those dimensions dynamic, based on the code of your website, but you had to follow this model. In GA4, the naming convention is much more flexible and it solely depends on the person who is implementing the tracking setup. So there's an event or there's a parameter, excuse me, in GA4 called event name, and then everything else depends on what you have planned. So if you wish, you could send in no additional parameters or you could send four additional parameters that better describe the context of that event. So in GA4, there are certain events that we can create, but we need Google, or excuse me, we need Google Tag Manager to create them. These are called custom and recommended events. We'll get a little bit into that in a second. But there are other events that are measured by default with only GA4.

So out of the box, GA4 is already collecting events that Universal Analytics never did for us. For example, you could create a scroll event, button click events, outbound link events. So no see account for how many people clicked on a given link from your website that left and went to someone else's website. Those were all events we could create in Universal Analytics, but they were much harder to create given the constraints of category action and label. With GA4, one example is some chat features have a hard time passing data into Google, because maybe they're a single page application or whatever. The problem is we would say, "Okay, well, with Universal Analytics I can at least do a button click event to know when somebody clicked start a chat." So we would create that event, but that was the only context we were given.

With GA4 and the ability to add additional parameters, I could add things like what page they were on when they clicked the button. So I would see an event that said the start chat button was clicked, but I could also pass what device it was on and what page they were on. So it gives me more context into the event, not just that someone clicked the button. There are four categories of events in GA4. The first one is automatically collected. The second one is enhanced measurement events. The third are recommended and the fourth is custom. So as we walk through this, we're going to define what each of these is for. Sorry, someone's asking to repeat what's happening on those dates. July of 2023, Universal Analytics will stop collecting data altogether. So if you looked at it on July 24th, you would see zeros everywhere. It will not collect data anymore.

But you will still be able to go backwards in time and look at all of your data. So that's why it's important that we make a plan to migrate. As of January, we don't know a date, some point in January, literally Universal Analytics will be deleted and you won't even be able to log into it anymore. So those are the importance of those two dates. All right, so what are the auto collected events? Right out of the box, what is happening? First visit. They send us event that the first time a user visits your site or your app. An event is collected saying this is their first visit. Why is that important? Well, we'll talk about it when we get to reporting, but that is now stored in GA4 forever. So we could talk about something like lifetime value or lifetime metrics on your users because we will always see the first time they came and every time they came back after.

So the first visit, that's when they first come. The session start is when that user engages with your site or app and starts a new session. And then user engagement. This is defined as someone... This is fired 10 seconds after a visitor has stayed on the page. So one person could potentially fire many of these, but only first visit will happen once. So that ones will happen once. But sessions start and user engagement, that same user could happen and fire all the time. There's the importance of us being able to go back and look how often an individual user came to the site and what was their first date of visit. All right, what are the enhanced measurement events? These are as you're doing your setup, inside of your account, you can always go back to these in the event section, and these are toggled on and toggled off.

So that blue check mark you can see to toggle these on or toggle them off, I advise you to toggle all of them on, with the exception of a couple. And we'll talk about those. But these are also auto collected for you. Page views, scrolling, outbound clicks, site search, video engagement, caveat on video engagement is the only way that it will measure it out of the box is if it is a YouTube embedded video. If you're using video or some other player to embed it, it won't measure it out of the box. You can still capture it. We'd have to create a specific special event inside of Google Tag Manager to do it. It's very easy, impossible, but it won't do it out of the box unless it's YouTube. Now, I mentioned file downloads and form interactions. File downloads. So if you have PDFs on your site and someone goes and clicks it to download, that will be automatically captured by GA4.

Form interactions, I caution people about. It is not that someone completed a form. So if you think back to the days of Universal Analytics, when we would create goals because someone filled out our contact us page or they joined our newsletter, that was we were firing something on someone actually submitting. Form interactions is still important, but it's not that someone finished the form. It just means they interacted with it. So Google Analytics 4 is able to tell that someone clicked into a field to start interacting with your form, but didn't necessarily complete it. So why it's helpful to be collected out of the box is you would've had to create separate events for that before and they would be events that were very difficult to measure. Because if you remember in universal Analytics, events were something that you had to go to the events section to look at reporting on, and it was very difficult to understand from a marketing perspective what channel drove that event to happen.

And then you had goals where you would go in and look at goals, like a form completion, and that was in the normal reporting that we're used to. With the new version, I can absolutely see how many people interacted with a form right next to how many people completed that form. So why that could be useful. Let's say that you just created a new form on your site and you think it... you're trying to make a long form easier by, say, making it on multiple cards instead of one long form. Well, you could see the number of people that interact with it versus the number of people that complete it. And if we have a much higher form interaction, unbalanced to our form completion, might be something we want to take a look at with our development team to go, "Why are so many people interacting with it, but they're not completing? What's stopping them? Where can we figure out why that's so lopsided?" So it's pretty cool to be able to see that out of the box.

All righty. These enhanced measurement events will be collected the second you toggle on that blue button that we looked at. So page view scrolls, first time a user reaches the bottom of each page, around 90%, outbound clicks, I think that's pretty self-evident. Site search, when a user performs a search on your site, Google will... We had to create a special event for that before. Google Analytics 4 will grab it out of the box. The video engagement, it will show the percentage of time a user watches the video on your site. So 25% or less, 50%, 75% or 100%. Again, that will only happen with YouTube only. You can still create the same kind of event for other players, but it's not done out of the box. File download, obviously, when a user clicks a link leading to a file. And form interactions we talked about. When they interact with the form on your site and also when they complete it.

Recommended events is category three. First, take a look at the automatically tracked events that we looked at, then check the enhanced measurement events. If none of those cover your case, then we can take a look at the list of recommended events. For most of us, there won't be a ton of events that we use in here much. The auto, the enhanced and the custom are going to be where we live for most of our lives. Recommended events will require a developer because they have to be activated at the data layer to push in code, like e-commerce or login events. Google's published several pages for different industries about what might be a recommended event, and that can be found at this link. We won't spend a ton of time on that part of it today. Custom events, this is when you want to send an event and it is not mentioned among the automatically or enhanced, you can create a custom event.

The only difference is that you will need to come up with your own event names. Again, this will require help from someone with data layer knowledge. For example, if you want to track form submissions of a contact form, the name of the event could be any one of these, form_submission, contact_form, contact_form submission. So you can name it whatever the heck you want, but I would suggest that as a team, if you have multiple people in the marketing world, the C-level world, the owner world who are going to be looking at reports, that we standardize our names so that everyone understands what they're looking at when it comes to reporting. All right, conversions. Goodbye goals, hello conversions. Finally, Google got it through their head that nobody in the planet calls anything a goal.

They call them conversions. So they have renamed them and now the conversions are in GA4. You will not find goals in GA4 anymore. What's a conversion? A conversion is an important interaction that you want your visitors or users to complete. Conversions can be split up into micro and macro conversions. Example of a micro conversion could be a newsletter subscription or downloading of a white paper. Micro conversions are usually described as conversions that put your visitors one step closer to the main conversion that you're wanting. Macro conversions are the most important interactions, such as form submissions, booking or purchase. That's how we want to measure our marketing dollars against. The macro conversion is good to look at, it's good to track, but I may not make budget decisions from my advertising budgets based on those macro conversions.

Those who've worked with previous versions of Google Analytics are familiar with the term goal. With the rise of G4 that concept is gone. Now these important interactions are named conversions. So what's different? It's all about the event now. It's your job to send them and then mark the most important ones as a conversion. We're going to look at what that means in a second. But the way we have to configure them is different. The types of conversions are different. No more out of the box destination, session duration, number of page view goals like we were used to in Universal Analytics. You can make any event that you have created on your website, which could be tons now, into a conversion. So the predefined conversions that come out of the box with GA4, this is specific to mobile applications, first open, so when somebody first opened your mobile app, an app store, subscription convert.

So I download your app from the app store and there's a way for me to subscribe, a paywall, something. That will be automatically tracked. App store subscription renewal, that will be tracked. And in-app purchases, those are automatically tracked. Now, someone still has to push the data layer in, so the e-commerce data is way too complicated to get into today. Luckily, Brandon's going to talk a little bit about that at the end. But for those of you who may be interested in how to figure that out, if you're not using ResMark, this guide from Simo is a very in-depth, very over my pay grade, step by step to how to code and push into the data layer of GA4. All right, so conversions that can be switched on. If you have any event that you've created, when you log in, you'll see your events, and that'll be the first tab you get in the bottom. You'll see all the events that I've created in my account here.

And when you go into conversions, there'll be nothing there until you go to the event tab and then tell it you want to mark that event as a conversion. So you first create the event, and then you can decide which events you want to mark as a conversion and which that you're just, they're micro conversions, they're important things you want to look at, but may not be something that you're like, "Ooh, that's a conversion." So I created one here for our contact form and I mark that as a conversion. File downloads, I don't really care about. If you go to my website and you download one of my white papers, that's awesome. That might make you one step closer to becoming an Xcite customer, but I'm not making my marketing budget decisions based on that. So I do not have that marked as a conversion. Just in events that I want to track.

All right, so planning out your event names. I talked a little bit about this a second ago, but imagine that you track various form submissions with the event name form submission, but you want to treat only certain types of form submissions as conversions. So let's say you track a contact form, a search form and a registration form submission. Those are events that you're tracking, but you only want to treat the registration form submission as the conversion. In that case, you would want to have three separate events. My naming convention is contact_form_conversion, search_form_submission, and sign up. Once I've created those three events, I go back to this screen. Oh, come on, where are you hiding? This screen. And I'm only going to mark the signup as the one that I want to have a conversion. So that's how you want to set up, if you have multiple forms, but not all of them you're going to convince yourself is a conversion, like a newsletter signup.

So what I've done is I've shared a sheet for all of you. This is a Google Doc. It's an example spreadsheet that I use with my team, so that everyone knows what the naming convention is. And you can use my example as inspiration to come up with your own spreadsheet for your own internal teams. But that way you can have notes defining exactly what it is that you're measuring, what it is that you want to call it, so that when someone's looking at reporting, they have sort of a table of contents to understand what exactly am I looking at, why are they called this? So that sheet is available, anyone can go in and grab it and make a copy of it for their own, and start messing around and creating something for their own teams. All righty. Okay, check out the data in the G4 debug. When you log in, you'll see debug view as something that sits on the side in the admin panel and it's really, really awesome.

But again, I could spend an entire hour just on that and we're at 35 minutes already, so I'm going to skip that. But what I did do was put a QR code here for you. Anyone can snap the screen right now and this will take you to my webinar where in section three I go into detail about how to check all of this conversion data, these events that you've created for yourself, how do you make sure they're working? Debug view is a way that you can do it. It's very easy once you figure it out a couple times. You'll look at it the first time and go, "I don't even know what the Sam Hill this is," but it's really pretty simple once you're used to it. And it's a great way to test that your events are working as you planned, that they're acting as you expected, and that conversions are working the way that you want them to. Again, take a picture of that, snap it, whatever you want to do, and make sure that you can go back and reference that debug view later.

Brandon Lake:

And Klint, one thing we can do with that too is we'll take... there was a question about this earlier, but we'll take that, the link to that QR code and send that out along with the slides and all of these various resources that he's been referencing along the way. We're going to add those to the webinar page so you can have access to them, and we'll send out an email soon after this to get that to everybody.

Klint Rudolph:

Yeah. And it looks like Kathleen's got a... Before I go on, because we're going to get into reporting, I'm going to go back to Kathleen's question, "Scroll seems like it could over fire." I'm not really sure what you mean by that, Kathleen. It will fire once per page view when someone scrolls to 90%. So if it doesn't fire, that means that on that given page view, they didn't get to 90%. But if they scroll back up and scroll back down again, it won't fire. It only fires once per page view. Does that answer your question? And it's also something that, just because it's automatically collected, doesn't mean unless you really want to go look at it, that it has to muck up your reporting. I always say turn them on anyway, just because if they're on and you find it useful, you know it's collecting and you can go back and look at it later. If you never look at it, oh well, no harm, no foul.

All righty. So reporting. What I'm going to try to focus on as much as I can here for the last 10 minutes before we get into Brandon's section, he's going to dig into this a little bit too, but this is really not about all the robustness that you can do in GA4 because that is the strongest suit. The strongest thing in GA4 is the reporting is way more robust and you can do lots with it. This is just going to be an intro in, if you're used to looking at GA4, how the hell do I go see that in, excuse me, in Universal, how the hell do I go find that or see that kind of view in GA4? These are the top ones. All right, so this is one of my favorite. If you're in marketing at all, you know that you have different channels driving to your website and you understand that I've got e-commerce or I've set values on my goals. I want to see how many completions I've got given a referral source of some sort.

So source/medium was a place that I always went to. Under acquisition on the left-hand side, go to source/medium and nicely I can see all of the traffic, how many of them were new users, how long they were there, how many times they completed a goal, all of those different things. So at first glance you open up GA4 and you're like, "Oh god, I have no idea how to find that." So here's where it is. On the left-hand side, the home button at the top, which you can see, then the second button is reporting. That's where we're in. That's why it's highlighted in blue. And when you click that, it'll pop out a menu and you'll see acquisition, engagement, monetization, retention, all of those things. So you want to click acquisition and it will do a dropdown and it will show you acquisition overview, user acquisition, and traffic acquisition.

Once you go into that, sorry, once you go into that, you'll see here on my screen that it's going to use default channel grouping as under the totals. And you'll see direct, organic search, referral, organic social. Right above that, right there in that little dropdown, you can change it to first user source and medium. All right, we're going to talk about that in a second. But if you click that first user source/medium, boom, this is what you'll see. So now you'll be able to see all of the things you're used to. Source/medium, I can add campaign name in. So as you'll see here, take note that if you're someone who uses UTMs, like I do religiously, I will be able to still see all of that data, just like I do in Universal, by simply having this source session, excuse me, say that six times fast, session source/medium, and add the secondary dimension of session campaign.

And now I can see my full UTM parameters here with all the engagement that I'm used to seeing. Users, audience engagement, we talked about that, events per session, that's all of your events, event count. The beauty is that we used to have to mark things as goals inside of Universal Analytics to be able to see them in this grid view. You don't have to do that anymore. Your events and your conversions will show up together in this grid view. And then where you can see there, it says, "Event count, all events," that's a dropdown that you could go into specific events that you've created. So that's the beauty of not having to mark everything a conversion because I can still see it in the source/medium grid view that I'm used to seeing it in.

So let's talk a little bit about that traffic acquisition, user acquisition, and default. Google automatically includes all Google properties as organic search, which is why there's no way to correct it and why I always tell people, do not use this, the default ad grouping, as the way that you look. Always change it to source/medium. And you'll see why here in a second. I was going through my analytics as I'm learning and bouncing back and forth between Google Analytics 4 and Universal Analytics to see the differences. Because again, we talked in the beginning, session and cookie-based Universal, GA4, event-based. Traffic numbers are not going to look the same. So don't be alarmed. Get used to looking at both of them. They will be different, but they were very different for me for organic search.

And so, I dug in a little bit and I left it on default channel group, but then I added a secondary dimension of session source. And as you can see here, Google is rolling a click from mail.google, my pay per click ads, ads.google, and ads from working documents that we use internally as a company at Google Docs, Google Sheets, and they roll all of that up into organic search. So my organic search numbers seem to skyrocket, but my conversion rate didn't. Now, I also do active SEO on my website, but I was like, "There should not be that big of a spike. What's going on here?" And I found out that Google is using every one of their properties, including YouTube and calling that organic search, which it simply isn't.

I want to look at traffic from pay per click, I want to look at traffic from Google Docs or from YouTube, but I'm not calling that organic search for the purposes of checking in on how my SEO is doing. So that's why not using default channel grouping is what I would recommend. Use that source/medium and it will be correct. All right, so we talked traffic acquisition versus user acquisition. There was a way for you to look at attribution in Universal Analytics, but it was difficult and it muddied things up and it was not accurate. It wasn't the same numbers you looked at when you looked at the source/medium. And then you had to go into attribution. Total traffic numbers were different. Conversion numbers were different. It was confusing. And I always like to say it was no black and white, it just had less gray area.

The beauty about GA4 is it's built in a little bit. There's a lot of attribution that you can do in reporting, but right inside of the dashboard that we're looking at, traffic acquisition and user acquisition are there side by side. And so the difference between them, user acquisition reports focus on the first traffic source that led a visitor to your website. We call that first click. So that's why if you look at the dimension names in the dropdown, when we switch to source/medium, you'll see that it says first user source/medium. If we go to the traffic acquisition, traffic acquisition focuses on the last click that led a user to your website. So literally, by toggling back between these two views, I can see what traffic sources first influenced somebody to come to my website versus what they did right before they converted.

So it has that sort of built-in first click and last click attribution. We were looking at a little bit yesterday with Brandon on his website, and you could see that paper click was much higher on user acquisition than it was on traffic acquisition, because people were finding his website on first click, but that wasn't the way they were necessarily converting at the end. It's a beautiful way to toggle quickly back and forth and see what channels influenced the first click versus what channels influenced the last click before they made a conversion. So that's built-in and something I really like. Google Ads reporting. Back in Universal Analytics, we had to go under acquisition and there was a separate section for Google Ads and you'd have to toggle into that and all you would see is your ads. In GA4 that is under advertising.

And when you connect your Google Ads account, all of it will show up in here and you will see all of your campaigns and you can dig in here. It's not quite as robust yet as I would like it to be, but I'm a Google Ads nerd, so I would much rather be in the Google Ads UI when I'm looking at that data anyway. Here, when I'm digging in, I'm looking at the overall performance of my pay per click campaign. I'm not necessarily delving into keywords and negative keywords. I'm going to do those kind of optimizations and that kind of digging right inside of Google Ads. So for me, not too annoying at this time, but there's not quite as much as you can do with Google Ads inside of GA4 yet. It's coming. It's just not there yet. All right, exploration reports. In addition to the reports that we just looked at for acquisition and advertising, the explore tab is a really, really fun place.

There's some really exciting capabilities with GA4, and the exploration reports make it easy to create custom reports with super advanced visualizations. So to find these, on the left-hand side, you click on and go to explore and you will see a screen that looks like this. You can create a blank one. There are a bunch in the gallery out of the box. You've got freeform, path exploration, funnel exploration, and we're going to look at those. Brandon's going to show some of those off in ResMark as well in a live view. But there are multiple ways. We'll just take a look at a couple of my favorites. The freeform exploration is an awesome one, and it's a great way to create custom tables and graphs and organize them however you like. This link will take you to a lot more information. Again, this is an intro.

We could spend an hour on each of these sections certainly. So I put the support link in here so you can see it. But quite simply, when you click on one, this is what you'll see. And on the left-hand side you'll see it says variables, on the right-hand side that I've highlighted in red is where I've created the report. And to the far right is where the data is been spit out. So this example, let's say I want to look at traffic to my website by city and by device. So what I can do is, it's hard to probably see on my screen, but right in the middle you'll see it say rows and columns. Any of the dimensions, segments or metrics in the first column under variables can be dragged either into row or column, and you can spit the data out however you would like using any number of things, gender, country, device category, paid traffic, event name, active user, transactions, all sorts of different things.

And when you click into those dimensions, this screen goes on for days and it will show you all the different things that you could grab to create this freeform exploration. There's a zoom-in of the row and the column. So you can see this example, I've drug in event name to be in my rows and the device category to be in my columns. Here's all the events I've created on my website. Those are the rows on the left-hand side. And all of the devices are at the top, desktop, mobile, tablet, and then I got the total account for all devices. So by simply dragging those two things from the left column into row and column, it takes a second and it spits this data out. Like I said, because it's like a pivot table, there's no shortage of ways that you could use this data to create your own explorations of things you want to see.

Once you create it, it automatically saves it, so you can go back and use it later. So what I would suggest is when you're playing around and you find one you like, go in and on the right-hand side where you see the three dots, you can rename it. I have these all as freeform. Great, well, I've created three freeform exploration reports. What the heck are they? I can go in and name it specifically device by event, whatever, so that whenever I go back, I know what that one is. You can also get rid of them, share them with other people. We'll make a note. This is a new change that Brandon and I discovered earlier in the week when we were preparing for today's meeting. If you share a report with someone else on the team, in your team, with your marketing company, they will have to make a copy of yours to be able to edit it.

When you share it, by default, that share is going to be read-only. So again, at those three dots, you could make a copy for yourself, and now you could go in and change that thing completely and make it however you want. But if someone shares it with you, it will be read-only until you copy it into your own, which I think is great. At first, I was like, "Well, that's kind of annoying." But after thinking about it, if I create a report, somebody goes in and messes around and changes it, then I'm like, "Crap, where's the stuff that I wanted to see? Why did someone change my report?" So it protects that anything you've shared, someone can't mess with. They could mess with it if they clone it, but it won't mess with the original that was made. So kind of like that idea.

Lifetime metrics. We talked a little bit about that because of the event that happens, right out of the box was that first time user. So only thing to note here is when you go into those under the freeform explorations, you'll see all of these, lifetime value, lifetime revenue, lifetime engagement, duration, all of these different things that you can play around with. Just note that these will only happen after August 14th of 2020. If you're like Brandon and have had G4 on your site since then, anything prior to that won't happen because lifetime metrics wasn't a thing yet. So if you just get this on your site today, it will start on your site today moving forward, but it can't go backwards in time. Cohort explorations is another way to do it. This is another exploration report that you can go in and it's a great way to gain insights on a group of people that have common attributes.

This one, I've created active users who had a purchase and when they added it to cart. So I'm looking at all the people who had a purchase and how far back they added it to cart. Simply put, I can go into the path exploration, I hit that start over button to create a new one, and I can create a starting point, I can create an ending point, and all of those things I can do, you'll see a dropdown based on anything, page, title page, URL, all sorts of different things that you can grab. Here's one that I made for mine that I entered my thank you page as the end point. It will show me all the users, what pages they were on before they submitted the form. For example, on my website, the form's on every page in the footer. Sometimes it's important for me to understand context and go, "What page were they on when they submitted that?" So here's a way. Step one, that starting point, I put in, "Show me the page title," and the end point was them getting to my thank you page.

So now I'm taking a look at literally how many people created forms from what page. And lastly, search console. You will need to reconnect search console to GA4 in the admin section, in the center, all the way under product links. At the bottom here, you will see a link for search console links. You can click on that and then it will connect. You'll be able to log in and connect them so that you have your search console data back, and you can see that data nicely inside, just like you would have inside of Universal where you can see search queries and things like that. Three valuable resources, I would say, how to create custom reports, what are some of the new concepts that Google has brought to GA4, and what are the top three most valuable reports that I use? These are great resources for that. We're a little bit over on my time. Sorry, Brandon. We still got about maybe 10 minutes here for you to take over and do some live demos inside of one of Resmark's accounts.

Brandon Lake:

Sure. Okay. Awesome, Klint. Thank you so much for walking us through all of that. I think that's really, really helpful. As we're coming to a close here, if there are any questions anybody has, complex or basic or whatever they may seem, go ahead and put those in the questions tab. We'll take those here in just a second. I just wanted to go into a live view. This is actually one of my businesses. We own a couple of tour companies, Moab Adventure Center and Western River Expeditions, and I just wanted to show you how this stuff looks when it is all configured, E-commerce, sales funnels, all of that. So you can see, and I'm just going to show you very briefly here, a couple of examples. One of the questions that came through early on was Amelda was setting up a new website, wondering should her marketing person have set that up in GA4?

Hopefully so. At this point, it doesn't really make sense to set up a new account in Universal Analytics. Set that up. But if you're wondering, "Do I have this?" you can actually... This is what it looks like for us. If I come in here and I look at our various properties, you'll see there's my Universal Analytics. You can tell because it has a little UA underneath it, so that's Universal Analytics. If I come down here, you'll see this one. We put GA4 here and the number does not have the UA in front of it. So I'm going to leave my, I'm logged into Universal Analytics right now, but I'm going to go over to GA4 and you're going to see things change according to everything that Klint just told us. So this is the new interface.

And one thing that I think is interesting with this, and I'll just show what you kind of mentioned there, Klint, recently. So if we go down to reports, I'll just show you this live view, and I come into acquisition and I go into user acquisition. And remember, he said one of the best ways to look at this is source/medium, so if we toggle that on, all of this changes, and you'll see over here when e-commerce data is properly enabled, you should be able to see that correlation. And I love looking at this, because it's ultimately, if you have e-commerce on your website, then that's an excellent indicator of that final conversion, but not just a conversion, not just a account, but what kind of dollars are each of these bringing to us? I always like to come in here and just sort this by revenue ,so I can go in and see what each source is bringing me.

And as Klint said, there's some really great stuff in here now to be able to look at the difference between whether it's the first, correct me if I'm wrong here, Klint, but whether it's that... I'm basing the attribution of the dollars on the very first visit, meaning they came from a paid ad in this case, and the one I have, I've highlighted right here, they came from some paid ad in Google, clicked that and went and made a purchase. Or whether they actually came to the site and then the final click was actually from an ad before they made a purchase. And you can see, as he mentioned, these numbers are pretty different. So here I see $6,200, and if we toggle over here, just so you can see a live comparison, I'll change my channel group to the same thing and I'll come down to that same row, there's a thousand dollars plus of difference there. And one of our other sites was different by like $20,000.

Klint Rudolph:

Yeah. And the thing to note in here specifically is if you're relying on reporting from Google Ads by itself, you're going to see this. You're going to see the last click. Most attributions still today, unless you've set something up with your marketing company that's different, out of the box, Google Ads will default to last click. So in Brandon's case, we would be making decisions off the budget that he spent during this timeframe to make $5,642. That's all that would show up. But if we go back to user acquisition and that turns into almost $7,000, that means over a thousand dollars we didn't count as Google Ads driving. But the reality is, had we not had an ad that they clicked on first, then they went and did some research, may have looked up reviews on Moab Adventure Center or whatever else they did, we would've missed that this was... almost a thousand dollars more revenue was brought to us based on our Google Ads budget.

So it's kind of nice to be able to... You can do this for all of your conversions, all of your events. You can see right there where I mentioned, you'll see all the different events that are configured out of the box. So if you want to just hover over the all events and do that dropdown under the events, that'd be on the right-hand side, almost over there by the total revenue.

Brandon Lake:

This one?

Klint Rudolph:

Yeah, the event one. And now you'll see here's every event that Moab Adventure Center has created. So if I just want to look at a specific event, I can now look at it in the same grid as my conversions. So it's really a cool way for you, being that it's a event-based model, that I now get to see everything in the grid by the source and medium that drove it.

Brandon Lake:

Yeah, that's really cool. So there's a lot to explore in here. One thing I just wanted to point out was that if things are set up properly, you should see the e-commerce revenue coming in, assuming you're an e-commerce enabled website. So how do we get there? I just want to provide one tool, particularly for our Resmark users. So if you are a Resmark user and you're utilizing Resmark Web for your website, and we've configured the website, the products that you're selling there and so forth, all of that should be set up. Assuming you've configured Google Analytics, and we can make sure all of that is connected properly so that that e-commerce data is coming through. The other really cool thing, let me just pop back over here, that we have some documentation as to how you can set it up, is in that section that Klint explained as being some of the custom things.

So this is an example right here of a sales funnel. This is a custom report that was set up using all of the steps that are stored within Resmark. And we've configured all of this for GA4, so it comes in now. And you can actually set the steps that you use. If there's some of these, if you don't have any agreement to policies or whatever, you can actually remove that step, which is pretty cool. So you can set these ones up that you're using, and then you can see across all the various devices how that conversion works, what the abandonment is at each step, and kind of start digging into that like, "Okay, do we have a real lack of availability up here upfront? What's causing some of that?" So that's really helpful to be able to dig in at that level.

Klint Rudolph:

That's a funnel exploration report. I showed you a funnel exploration report as well. So as you can see, there's two very different ways to use it. And Brandon, I think the team has some really good documentation on how someone could go in if they have Resmark to set up their own sales funnel. Is that right?

Brandon Lake:

That's right. So if you come in here, and I'll just show you, for those that have the system, you can simply come in here, log into your account, and right down here on the left of the navigation, you will see support center. If we just click on that and then simply just type in Google Analytics and you start typing that, and you'll see there's Google Analytics 4 Video Walkthrough Documentation. This will give you all the setup and configuration information that you need, in terms of how to actually create the property, how to set it up, how to add the measurement ID to Resmark, test it, how to set up your sales funnel, all of the step-by-step.

So you can watch the video and then read through that, and that should be a really great resource for you. With that, I am going to, I'll actually just turn my camera back on and stop recording here or stop sharing. And just wanted to see if there are any other questions. I do have just a couple, Klint, to add here, as we conclude. One is if someone has questions while they're trying to set up Google Analytics 4 or configure some of the things that you've suggested suggested, is there someone on your team or you that they might be able to reach out to for some additional support with that?

Klint Rudolph:

Yeah, absolutely. The last page of the deck has our phone number and website and my email. And if it's something that I can't get to, then I can forward it on to someone on the team to make sure that we can answer any questions people have. Yeah, that's easy.

Brandon Lake:

Okay. That'll be a great resource for some. Because I know some of this stuff can get pretty complicated as you're trying to go through this. I love the overview you gave of just how things are different and some of the tools. And there are some really great tools in there that really take our analytics up a notch in some ways. [Inaudible 01:06:33].

Klint Rudolph:

Absolutely. It's annoying because it's new, right?

Brandon Lake:

Yeah.

Klint Rudolph:

It's annoying. But once you get through it, I mean I've lost hours of my life in that damn explore tab, messing with different kind of reports I want to build. You can go down rabbit holes for days.

Brandon Lake:

But that's fantastic. So we really know what we want. And I like that sometimes, what you used to take, maybe three reports comparing this over here and that or adding a segment and all of those things. Now we can just say, "No, I like to see that frequently. I'm just going to build something," and there it is every time I want to go see it. That's really cool.

Klint Rudolph:

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that I've talked about for years with any kind of analytics platform, especially with GA4 because it's not familiar to us, I think it's really important to figure out before you go in there, what's the question you're trying to answer? And that will help guide you where I should go. So again, comparing first click to last click. What does that look like? Am I giving enough credit to my ad spend on social or to my ad spend on pay per click? What we've seen as a marketing agency over the last few years is that what used to be a bottom of the funnel step is no longer a bottom of the funnel step. Pay per click used to be that. I'm raising my hand, it was the yellow pages. I did a search, I clicked on the ad and I made a purchase.

And over the years we've seen that creep further and further and further up into a upper funnel activity, not a bottom of the funnel activity. So understanding what question you want to ask first or what question you want answers to will help guide you as you're playing around with those custom reports and go, "All right, I want to see if there's a problem in my sales funnel on mobile." Cool, I can go look at the sales funnel that Brandon created for you because it breaks it out by device for you automatically. And I can see the abandonment rate on desktop versus the abandonment rate on mobile. Then I can go back to my developers and go, "Maybe something's wrong with our implementation of how we're using it, because it seems to me that mobile is falling off much more at this one spot then desktop is," or... excuse me, whatever. But understanding before you mess around, "What am I trying to answer?" will help guide you without getting lost for hours.

Brandon Lake:

No, for sure. And just in closing, to that point, Klint, when I think about this stuff, I like to divide things into two buckets. I think for me at least, it simplifies things. I like to think about traffic, where, Google calls it acquisition, but where am I getting traffic from? Is it quality traffic, does it convert? And how do I get more of it, if I'm looking at that? Because ultimately, if nobody's coming to my site, nothing else matters. So that's question number one in my mind, is acquisition. How do I get more quality traffic coming to my website? And then question number two or bucket number two is conversion. Once I have the traffic, what am I doing on my site? And this, Google Analytics 4 has some really neat tools for that.

To be able to track engagement on in the way you explained, and to be able to see now like, "Okay, they're not getting down to that video, they're not scrolling through my content. What can I do about engagement?" Because engagement generally equals or leads to conversion. So [inaudible 01:09:53] having those kinds of tools there is really cool. If you think about it in those two buckets, how am I getting traffic, how am I acquiring people to come and visit me on my website? And then how am I, what am I doing with them once they're there? And there's lots of questions to ask in those two buckets, but I think that's a nice way to mentally organize it as you think about all of this.

Hopefully this has been a helpful exercise for everyone to get a bit of an overview. I'm sure there are more questions that you'll run into as time goes on, so absolutely, feel free to pass those along. We're going to take everything that was shared by Klint today. We'll update it. We'll send out an email, likely within the next day or two, and you will get everything we've talked about, all these resources and everything. So you can spend some more time with that as you get it set up. We appreciate everybody for coming today, and we'll see you again next time. Thank you.

Klint Rudolph:

Absolutely. Thanks, everybody.

Webinar Replay | 6 Big Opportunities to Increase Sales through Team Building, Groups, and Incentives

nikki@resmarkweb.com (Nikki DeSantis) — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 14:16:36 GMT

Businesses now have more employees working from home than ever before. Remote work is here to stay. Business owners and managers have learned a lot these past 2 years. People are far more productive working from home - and business operating expenses are considerably lower. But that creates a new set of challenges.

These businesses need ways to connect and incentivize their employees through experiences and services. This has created an unprecedented opportunity for experience providers to increase sales in new and exciting ways. Watch our webinar and workshop with Josh Oakes, founder of the Sunshine Tribe, as we learn:

How to make sure your experiences sell wildly to businesses
New ways to find businesses that need your experiences
What a corporate decision-maker is really looking for
How to write engaging copy that speaks to a new audience

Our Speakers

6 Big Opportunities to Increase Sales through Team Building, Groups, and Incentives

Brandon Lake:

All right, we're so excited to have this workshop and this webinar here today. We've got individuals joining us from around the globe. As I look at the list here, we have a lot of tour companies, but also several other experience businesses, from ax throwing, to inflatables, bowling, spa, adventure parks, all kinds of great experiences. And I think this topic is incredibly relevant to everybody, so I'm really excited about this.

My name is Brandon Lake. I'm the CEO of Resmark and WaiverSign. We provide a booking and marketing automation platform as well as a digital waiver solution. We're excited to have a lot of our clients joining us today, but we're even more excited to have Josh Oaks joining us today all the way from Ibiza, Spain, and he's the founder of the Sunshine Tribe. And I'm sure a lot of you know Josh as he's done a phenomenal job at educating businesses, and particularly in the tourism industry, sharing what he learned by starting and selling his own tour business in Melbourne, Australia. So we'll be excited to hear a little bit of his background today and his story and how it relates to our topic.

So let me tell you how we got to where we are today with this webinar. I actually co-own a couple of businesses, Western River Expeditions and Moab Adventure Center, and we of course utilize our software, it's part of the reason we built it was for those businesses, and now a lot of others use it around the world. I was talking to Josh about these businesses a couple of months ago and he said something that really resonated with me. He said, things have really changed over the past couple of years. Businesses, and we kind of know this, and I knew this, but I haven't really thought about the opportunity it presented, he said, there's businesses have people working at home all over the place, more so than they ever have. And while a lot of those employees are enjoying that, it presents some new challenges for those businesses. And some of those are A, how do you create a culture and kind of the bonding that can occur only really in person? How do you create that when now you have all these people doing remote work? And number two, how do you incentivize those employees to really want to work hard and to perform for the company?

And so we started talking about that and realized on my part that we have probably a bigger opportunity than we've ever had before to get in front of these people with the types of experiences they offer. Whether you're providing tours or activities or some other service or experience, there is an opportunity to help these businesses with a solution that can allow them to bring their employees together to provide that kind of culture that they're looking for and to incentivize employees.

So I was super excited about this and we talked about Josh putting together some of his experiences in running his business, because he's been very successful in creating this particular channel, this corporate channel, the messaging and everything that can appeal to these people to be able to make this a new business segment. Or in our case, we do some of this already, but I think we're missing a big opportunity here by not taking advantage of this shift that has happened over the last couple of years and changing our messaging to get in front of more of these businesses and provide them with something that I think is going to be invaluable to them.

So with that, that's what we're excited to talk about today, Josh, and I'm really happy to have you here, I'm going to go ahead and turn the time over to you. Before I do that, just a couple of notes for our audience. Here in the platform, you'll see that there is a little chat window. You can utilize that. There's also a questions panel, either one of those. But if you have questions you'd like to ask, some of those, I'll hold until the end, others I may interject here now and then as Josh goes through his presentation, if the timing seems right. But certainly be thinking of some of those things, how you want to apply this to your business, ask questions, we'll have time at the end to go through all of that.

So with that, Josh, I'll go ahead and turn it over to you.

Josh Oaks:

Wonderful. Thanks mate. I'll just share screen, give me one second. Thanks for having me. Thanks for the great intro.

Brandon Lake:

Absolutely.

Josh Oaks:

Where am I? All right, so let me know that... oops, so get back to the start. Okay, you're seeing that nice and clearly?

Brandon Lake:

Yeah, that's coming through really well.

Josh Oaks:

Excellent. So yeah, look, I'm going to echo a lot of the things that Brandon said, and one of the important things is that a lot of the organizations and these businesses that Brandon was talking about, they don't even know they have a problem right now, a lot of them don't. So there is a monumental opportunity for a lot of you to really, really grow your businesses quickly through a new sales channel, a new market segment.

So yeah, as Brandon would've mentioned, the topic of the webinar, six big opportunities to increase sales through team building, groups and incentives and many other things as well. So Brandon, jump in if there's anyone I missed here, but it's definitely for you if you run a tour, if you run an activity, if you run experiences, or even if you run events, you'll find a lot of this really relatable and you're going to apply a lot of these strategies to your business as well. But as I say, if I've missed someone mate, then just jump in and let me know.

So what I'm going to aim to do over the next, well, 30 to 40 minutes really, is show you how you can legitimately accelerate your experience business faster than anything you've potentially tried before. It really has that potential. I'll show you how it worked for me, I'll show you how it can work for you as well. By serving a market segment, ie local businesses, and not necessarily even local businesses, there's obviously meetings and incentives, there's international and domestic opportunities as well. But to start somewhere, local businesses that really, really need something that you're offering right now more than they've ever needed it before.

So I'll just run through this really quickly as a lot of you will know me, some of you won't. But back in 2007, as Brandon mentioned, I started a tour company called Melbourne Private Tours down there in Melbourne, Australia. That was the website a few years back around the time of sale, which I'll tell you about in a second, offering some really high-end premium, exclusive, immersive, private experiences around Melbourne and different regions. When I started, it was a tricky time, I like many of you started with this dream of just showcasing my little corner of the world. I had these visions of this fleet of luxury vehicles, and I had all these wonderful ideas and drive and ambition, and the first couple of years were pretty tricky, pretty awful to be quite honest. And my fleet of luxury vehicles consisted of a secondhand Toyota van with me as a guide and effectively wearing every hat, operations, reservations, customer service, inquiries, vehicle maintenance, as a lot of you would know. Wearing every hat, not wearing a lot of them particularly well and nearly through the towel more times than I can remember.

Probably about three or four years later, we really started to get some traction and I started getting some accolades and the business started to grow fairly quickly. I figured a lot of things out, things started to work. I got some good guidance and support around me, and we started to grow pretty quickly. And by 2014, we were doing well over a million dollars in revenue. We had a nice luxury fleet of touring vehicles. Business was going really, really well. I was living a really great lifestyle and life was good. Had a nice team, a really small but well organized, aligned team in the office, and obviously some really, really great tour guides as well.

And it was at the time we were doing around $2 million a year that I started to see something. And as the immersive nature and we started to up-level our experiences, I started to get a lot of inquiry from local businesses, executive assistants or sales and marketing managers or business owners, along the lines of, hey, I love your Yarra Valley ballooning and barrel tasting experience, or your chef led journey. It sounds like the kind of thing that my team would love to do. So I noticed the trends and I had a really good business at that point, a seven figure business, I had a good team, I had bandwidth, I had resources, so I decided to do it properly and I launched MPT corporate events. So serving the local corporate market, and it was really, really successful. And in the space of it was about nine months, we grew that really quickly to over 300,000 in revenue. So it happened very, very quickly.

And the things that I learned and my team learned, that we could really fill a need with some of these things, and I'm sure you can also do the same. So the needs of the corporate market vary greatly, and there's a lot of them. So company Christmas parties, end of financial year events, we run our financial year in Australia July to June, and even end of quarter events where there's an opportunity there. Team building events of course, reward and recognition programs or experiences, so rewarding high performers in the business. Partner programs. And on that note as well, entertaining delegates or international visitors from the company in destination, client engagement, pre and post conference and company incentives. So a whole bunch of different needs, and we found that we could deliver on many of those.

And when I sold my business and it was 2017, I got a really good price for the business. Why? That's another story. It just felt right for me, 10 years doing one thing. I wanted to do more of what I'm doing right now, but I could go deep on that one. But one of the real motivators, one thing that allowed me to generate a whole bunch of offers at the same time drive that ultimate sale price up was the tantalizing opportunity that the rapid growth we had in their corporate business presented. And we'd only just really got our teeth into it and we've grown it really quickly, and there was just no limit to what the ultimate owners could do with that.

So before I dive into that, why was I exploring a new revenue stream or a new sales channel? For me, my own experience I learned from great advice that I got. When I got the sort of support and the mentoring that I wanted around me was that, and this is really important for you guys, if you are going to grow a really thriving, successful, widely profitable business, then there is a much stronger likelihood that you're going to do that by having a diverse range of sales channels, by driving sales through a number of different channels. Maybe somewhere between, depending on your bandwidth and resources and the size of your business, somewhere between four and eight really strong performing sales channels would be my recommendation.

So this was a bit of a pie chart from around the time I sold the business. So you can see we were doing a lot through travel partners, so travel agents, which was the lion's share of our revenue, but we could break that down into 50 different customers. So that was coming through a whole bunch of different agents, so there was diversity there. Direct business was a good chunk, corporate business was growing quickly, hotels and partnerships and collaborations with other tour operators, and then some other stuff like little bits and pieces. So there was a lot of things and that allowed us to grow the business quickly. And I implore all of you to avoid having any over reliance on one particular sales channel if you really want to grow a really successful, thriving, profitable business.

So as Brandon mentioned, why now? The opportunity right now is something more than I've ever seen. Just to reiterate what Brandon said, the world has changed. Semi-remote or remote work has been with us for a couple of years now, and it ain't going away. My really basic research shows that businesses are around 30% more productive. So the people in those businesses are around 30% more productive working from home than they were working in the office, for obvious reasons, travel time, distractions and all kinds of stuff. And they draw a line through around 30% of their business operating expense is by having people working from home as well. So it's really great for business, but that throws up a whole new set of challenges, obviously fostering company culture, team morale, motivating, incentivizing, having people aligned, and they're real challenges.

And a lot of businesses they haven't actually figured out as I mentioned, that they have a problem. And what I learned by tackling the corporate market, I'll go a little deeper on it, is that sometimes people don't even know they have a problem until you present it to them. And if you do it in the right way, you can have a lot of success. And so a lot of businesses will have now allocated budgets for this kind of stuff, but one of them, it'll be kind of new to them, but once you articulate it to them in the right way, they'll be nodding along saying, yes, I have that problem. That is a problem I have. How can you solve that for me?

Okay, so where would you start? And look, there's a whole bunch of strategies. I am really an advocate of teaching strategies that are very, very affordable, free, that aren't going to mean throwing a lot of budget initially, and just things that you can do with time and human resources. So here's the sort of stuff that I did. Now, everything I did in my business, I always started with research. It was the cornerstone of everything. So I always took a step back to ask a lot of people that I saw as a potential customer, an ideal customer, most represented type of customer, some probing questions. It helped me immensely understand their needs, their problems, their desires they want satiated. So that's where I always started with everything I launched.

I learned the hard way that sometimes what I think are great ideas are irrelevant because I'm not my target market, so I drew a line in the sand. And as I grew, everything I did was research based. Not crazy amounts of time, spending months and months in research phase is enough to your bandwidth to get a real assessment of what people's legitimate desires, problems, and issues were, so that would help you create something that was going to solve those problems and satiate those desires.

So a few things that you could do, this may not be relevant for all of you, but a simple thing that we did was went back five or six years to every historical inquiry, and we'd had inquiries over the journey from corporate clients, and we went back and we analyzed every single one of those. And before, we were really proactive in serving the corporate market, over that three years, we might've had 50, maybe 60 corporate inquiries. So we just got a sense of what type of business, what type of industry, the company size, the role of the decision maker and the nature of the inquiry, what they needed. We always asked some probing questions, what sort of outcomes did you want for the day, and a few other things. So we got a really good feel for what was happening in the corporate market, and we started to see some trends come out of that as well.

Then the next one, I found crazy, crazy effective, just simply people in my networks and in your networks. Now, all of you out there would know hundreds and hundreds of people that have a job that work in companies. Obviously yes, there's a lot of freelancers and things like that, a lot of people working remotely, but ultimately we all know people that work in businesses, that go to offices, that have work colleagues, that have bosses and corporate structures. So I started with a bunch of those and I asked a lot of my team to do the same. So all up, we might've spoken to 100 people that work in a business, in a company. So we asked them, what did your company do by way of company entertainment? And they're like, huh, what are you talking about? Do you do a Christmas party? Do you do an annual conference? Do you do a team building day or do you get rewarded for anything? And is there a conference the company runs once a year? That sort of stuff.

And then a few more probing questions, so what is it specifically? When does it happen? Does it tie into a particular time of the year or end of financial year? What do you feel would be the average spend per person? And if they didn't know, we'd be able to work it out. Okay, we're pretty good at working that stuff out. So what do you do? Where do you go? Do they take you there in a bus? Do you have a three course dinner? We'd be able to get a really clear sense of what they were spending. What's the size of the company? Who is responsible for making these decisions? Is it the human resources manager? Is it the executive assistant? Who actually organizes this stuff? Have you got a dedicated events person? And then what's the general feedback about it, about the event? What's the talk around the office? Do people appreciate it? Is attendance really good? And from an attendee perspective, what's frustrating? What sort of challenges do you see? What would you as an attendee love to do? You know what I mean?

So we got an absolute goldmine of valuable information just from asking those questions, and it didn't take a lot of time. Probably we dedicated maybe a month or two and dedicated time in every day to have these conversations. Then we reported back after, look, I can't remember whether it was at the end of a couple of months, but we dedicated enough time to doing that.

And then we added to that a bit of research of our own. And this is what I would recommend you guys all do right now, industries, who's thriving right now? What's happening in a global environment? Things like cleaning businesses or financial advice or food manufacturing. You could jump on Google in about five minutes and you could come up with 15 lists of all the industries that you want to invest in that are flying, that are going to do really well over the next two to three years. So you would get that, then you would zero in on your local area, what businesses are in your local area that are in those industries? And you might even go a little further and see if you can find a little information on who's actually performing really well. There are ways, there's your Chamber of Commerce for example, or you may be able to find if there's businesses that are listed, but a little information there. And then of course, we could see if any of those fit the demographic of the historical inquiries that we had. So I hope that's all making sense.

And then the last thing we did, which was, and this doesn't necessarily need to be limited to your direct destination, who's your competition? Who runs team building experiences? Who runs company Christmas parties? Google team building experience Melbourne or Los Angeles, it doesn't matter where it is, jump on these sites. You could get up 30 or 40 websites of companies that specialize in these things. I gave you the list of that a few slides back. And find out who's reviewing them, who's actually writing reviews? Who's had their experiences? Is it Tanya the executive assistant from Kraft Foods, or is it someone from a financial institution? So you'll often be able to see the name and the company, because a lot of event or corporate entertainment companies or team building specialists or things like that, they like to have the name of their company from the person who's reviewed them. So that's another really great one. Who's actually doing this stuff? Who's spending the money?

So there's four different strategies to get your starters. And another way is of course, if you've got budget, you could start running ads and you could have some real success. Speak to a digital marketer, that's not me, I've got a base level of experience, but really easy to target corporate business owners. Geographically, within 20 kilometers of your experience or your tour business, targeting that sales and marketing managers, executive assistants, business owners, size and geographic areas, you're going to have some success. It's not a challenging thing to target. But once you actually go through those steps, and this next step I'm going to tell you about now, your marketing is going to be insanely good, because you're going to be right inside your customer's head.

So the next thing you would do, and I alluded to this earlier, time block, set aside some time for outreach. And that could be you as the company owner. You might have someone driving sales, you might have a sales person in your office, but ultimately it could be you. What is a really great investment for anyone, I think, is to get someone who is going to be dedicated to driving sales. But it's really great for you to know, to understand this process and have had some success in this process before you make that decision to bring someone in.

So there's a few strategies you could explore here, and the first one would be to have a conversation with the decision maker. With a lot of my outreach strategies, I generally prefer an initial email with a promise of a follow-up phone call. I think it works well, but this was also a strategy that worked well for me. So once you've got your target list of businesses and you've even got your list of decision makers, you may even have done the requisite research to find out who that executive assistant or who that sales and marketing manager, who that human resource manager is, and you're going to find they're actually not that challenging to get on the phone. So if you're really open, really transparent, you might be able to contact them directly, you might have to come through a switchboard or a secretary. With a secretary, they're very happy to pass it up the chain if they can wipe their hands of you and shuffle you off to the person you want to talk to.

But whether you're talking to the decision maker or someone who you're hoping is going to give you the ear of the decision maker, something along these lines, look, this is who I am, this is what I do. Just want to be clear, I'm not selling anything. What I'm doing at the moment is I'm working on, and you can establish credibility into who I am and what I do. Okay? Don't go too long. Really, really short and sharp. I'm working on an amazing, awesome new range of team building experiences or company Christmas party options, really exclusive, really immersive. And you can get people excited like, oh, this sounds interesting. This sounds something like my company would be interested in. And once you've told me you're not selling anything, then they're going to be even more receptive and lean in.

So you want to ask them a couple of quick questions, just one minute, or even just one minute or two minutes, okay? If you wouldn't mind, I'd love to know, what do you do for your company Christmas party or for your team building days, or for your rewarding of staff and your reward and recognition experiences? How do you reward staff? And if they don't, they're going to be really sheepish and really embarrassed about it, and they're going to want to know a little more. So what do you do? When do you do it? How much? Is there a fixed budget? Generally, how much do you spend for these events? How often do you do them? Generally, what's the feedback? What are your single biggest challenges? Are you the decision maker or are you the organizer? What are your frustrations or any fears or your personal desires for the event? These kind of questions.

And you are often going to get people that are really open and happy to have a chat with you. There's things that you're saying, first of all, you're not trying to sell something. Second is you've planted a seed, and they are completely aware that if they're not rewarding their team, then they should be. So that's what I learned, people are curious to learn more. Well, how can I do this? I want to know how I can do this. Especially when they pass it up the chain to their boss or their manager, things like this make people look good.

So what you want to be doing through this entire process is recording or writing down the exact language that people use. The people, the friends that work in businesses, the decision makers in this target list of organizations, you want to be writing down the things that they're saying, because then you are going to use that exact language back in your marketing and your promotion. And when you do, people are going to read it. They're going to be nodding along and they're going to be leaning in and saying, yes, that is exactly how I feel. It's like he's in my mind, this makes sense. It's going to really resonate.

So I'm going to just tell you about stuff that I learned and maybe even just fast track you and save you a little bit of time. So throughout this process, what I learned, which was interesting, is that you're always surprised. There's no discernible patterns. So you might have two seemingly identical organizations, a legal office on that corner with 10 staff turning over $3 million a year, the same business on the other corner, doing the same staff, same staff, and one could be like, oh, we do a team dinner $100 ahead once a year. The other one, they might have a full corporate entertainment program. They might do quarterly team building, [inaudible 00:27:15] bring people in, they might do a client engagement event, all kinds of stuff. And it looks like, wow, how can they be so different? And so that's one thing I learned. Never make assumptions, every business differs, which is probably not that helpful for you.

So then at the end of that conversation with that decision maker, and this is going to be a really short conversation, it's going to be five minutes, who knows, they might just go, blah and want to talk to you and it might be longer, but at the end, what you're going to say is, well, look, this has been fantastic. I really appreciate your time, and I'm going to get out there and I'm going to develop these things. What you had to tell me is the incredibly valuable.

So when I've fully developed these experiences, this new range of A, B, and C, how would it be to you if I could come back with three or four meaningful, memorable concepts and ideas that are light years ahead of what you've been doing to this point and they come in under budget, would you be interested in seeing those? And ultimately, the answer is going to be 100% yes. And what that does is it gives you permission. They're already almost sold. Okay, great. Well, look, I'll probably have them ready in a few weeks. I'll come back to you then, and then we'll take it the next step further. So that was a really effective strategy.

Now, if you're thinking, but this is such a time consuming, laborious experience, well, yeah, it takes a little bit of time to get some traction, but you are learning so much along the way. Because then when you turn on the flick the ad switch, you just know you are in the mind of your customer so greatly.

I'm just making sure, I'm assuming I'm coming through clear, Brandon, obviously I'm not seeing anything other than my screen running through these slides, and I always get a bit nervous when there's just silence. So just let me know that everything's coming through clearly before I push on?

Brandon Lake:

No, it's all clear. Since we're kind of pausing here for just a second, a couple of questions on this, because this research phase, I love the steps that you put together. One thing I'm wondering, you talk about using your past inquiries, which I think is great, looking at your own network, of course, which I view as your personal network, people you know. What about also utilizing, if you're already an established business and you have an email list, for example, of people who have already experienced your services, maybe as an individual or a family, most of those people either work inside a business, perhaps some of them own a business. What about using that as a potential resource as well?

Josh Oaks:

Exactly right. You've got a list of three or 4,000 leisure travelers or visitors. Every one of them has a job, and there's going to be a big chunk of them that work somewhere, and there's going to be a big chunk that have teams. So absolutely, yes, as long as you can really, really clearly articulate the difference in what they experienced and your new range of corporate experiences and how you've aligned it to the corporate needs. Yes, I'm just thinking about this as we go, 100%.

And what you are then going to be doing is you are probably going to be relying on those people, perhaps have a bit of a thought into that email campaign, but what you would need to do is make it super simple, super easy. Let's say, for example, your message would be for that, they could be company owners, but there could be some kind of incentive or some kind of special offer for people that have experienced what you do, that their company might get a special offer to do something that you've created that is specific to the corporate market, but you need to make it easy. So here's what you need to do, even create a little promo or something, all you need to do is cut and paste that and send it to your boss, you know what I mean? Because if someone says, hey, that's a great idea. I should pass it up to chain to Wendy. But if it's complicated, it's going to mean them sitting down and penning an email and nothing ever happens.

So if you can think of a way to make it super simple so that someone that has had an amazing, you've got a raving fan that could then open up a door for you, how could you make it so simple a three-year-old could do it. Does that make sense?

Brandon Lake:

Oh, totally. I think that's great. And then another question is, you mentioned having these conversations with people where you get them on the phone and you're asking these questions, which I think is wonderful because it allows you to dig a little bit deeper based on the responses, what would you think of the effectiveness of that versus sending out a survey, for example, asking those similar questions and kind of gather them in bulk?

Josh Oaks:

I never tried the strategy, because I think hitting people up cold with a survey, you need to think your way through that. The next one I'm going to show you is an outreach email strategy, which could serve the purpose of that. I guess surveys that work really well for me are things that have, what's your single biggest, your one thing, that number one, meaty desire or problem? So if you're giving someone a survey of can you answer these 10 questions, and it's impersonal, it's informal, it's not going to resonate, it's not going to go down well. Maybe even it could be your second step with the survey, like an initial outreach email. Then once someone opens the door and invites you in, that would be an opportunity.

So on that note, let me know if this answers the question. So an outreach email works really, really well with a promise of a follow up call. So that is a really effective strategy in that cold calling is tricky in the sense that the person who's doing the cold call, they're always a little bit uptight, little tense. They feel like they've got to rush through things, they've only got a few seconds to capture someone's attention. And if you're not a skilled salesperson, which let's be honest, you guys out there run experiences and tours and activities and you're wearing a bunch of different hats, a lot of you suck at sales. That's probably a weak area, and this wouldn't come naturally.

So an outreach email is great when you can actually give someone an opportunity to learn a little bit about you and just let them know that you're going to follow up with a call the next day or the day after that. And when they get that call, then there's going to be a level of comfort on both sides. If you don't get the call, it means they've had a quick look at what you've said in your email, and they're like, yeah, not for me, and they'll probably just fob you off. But if they're going to take the call, then there's going to be a level of comfort and things are going to go a bit better, generally, in my experience. Okay. Does that make sense?

Brandon Lake:

Yep.

Josh Oaks:

So I just want to just quickly, I thought I'd just show you if I could grab it, where we got that. Sorry, am I sharing my? No, that's not what I'm after either. What I did have is something ready to rock. Okay, that's it there. I might just make that a little larger. Can you see that, Brandon?

Brandon Lake:

Yeah, we can see it.

Josh Oaks:

Okay, great. This is actually to an outreach email script to a travel partner. So not to a corporate client, but the spirit is the same. So this is something that in my coaching program I share with people that was really, really effective in growing my agent business. But it starts really short and sharp, this is who I am, this is what I do. You might even pop a link in there. Thought it'd be a great time to reach out as right now. Now this of course, is going to differ, because we know right now it's a great time to reach out with the corporate market. We've already talked about that. There's no better time in history to be reaching out. And they're like, all right, yeah, I get it. I get it. Even if they didn't know it before, they certainly do now.

Then drop something in there that shows you've done a bit of homework about them. Might be speaking to a couple of people and they said, you are amazingly helpful, or your business is clearly going amazingly. You guys are clearly doing something right over there. Something nice that shows you've done a bit of homework. We've been around for, had a lot of success. Keep it short, a lot of success doing this thing or offering this thing or entertaining or whatever it is that you do with a lot of success. And most importantly, but we are different in the sense that... And this is the key, a couple of reasons why you're different to everyone else. And then would you be keen to learn some more? So you're not hitting them up with this A4 page of stuff, it's just what you want in that. Now this is just one type of email strategy, and it worked really effectively for me.

And what you want, oops, I'll just get that back to where I was there. What you want is to get to first base, and first base is an acknowledgement and a yeah, sure, I'd love to hear more. So that's your first step with your outreach. Then you've been given an opportunity to build a relationship. So the next step would be a little bit more of detailed information and then even just a suggestion that you just jump on a quick five minute call, had a couple of questions about your specific needs. So things like that. Everyone will work differently as far as your access to people. Some will be super busy, send me an email. Some will be like, yeah, I've got five or 10 minutes. Or others who are actually dedicated event people, they would love to learn more about a really amazing product or experience that they could use. So that's a couple of different strategies.

What I would say is this, be prepared to be persistent in your follow up. So let's see, if we use travel agents and the corporate market, they're wildly different. So if you are wanting to grow your business through travel agents, which I had a lot of success doing that, then you're going to find it's a lot easier. People get back to you. The travel industry has a thirst for something new. They want to know about new products and experiences and ideas. They want to know about things that are going to set them apart from others. So you've got a much more receptive ear from a travel agent, from a product manager or from a reservations agent in a travel company.

Corporate market, I learned to be very, very different. And ultimately 80% of these types of events, team building days and things like that, are organized by people who just don't want to do it. It's like a pain in the, they've got this actual job over there that they're trying to do. The boss has asked them to do this other thing, and they're like, oh, it's just so painful. This is just an extra job. So what they want is for this job to be taken off their shoulders, but they don't need you until they need you. So you're far more likely to be fobbed off for a while by a executive assistant or a sales and marketing manager or a business owner because at that immediate time, they don't need you. So you need to be persistent in your follow up. And sometimes I might take five, six, seven follow up finally for someone to say, sure, sure, sure, I got it. Okay, yes, now you've got my attention. I've had a look, it looks great. I do have 10 minutes for a quick call. Or you've got me thinking, and I actually think we do need to organize something for the end of financial year. I'd love to hear what you've got in mind.

So with your follow up, the way that it works best for me, and it could be a combination of phone and email. I'll try with another call. Hey, didn't get you, didn't have a lot of luck, but always a couple of things. One is very apologetic. Look, I'm really sorry, clearly you've got a lot on your plate at the moment, but look, I thought I'd just try you again, see if we can shore up that chat that we had planned or something like that. So mindful that you're really busy, apologetic, I'd probably give you a bum steer, not like I'm really sorry, but I'm mindful that you're very, very busy. It seems like that's the case. So look, I'd still love that quick chat. So if you get too annoying in like, hey, I've tried you four times, then people are just going to get a bit like, go away. Hope that makes sense.

So to save you a little bit of time with your research, these are the things over the journey that I learned are the challenges and the frustrations and the desires of decision makers. So first of all, they get really stressed out that it's hard to please everyone. So an event planner, someone who's organizing, a decision maker, they're always stressed out. There's so many people in the office, people complain. Some people are really easy to please, some are hard to please. Some have got a terrible fitness level, some have got a really great fitness level. I get stressed out about it, and that's probably the hardest thing, something that appeals to everyone. So if you can do something that has contingencies, ie that you've recognized that, you are mindful of it. And even in when you are in that first point of contact, look, in my experience in the corporate market, I understand that one of the biggest stresses that people have is that it's hard to please everyone. So here's what we do to combat that.

The next thing, as I mentioned, time to organize, big responsibility, that often quite frankly they don't want. So if you can reassure them that you've got their back, you've got it covered, it's in safe hands. You just get on with your job, let me take control. I'll report back to you every couple of days just to let you know things are in place. They stress over supply quality, ie you. So you need to reassure them you can deliver to promise, that you understand the needs of the corporate market, you understand how it differs to other types of customers, that will alleviate their stress and make them more willing to work with you.

In most events or in many events, one thing that you need to be aware of is that they often want an outcome. They've got budget, they have someone organize an event, but the boss is like, well, how's this going to actually improve our organizations? [inaudible 00:42:25] learn about this, there's a lot of that. Other times it's just a reward or a recognition. I just want them to have fun. But often they want to know what the outcome's going to be, and they often want a bit of a challenge or a team building element to their events.

They also want, from a staff perspective, they want staff to really feel like they appreciate them. They've actually put some thought and some effort into this event or this experience. They want really good attendance, so they worry that people might not want to come or they might just make an excuse to be too busy or stay in the office or whether it's out of hours. So need to really encourage people to come along to the event. They want great ideas, really quality events that don't blow the budget. And flexibility is really, really important. They're very, very often, very time poor. You might do this thing that's five hours, they're like, look, great, I want it, but we can't start till 11 and we've got to finish at 1:30 because we've got a board meeting. So is it malleable? Can you fit it into that timeframe?

So those are the real key things. And if you're talking budgets, this is very loose, but the average event that I did, now, remember I started running private day tours, average event was around 20 people. Average budget was around 4,000 to 5,000. So my experience or my recommendation is you want to start aligning yourself or finding or ideal customers that have a budget of around $200 to $250. Obviously we had a lot that were considerably higher than that, but people will spend that kind of money. So imagine what that could do for your tour business, if you're running $79 small group walking tours, what it could mean to your business to be executing seamless, $4,000 to $5,000 events. It's going to change things dramatically. And that's entirely possible, those budgets do exist and they're very, very common.

Brandon Lake:

A question for you that came in from here, I think is a good question. Others may have the same question here. So she's saying this would be a new thing for her, doing events like this. So let's say she's planning to do a unique sub kayak experience including food, but right now, because she's smaller, perhaps she's limited to the number of people she can host. So you said the average size group might be 20. What about those who are in the boat where they don't have enough resources to maybe host that many people? Did you find where [inaudible 00:45:23] corporate market [inaudible 00:45:25]?

Josh Oaks:

Great question. Just make sure, someone's buzzing me over here. I just didn't know if it was someone trying to get into the webinar. Great question. So let's say you run a kayak experience and you've got a maximum of 10 people, and you are thinking, oh, I can't [inaudible 00:45:46]. So I'm going to say, we do this thing, and they're going to say, can you do our team? So what you need to do is tell them how you can help them.

So best way to describe it? Okay, so you've created a reward and recognition experience that works perfectly for the top 10 performers in your company or for the top five performers in their partner. It works beautifully, every thought and consideration has been covered off, and this is exactly what your company needs to do. You need to reward your top five or your top 10 company performers, and this is an experience that has been specifically created for that need. So they don't know that they want that, they're like, hey, that sounds great. That's a really good idea. Okay, so we do it for five? Yep, you do it for five, or for 10.

So you tell them what you've created, why you've created specifically for them and how they can use it.

Brandon Lake:

Yeah, no, that makes total sense. And she threw out another question here that was, perhaps the group size is getting a little bit bigger, should she collaborate with another operator that has something she doesn't have?

Josh Oaks:

Absolutely. Yeah, we used to do things like that all the time, like set up events. I'll show you a couple in a minute, but we might have a dragon boat regatta going there on the river. And on the riverside, they were doing a picnic with lawn games and just sort of through. Yeah, so you can pitch a whole bunch of, like bringing in suppliers is great. If you've got suppliers that have offered great experiences that you've got a good relationship with, that you align well with, 100%. It is just opening up opportunities. So absolutely. Obviously, there's a whole bunch of considerations, quality control, but fundamentally the answer is yes, I would be doing that.

Brandon Lake:

Okay, great. And then just one last question on timing also. You're starting out, you don't obviously have any referrals yet, and if businesses are asking for those, I mean, how do you handle that?

Josh Oaks:

Yeah, well, I mean, look, you've all got hundreds of, thousands of raving fans that have come through your experiences. So ultimately, you've got a whole bunch of people that have experienced your core products that are willing to rave about it, and to get the wheels turning, that's absolutely fine. So you could just use reviews and testimonials from existing customers that aren't necessarily corporate customers. You don't have to telegraph that, but there's nothing wrong with having a bunch of testimonials from Joe Smith. Does he work for a company? Well, is he happy for you to have his company? You might even ask him, look, I've got this great testimonial, are you okay for me to present it to a client with your business name as well? He's like, yeah, of course you can. That's fine. You could also get a bunch of friends or people that do work in corporations to just come and run off a mill and get them on to sample an element of what you do, and then to give you some reviews and testimonials.

There's a whole bunch of ways you could go about it, but that's not an obstacle at all. The fact that you've just got people that have had a great experience doing what you do, a slightly different sort of style of experience to what you are going to be serving up to the corporate market, to get you going, I think it's fine.

Brandon Lake:

Yeah, those are great thoughts.

Josh Oaks:

Okay? Cool. And I mentioned this earlier, so when you're ready to throw some budget towards your sales and marketing, well imagine if you just launched your corporate business and just started running ads, and you launch your corporate business and six months later after all of this, then you started running ads. I don't even need to articulate to you how effective they would be. Using the exact language, solving the exact problem, satiating the exact desires, and that just goes straight into your marketing and sales initiatives. You use it in your marketing collateral, you use it to run ads, you use it for promos and things, for your email marketing as well.

So then your copy is the last thing. I'll just show you a couple of examples just to illustrate. But ultimately what I just showed you back here, okay, so let's say you're writing copy for your leisure visitors, your international visitors or your local weekenders that are just taking your experience as just like, well, leisure visitors, and then you're writing copy for your corporate clients. So for me, I was running Melbourne Private Tours. So my copy for leisure visitors was stuff that was focusing on the landmarks, the destination, just getting people feeling like they're actually living and breathing those cool climate wines and that beautiful majestic sunsets and all that sort of stuff. They're like, oh, wow, that sounds amazing. But my copy for the corporate market for a seemingly similar experience was very different. It was always about those things, taking the stress off your shoulders, taking that responsibility, making sure you can please everyone, having contingencies for those people so everyone's getting something that they want. Being flexible on time, getting people from A to B, end to end solutions. So that was the stuff that we're really going to find important. So that's how your copy's going to differ.

And I'll just grab a couple of things here. So this, for example, was my corporate menu, let's call it my corporate menu, inspiration for your next corporate event. And this over here were my tour descriptions for my leisure, my high-end inbound international visitors. So as I mentioned, this copy is all about the stuff I was talking about, getting people immersed, they can actually feel it and live it and breathe it and see it. The drinks being poured and the sun going down, the lights coming on, all that sort of stuff. But over here it was more practical, it was about solving problems and understanding those needs. And even the layout, I would say a lot of the actual experiences and products and suppliers I used were the same stuff, but it was just the way that I presented it to them and the copy I used.

So a couple of examples might be, I'm just going to run through, so our Yarra Valley Wine Blending Challenge was not dissimilar to many elements of our...

where am I? Hopefully I can find it. Okay. So yeah, we did a Yarra Valley ballooning and barrel tasting tour, which had an element of wine blending later in the day. So that was a dramatically different sounding experience, but a lot of it, in essence, the suppliers, the experience included, were very, very similar. I'll try and give you another example, I'm hoping this is becoming clear. I'm happy to share these two documents with you as well in the follow up, Brandon. Okay, so this like a Yarra Valley picnic and garden party with lawn games and team challenges and things like that, again, was very similar in many ways to the Yarra Valley experience that we offered to our international visitors.

Okay, got real deep on copy, but that I guess is probably the crux of it. The cornerstone of that is that you need to be writing very, very different copy based on the needs and desires of that particular customer and the problems they want solving, the desires they want satiating. And those two different sets of needs and desires are very, very different from the people that you serve right now to the corporate customers that you will be serving. And I learned that in the way that, when I told you right back at the start, the way that I launched MPT Corporate Events is that I started to get a lot of inquiry from executive assistants saying, hey, that sounds great. That thing you're doing, like your morning to Peninsula chef led tour, your Yarra Valley ballooning and barrel tasting, it seems like it'd be a really great fit for my team.

So we would be saying, oh yeah, great. Well, look, there's some information. That's our tour description, there are the prices, [inaudible 00:55:26] version was terrible, absolutely terrible, because I was trying to sell something to them that I had created and marketed to a very, very different type of customer. It wasn't hitting the mark. I think that it would get passed up the chain, and they're like, yeah, we're sort of looking for something a bit different. We want some sort of team building element, a bit of an outcome. Looks too long, it looks like they've got too much in the itinerary, so it wasn't resonating. So once you understand the needs and you can write your copy to solve those problems, then you'll have a lot more success.

So yeah, just a couple of quick lessons learned before we finish up. One, I touched on this before, you just never know. Every company's different, never make assumptions. You can make general, you can see a lot of patterns that emerge, but there could be... I'm just trying to see if I actually covered that one. Yeah, so you could have an opportunity to serve one customer in 10 or 15 different ways every year. You can get a client that could be a large financial institution and they do a big company Christmas party where they invite all the partners and there's 300 people there. Or they might have small departments, little teams, and those teams might do smaller quarterly, food tours, just like little team bonding experiences. Then you might have a reward program for their company top performers, and then they might do client engagement events, and they've got a $30,000 annual budget to entertain clients. And you could get all these

opportunities if you can pitch it to them in the right way. But just because one company is doing those things, never assume that everyone else is following suit.

What you can do is when you find companies that aren't, you can literally take a case study, stuff you're doing elsewhere, and say, well, look, these guys are doing this stuff with us and they're having outrageous results. It's doing this for their people, it's improving their business in this way. And frankly, if you are not, then don't take this the wrong way, but you really should be, because you're probably getting left behind. There's so much more I could say about it.

And I mentioned this about the follow-up, just be mindful, don't get annoyed. Don't feel like, oh, what am I doing wrong? Why won't they take my calls? Sometimes you're just not a priority until they really need you. So you've just got to be really consistent and respectful and empathetic in your follow-up. Conversion can be lower, so what I'll learn is you often get a lot of corporate decision makers that are looking for a whole bunch of different ideas. Rather than just people looking for tours, they're looking for one tour, or they might be looking at a couple of different, they might be presenting 10 or 15 options to their boss. So ask a good initial set of questions so you can qualify your leads. If you're just on a fishing mission, to just collate a whole bunch of ideas to present to your boss that he may look at in six months and may choose one of the 20 that you've presented to him, look, it's probably not for us. So be specific, what's this particular event for? [inaudible 00:58:40] Have you got an indicative budget? Is the date confirmed? Things like that, so you can know how much time to invest in it.

Get full payment upfront, no reason not to. They've all got the budget, it's sitting there ready to be used. And I would insist if you're running corporate events, just get your money up front. Get it all up front, keep it as long as possible is the motto.

And just getting the first one over the line is always going to be the hardest one. Obviously, you haven't got those reviews or you haven't got that in depth ability to talk about the minute details, because you've just been something. So it's going to be tricky to get over the line, but once you do, you're away. You use that, you take someone along with you, you to get some great video content. You record video testimonials with people on the day, oh, Richard, how much fun was that? Oh, Josh, that was amazing. What did you like best about the day? Oh, that time when we did that thing, and the sun came out at the right time and that sparkling wine, which is perfect. You're like, well, look, I think you just said it all. Thanks, I really enjoyed having you. And boom, there's a testimony. You use that in your marketing, it's going to be crazy, crazy effective. So be creative in the way that you are capturing these moments, video image, and then you've got a product that you can use to market and promote to others.

So I think that about covers it. I could go deeper and deeper and spend hours talking about it. But yeah, I think we'll leave it there and we'll kick over to some questions, Brandon, if that's cool with you?

Brandon Lake:

Yeah, no, that's great Josh, thank you so much. This is fantastic. I love the phases of research, figuring out really how to nail that messaging, how to put that together, some of the examples you shared. Really, really wonderful.

One question is, at the beginning of the presentation you showed a little snapshot of your website. Did you create a separate website for-

Josh Oaks:

Separate website, yep.

Brandon Lake:

Okay. And that's where you housed all your messaging and everything and some of those other slide decks that you showed me, those are really helpful as well.

Josh Oaks:

Exactly.

Brandon Lake:

That's good, okay. So a separate website can be really helpful.

Josh Oaks:

Exactly. I had no template to follow here, I just sort of figured it out on the fly. Some things worked really well, but that's the way we went. But we did link it, I'll just make sure, I don't know if they're still doing that now, bear with me for one second. Bring up the existing website. Hold on one second.

Brandon Lake:

Let me throw out another question. This is from Christie, this is a great one as well. I thought of this as well, Christie, as you were talking about it Josh, what about LinkedIn? That's a great business to business type platform. What about that either for advertising or outreach?

Josh Oaks:

Definitely, yeah. We never used it for advertising, but definitely for outreach and definitely for identifying targets. So if you have a target organization, call it Commonwealth Bank, and you're looking for product managers or you're looking for specific people in those positions, you're not getting obviously email contacts, but you're getting a name and you're getting a position. And then you can use that, you can find that person. So we used that with real success as well. Didn't advertise with them. Outreach, we didn't do a lot actually on the LinkedIn platform. What we did was just help us to create a database of target organizations and industries. But that was me seven years ago, I'm not saying that there's another way. I'm not saying that it couldn't be an incredibly effective way and then that we were doing it in the right way and that there's better ways to use LinkedIn, but that's what worked really well for us.

So just to show you really quickly, we had, oops, where am I? Where did I just put that? Oh yeah, there we go. So that was Melbourne Private Tours. Yeah, in the old days it linked through to the corporate site from there.

Brandon Lake:

I saw your other one up there for a second, the Melbourne Corporate Events, right there.

Josh Oaks:

Yeah, exactly. Well, it was the MPT Corporate Events. I think they just sort of rebranded it slightly Melbourne Corporate Events when they bought the business back in 2017. But for all intents and purposes, it's exactly as it was. Same experiences, a couple of new ones I can see there. So anyway, yeah, two different websites.

Brandon Lake:

Yeah, well, and I like that because all of your imagery, the activities, it's just sort of hard to present, to use your main website that's maybe featuring stuff that appeals to individuals and families and so forth, to use that for the corporate market. So that makes a lot of sense.

Josh Oaks:

Yeah.

Brandon Lake:

Okay. And then Josh, you mentioned your services that you provide. If somebody is kind of interested in some of these templates and different things like that, some of your coaching, maybe just give us a quick synopsis of what that is, if they wanted to learn more about that.

Josh Oaks:

Yeah, okay. Kind of put me on the spot there, I wasn't doing a promo tonight. This is just purely wanted to come along and talk about something I love. So the best way to describe it, look what I do, I run from time to time what I call my tour business breakthrough sessions. They're free sessions, they run about 30 minutes and I offer them to my community. I jump on a call with you and we dive into your business. We zero in, we figure out what's not working for you, why it's not working, what your ambitions are, how are you going to get there, and create a really clear step-by-step action plan as to how you are going to realize your vision. I like to work to a 12 to 24 month vision. So what you need to do [inaudible 01:05:25] marketing perspective, what you need to do with your systems, efficiencies and processes, your recruitment, everything you're going to need to do to achieve that goal that you've got for the next 12 to 24 months.

So that call, I'm very confident in saying is the best 45 minutes that you've possibly ever spent on your business. So that's what I do for my community. At the end of that call, I'll tell you what it looks like to work with me on a deeper, more intimate, ongoing level. If you feel like the fits right and you want to explore that, great. If you don't, you're going to have 45 minutes of goal that you're going to be able to take away and implement. So that's the best way.

I've run a coaching program, I've got about 100, I can see some on the call here that in the program. I've got probably about 100, including Brandon here, tour and activity and experienced business owners from all over the globe. And it's an amazing program, it's allowed me to work with people on a deeper, more intimate level. And collectively over the last 12 months, we're getting results better than I could ever have dreamed of. So it's just been a joy and a blessing to be working with such an amazing group of people.

So that's that. If you want to grab one of my free sessions, there's no obligation. It'll fast track you years, I'm very confident in saying. At the end of that, I'll tell you what it looks like to work with you on a deeper level. If it's right for you, great. If it's not, no sweat. [inaudible 01:06:55].

Brandon Lake:

I think that's great. And we'll send some things out after this to the audience so you can have that link to sign up for one of those if you're curious, but they are available [inaudible 01:07:08].

Josh Oaks:

What I'll just do now, I'll also just drop it in the chat, that link.

Brandon Lake:

Sure. And then before we close, I know we've got a lot of our Resmark clients on here, I'll just show you just a couple of quick resources in the system that you may find helpful for some of the things that Josh has talked about, and then we'll just wrap this up.

So those of you that are using this booking platform, maybe say, okay, if I'm curious about putting together this corporate focus, what does that mean for me from a system perspective? Well, you've got a couple of different options, we've done this, I think there's still a great opportunity for us at Moab Adventure Center to do more of it. But where we've seen some success with this, I'll just show you a couple of different things. One is your product mix. So you may want to consider, and Josh, I think I saw this on your site, some of those products you developed specifically for the corporate groups. Some of them may have been your standard products, but then some of them may have some tweaks to them and they're actually a slightly different experience. So one of those things is to come in and think about the experiences that you're offering. What is the pricing for that corporate market? Maybe you don't need child pricing and so forth. Maybe you do that a little bit differently around those. And then how do you think about your messaging and so forth when you put all of that together for them?

So coming up with the right product mix I think is key. And then when you get into actually creating bookings for them or reservations for whatever experience that you might provide, I'll just pull up one of mine here, you can think about these a couple of different ways. One, we found with some, there may be a situation where, this is just a sample reservation where we did some filming on stuff, but I could come in here and potentially manipulate, customize the price as I'm working through that with them. Or I can provide a discount, have my standard discount set up for perhaps groups or different things like that. I can also automate some of that in the system. So if you're doing that, you can set up an automated discount. We do a lot of that with groups that are just booking our primary experience, because a lot of what we sell, like canyoneering is a wonderful team building experience. We don't have to do a whole lot with that experience to make it an experience that's appropriate for the corporate market, but we may have a book 10 or more get X incentive for them to come and do that as a group. So those are easy things to build there.

The last one is what we talked a little bit about here with resellers and suppliers. We've got several resellers connected that are booking these things. I mean they're all businesses, but some of them may have that focus where they're coming again and again and again, and maybe we've created an agreement with them where we're providing them a certain net rate or there's some financial incentive there for them. I think in a large part, there's incentive enough. You don't necessarily have to get into any kind of other financial incentive, because just sending their employees there, the bonding, the team building, the motivation, the reward, all of that is encompassed in these experiences. But you can get into some of that as well where you can build these off of a net rate or commission or so forth. And then of course, working with other suppliers, as Amelda mentioned, that could be another good idea too, to kind of build out that product mix, and you can set those up in the system as well.

So hopefully that gives you some idea of how you might work with that in the system. If you do decide that you are thinking about this seriously and you want to consider another website, certainly let us know. We have some incredibly affordable website packages as well. We can help you get underway with something that's super, super easy to edit and put together. And you can build out a new website very quickly, very easily, and that's a great resource for you as well.

So hopefully that gives those of you that are using that solution some additional insights. Certainly if you have any questions beyond that, let us know. I see a question about, will the deck be shared? I think we'll put together all the resources we can, Josh, from the deck, some of the templates that you have, different things like that, some of the resources [inaudible 01:11:50]-

Josh Oaks:

Yeah, I'm happy to share the deck.

Brandon Lake:

... and just put all of that in your hands so you guys can take this and really be off and running with really developing this new channel, which I think presents, like you said, a phenomenal, maybe historic opportunity that has never existed to the extent that it does today, and really take this [inaudible 01:12:08] and grow your business because of it.

Josh Oaks:

Yeah, exactly. So what I'll do as well, Brandon, if anyone's got some specific questions, I'll just chuck my email address in the chat as well. I'm happy for people just to reach. So I've popped a link for one of my breakthrough calls in there, and that's pretty self-explanatory. There's my email address, if anyone's got any specific questions, follow up questions, I'm more than happy for you to email me directly as well.

Brandon Lake:

Absolutely. I put mine in there as well, so if you have questions around Resmark website, anything like that, happy to help on that end as well. So Josh, thank you so much for joining us today. Really appreciate.

Josh Oaks:

I really enjoyed it.

Brandon Lake:

I think it's a great opportunity for all of us to really take a closer look at this. So thank you very much, and thanks to all of you for joining us today. We'll catch you next time.

Josh Oaks:

Thanks guys. Bye-bye.

The Best Tips for Tour Operators During Peak Season

chad@westernriver.com (Chad Allen) — Tue, 10 May 2022 18:07:28 GMT

When people are gearing up for their ultimate getaway, a popular vacation excursion is to embark on a tour. That's why, as a tour operator, it's important to deliver the best experience possible to any group that books with you. During peak season, setting up and completing tours may seem overwhelming. That massive influx in bookings requires efficiency from the moment that someone books a reservation for their family until the tour and payment are complete. Here are some tips to keep in mind as you get ready for the busiest times of the year.

Simplify the booking process.

Establishing a proper reservation system can save a lot of time for activity operators. The best tour operator software through a user-friendly website makes things easier for organizers and customers alike. Our company seeks to offer activity businesses a platform for easy reservation management, using booking widgets that incorporate pre-existing websites with ease. Our unique software is able to provide direct booking links for organizers to then share with members of their group to make sure it's easy for parties to establish an itinerary, and take care of payment online.

With easier control of online content, a tour provider can use more resources to create the best time possible for their customers. This software is designed to take the guesswork out of bookings, making trip planning easier for the consumer and for the business as well. These tour operating platforms allow tourists to explore a variety of options and make sure there's a clear understanding of the variable pricing.

Get the paperwork out of the way.

As a tour operator, the safety and well-being of your customers are incredibly important, as is your bottom line. The last thing you want is to have an injury occur during an adventure, and for your business to be left liable for an accident. Our tour booking solutions allow a customer to sign any safety waivers when they reserve direct bookings, even during the busiest time of year. These platforms include security solutions that protect the identity and signatures of those signing these documents, providing a tour company with legal protection in the event of an accident.

For better business operations, tour operators should turn to a software solution that makes sure these waivers are completed by the time tourists check in, regardless of single-day tours or more expansive options. With digital waivers, you're also able to have all important paperwork securely stored in an online management platform. This spares the time of having to comb through physical pieces of paper, or potentially losing important documents.

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Make sure to promote your tours.

Tour operators shouldn't have to worry so much about certain business tasks when it's time to focus on providing customers with an incredible experience. You can approach this by hiring someone to market your business online and on social media. Word of mouth is also great for tour managers and can be as easy as telling customers to inform their family and friends about the tours that you offer.

Moreover, the right tour operator software takes care of office processes like an easily accessible payment platform and distribution channels that allow businesses to streamline operations for better customer support—ultimately bringing in new customers. With built-in tools, our software solutions can help a tour operator increase sales by boosting upsell messages after each new booking to keep the revenue rolling in during peak season. This allows operators to get more reservations through other tour operators and resellers in the area. This might be through customized e-mails to potential customers about bookings, based on the timing of their vacation. This automation technology has become popular in the travel industry to intertwine the purchase of airline tickets with hotel bookings and other attractions in the area that may be of interest to the customer.

Establish easy access points.

Our tour operator software allows customers to check in for their reservation with just the click of a button. With the right platforms in place, customers are able to log in by smartphone or tablet, reducing the time it takes to make sure that all parties for the tour are on scene. This also helps to manage last-minute cancellations during a busy day, while also notifying guests of any missing waivers that haven't been signed or any payment that hasn't been confirmed through this booking system.

This same system allows tour operators to monitor their database for any custom events coming up, making sure that those accommodations are met. With a user-friendly dashboard, check-in is easier than ever, and monitoring these procedures is just as simplified. This translates to excellent customer service for tourists to truly enjoy their trip. The proper management tools also help companies establish easier access points for customers, showing pickup locations and specific times for tour departure. The booking system will be able to display those options for users, even making clear pickup and return times based on settings.

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Capture those rave reviews.

Tour operators know that their main driver is customer relationships , making sure that client preferences and specific needs are met with each booking. The right online booking software for tour operators allows for a quick analysis of how customers felt about the services provided from the moment of the reservation to the end of the tour. Companies can view tour bookings by the user, getting a daily summary of tour payments, while also looking for refund requests or cancellations made through your current website. It's also important to encourage customers to leave reviews on your website or on other travel websites describing the experience.

Tour providers can use 5-star reviews to bring a personal touch to their platform. This sets expectations before arrival so customers know they're signing up with the right tour provider for a good time. Tour operators can stand out in a crowded marketplace, especially in regions that are tourism-driven during certain times of the year. Plain and simple, being a great tour operator starts from booking a prospective customer and carrying out the process through to a satisfactory review. The right software solutions make this process that much easier.

How Tour Bookings Software Saves Time with Automation

Tue, 03 May 2022 17:43:46 GMT

When traveling to a destination for a well-deserved getaway, tourists are looking for a unique element to their trip. That's why many take the time to book a tour for their vacation—locking in a reservation well in advance for their trek. However, reservations can go haywire if the protocols for booking aren't up to snuff. That's where tour booking software is changing the game for travelers looking for a unique experience while also streamlining the process for tour operators. Our all-in-one booking system can manage automated emails, online booking integration, digital waivers, and more for your tour company.

Booking software accepts tour reservations 24/7.

Rather than having a limited time to book a tour with your company, tourists can reserve a day of kayaking or rock climbing at any time during the day or week. For example, if your company's business hours are 9-5 and you have tourists from another time zone looking to book a tour, our software can facilitate that reservation so it's ready for your team of tour guides.

The last thing travelers need before a vacation is a hassle with their reservations such as not being able to book during open business hours. A proper online tour booking system allows travel parties to save those reservations by receiving a confirmation code to remind them of their activity. Direct bookings are often the best way to secure those reservations with a tour company, so working with a direct reservation management system makes locking down a date with a tour business that much easier for holiday-makers. Tourists simply choose a date and then enter their personal and credit card information. Activity businesses benefit from an online booking system because it makes customers feel at ease but also provides you with peace of mind that your bookings are automated and saved in the reservation system.

Our reservation software solutions adapt easily to existing websites, providing benefits to touring businesses on their backend while affording easy access to travelers. Tour operator software also includes automated notifications featuring confirmation codes, and messages are distributed to make sure that a traveling party is aware of any sudden cancellations or waivers that need to be signed prior to the start of the tour.

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The software can collect payments on your behalf.

For touring companies, our software solutions afford more time to make the most of a tour. By having a software solution that handles everything in the back end, tour providers can easily control online content, saving time with seamless integration. With an easy online booking process, companies don't require staff to process scheduling and payments. Our system—adapted to your unique situation—takes care of online payments and makes check-in that much easier.

Eliminating that hassle puts greater focus on the experience for customers. Plus, with the right security in place, new customers and returning visitors don't have to worry about personal information getting leaked. With security remaining paramount, the booking process is kept safe, and monitored through proper protocols. This makes sure that any online waivers, credit card information, or other sensitive data isn't seeping out and putting customers at risk.

With automated processes, the right tour booking software can even send off electronic waivers to tourists to make sure that any necessary forms are filled out before a tour begins. This saves tremendous time for companies, not having to rely on all members of a tour group to get their documents done quickly. In addition, an e-signature waiver platform safely stores those documents, avoiding the potential for missing or lost documentation. By having digital waivers, a tour operator business can more easily refer to documents rather than worrying about lost papers in the event of an incident.

Start collecting payments from customers

The check-in process is simplified with reservation software.

There's nothing worse than making customers wait when they've made their reservations . That's where our tour booking software is helping customers avoid being stuck in limbo. With our technology, tour providers can let customers check in ahead of their scheduled time, directing them where to wait and get ready for a one-of-a-kind journey.

Through the check-in process, tour companies can also alert customers to any sudden changes. For example, day trips out on a tour boat could be canceled for part of the week because of rough weather. Our booking software is suited to a company's operational needs and can alert those with reservations about such issues arising.

The same system can send out notifications to customers to get the information needed for secure payments, or to fill out any necessary e-waivers to be cleared for activities. This check-in system allows for easy tracking, making sure that customers are able to take care of any paperwork and enjoy their tour. It also just removes one less hurdle in the day-to-day operations.

Simplify your checking process with Resmark

Spend less time on admin tasks and more time providing excellent customer service.

Having to spend too many hours putting together a website and a tour management system can be frustrating, so tour providers are turning to our booking software solutions to eliminate the backend hassle. With the right platforms in place, there's more time to focus on customer relationships, bettering the bottom line. A well-run customer database monitors custom events and inventory management, all through automated processes that make sure everything from booking to financial transactions are considered.

By providing excellent customer service, businesses assure themselves of better customer reviews . Positive reviews can be published on your website to promote how popular your tour services are. In some scenarios, touring companies may pair up with other outlets to advertise tour packages, such as local hotels or airlines.

As a tour provider, marketing and keeping a high profile is crucial in order to stand out in the marketplace, especially in a popular tourist destination. The right software solution emphasizes the importance of local attractions, and how your touring company presents itself in the travel industry. With our booking platform, your attention to customer detail and reliability can take your touring company over the top, and garner some tremendous financial benefits.

Find out how Resmark can help you spend more time doing what yo love!

9 Steps to Create a Customer Journey Map that Converts

chad@westernriver.com (Chad Allen) — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 21:44:24 GMT

What if there was a way to simplify your marketing and create a repeatable “operating system” that you could use right now to find more customers than ever before?

In this webinar, Brandon Lake, CEO of Resmark and WaiverSign personally shows you what he has done in his own businesses (Western River Expeditions and Moab Adventure Center) to map a predictable, repeatable customer journey that has helped grow sales to millions of dollars.

The Best Features to Look for in Tour Booking Software

chad@westernriver.com (Chad Allen) — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 17:25:12 GMT

So, you manage a tour operator business, and you're looking to move your activity company online. In today's travel industry, you need to make your company available online to make the most of your business. So, how do you do that? The answer is tour operator software. This online system is designed to help tour operator businesses increase their reservations, bring in more revenue, and ensure that clients have the best customer experience possible.

When looking into tour operator software , you'll need to know what to look for to get the best return on investment (ROI) for your business. Today, that's exactly what we'll cover. In this article, we'll explore the top features to look for in a tour operator software so your company can succeed.

What is tour operator software?

Tour operator booking software is a type of software meant for reservation management at your activity business. This software allows travel and activity businesses to accept reservations online and manage mobile bookings more efficiently. In addition, these online booking systems provide features like a self-service online booking portal so potential customers can book and pay for services from start to finish without the need for a representative or travel agent's help. Instead, they begin and finish the entire process on your travel website, social media page, or even mobile app.

Customers visit the site, choose the tour they want to book, and fill out the booking form. Afterward, they'll pay through a payment gateway in the software that transfers the booking fee directly to your account. The booking process, including the payment process, only takes a few minutes to complete and shortens further for returning customers. In addition, online booking software updates tour availability and schedule changes in real time, so your customers can be sure that the activity they want to book is available when they want to book it. Furthermore, though online booking software is primarily used in tour operator businesses, it's beneficial for many other companies in the travel industry as well as property rentals, seminars, transportation services, training classes, and more.

Resource management is a must for tour operator software.

Not to imply that your online booking software will manage your entire company's resources for you, but resource management is a critical feature of online booking software to have for your company. If you haven't integrated this software solution because your tours involve complex scenarios where the use of equipment and other resources affects the availability of specific tours, you're missing out.

Top-quality tour operator software, such as ours at Resmark , will include resource management meant to handle complex situations as we've described. Your software will automatically manage the availability of your tours based on the availability of said resources to ensure that if someone books a tour with your company, they'll have the equipment they need to participate without the need to constantly manually update the system when you rent out equipment for a tour. As a result, you can save a ton of time with this automation and maximize your bookings as a tour operator. Get a a free Trial of Resmark

Message and email marketing automation is an excellent feature to include.

Personalized emails, messages, and reminders are vital for your marketing campaign . However, sending out these messages manually is a tedious task that lacks the personal touch of an automated system that analyzes each customer's activity. When shopping for the best tour operator software, you'll want an online booking system that keeps track of your customer data so you can implement messaging automation that sends your clients the best message for their needs at the perfect time. This personal touch will not only help customer retention but also lead to more top-rated reviews. In addition, these built-in marketing tools can help bring in more revenue with automated messages offering personalized lead nurturing, custom upselling, and easy links for customers to invite friends, improving your budget and the customer experience.

A quality tour operator software will modernize your website or seamlessly or allow you to integrate it into your current website.

If your travel website looks a bit dated, then quality tour booking software can help with that. You'll be able to reach more potential customers with an attractive, custom website. In addition, you'll have the opportunity to update your tours and activities as the software automatically publishes any changes on your website in real time. If you're happy with your current website, then that's no problem either, as any quality tour operator software will also easily integrate into your existing website for a seamless transition. Learn how easy Resmark is to integrate

Accurate and reliable analytics should be an essential feature of your tour operator software.

One of the most crucial features of any tour operator software is providing accurate business and customer data insights. Your software should give daily tour volume and other essential business reports to help you keep your tours current and your customers happy. Additionally, you'll get a daily summary of payments, refunds, and overdue deposits. These business insights are crucial to operating efficiently without spending countless hours compiling reports yourself. Furthermore, the software should provide critical customer data analytics to show what tours are performing well. You should be able to see this not only in the software itself, but also have a full view into e-commerce analytics through a tool like Google Analytics. In the modern business world, accurate, timely insights and analytics are essential to any business's success.

Built-in pickup management is another top feature for your tour operator software.

As a tour operator, you know that there's much more to prepping a tour than simply having a client book it and show up. Therefore, another top feature your tour operator software should include is configuring pre-set hotel or airport pickups and times for your tours and guests. With a top-quality online booking system, it'll have a built-in pickup management system. This way, you can set up pickup locations and specify the time before tour departure and return times. As a result, you'll be able to ensure all tours go according to schedule, and your customers will never be left wondering when and where they're supposed to go. When your customers are unsure where and when they're supposed to go for your tour, it's enough to turn them away from future tours. This simple feature will not only promote the professional image you want but also help customer retention and encourage existing customers to recommend your activity company to others.

Resmark offers these features and more.

When you're looking for the best tour operator software around, Resmark has you covered. Our team offers tour operator software that includes all of these top features and more. With Resmark's online booking system, you can ensure that resource management, email marketing automation, website integration, business insights, and pickup management are all included. As a result, you can make the most of your activity company and ensure your clients have the best customer experience possible.

5 Reasons Why Tour Operator Software Is Worth the Investment

chad@westernriver.com (Chad Allen) — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 16:22:52 GMT

The tourism industry has made a significant jump to the internet over recent years. Today, most business is conducted online through travel websites, apps, and more. Customers use the internet to find everything they need these days, including booking reservations for tours and more. If your travel company doesn't have an online booking system for tour operators on your travel or tour booking website, you're most likely losing a ton of business.

Consumers prefer travel websites that support online booking because they're much more convenient in various avenues, including seeing tour bookings availability, dates, prices, and more, without needing to call a tour operator or start the actual booking process. In addition, they have the comfort of knowing that they won't be pushed by travel agents when they're simply inquiring. For these reasons and more, many consumers will choose the travel business they want to work with solely based on whether they have online booking or not. Today, we'll explore five of the most crucial reasons tour booking software is worth the investment. So, let's get started.

What is tour operator software?

Before we dive into all of the reasons why tour operator software is a better solution , you should know what it is first. Put simply, tour booking software is a reservation management tool. This software allows travel and tour businesses to accept bookings online while managing mobile and personal bookings more efficiently. These online booking systems function like a self-service portal where customers book services based on available dates suggested by your tour operator system. In addition, our booking software has many additional marketing tools to increase online sales and more.

Tour operator software can easily integrate into your existing travel websites or be included with a new website. Your potential customers just visit your page, choose the specific tour they want to book, and fill out the reservation form. The software determines what times are available, if tour inventory is available, and every other aspect that could affect your tours' availability. Afterward, they'll pay for the booking using a payment gateway that transfers the payment directly to your travel company's account. The entire process only takes a few minutes.

Tour operator software will increase the number of reservations you receive.

One of the best reasons to have online booking is that you can accept reservations any time of day instead of relying on taking phone calls and in-person visits during operational hours. This way, your customers have the convenience to book their specific tour when it's the best time for them. In addition, this 24/7 online booking system reduces the workload on your staff , increases online sales, and optimizes customer service. Therefore, you'll be accepting more reservations than ever before, and your clients will be more enticed to book with your tour business when they know they can do it whenever they want.

An online booking system increases payment process efficiency and convenience.

Payment processing for tour packages is also made more accessible and faster with an online booking platform. Subsequently, you can skip any middlemen previously used to take booking fees and avoid losing part of your profits to third-party payment processing fees. In addition, once customers book through your software, the booking fee is transferred directly into your travel company account without the need for any third parties, payment processing fees, or hassle, making it easier on you and your customers without taking away from your bottom line.

Learn more about how you can save on processing fees with a demo of Resmark.

Online booking software can handle your automated messages while generating more revenue.

Sending out emails, reminders, and text messages is crucial for your tour business's marketing platform. It helps retain customers and bring in new potential customers while showing them that your tour business is willing to take a personal interest in client preferences. So, this message and email marketing work in tandem as the most prominent influencers on your marketing tools and customer care programs. However, manually sending out these emails and texts can take tons of time and often lack the personal touch that insights from tour operator software can offer. In addition, working with a third-party messaging platform only takes more of your budget away from your travel business.

Furthermore, the combination of more and more third-party platforms and services can continue to take away from your profits and possibly lead to cutbacks just to keep the travel company moving. However, tour operator software can handle all of these issues simultaneously. Not only will your software tailor personalized emails, reminders, and messages to increase customer engagement and offer promotions, coupons, and vouchers to bring in new clientele, but this automation also upsells your customers with bundles and add-ons to their tour package based on client preferences, improving the customer experience and your budget.

Tour booking software can offer your travel company valuable insights into your tour business and customers

Not only does a tour booking system log each reservation for your system, so you can prepare for various tour packages and customers, but it also keeps track of all of the details associated with each reservation. The customer data your clients offer when they book a tour package is a crucial resource for your travel company that's becoming more necessary in today's more virtual business climate. You better understand your customers, who they are, their client preferences, and much more from these various analytics. As a result, you can custom tailor vouchers, promotions, and coupons. Furthermore, you can find out what tour packages perform well, which don't, and what you need to improve on from these analytics. This way, you have real-time insights into your tour business's performance, your client preferences, and how to attract more potential customers. If you want to compete with modern tour companies, accurate and reliable analytics are the first steps to modernizing your travel company and making your travel business stand out.

Online booking systems offer greater mobility than traditional booking systems.

Back to the advantages of convenience, more people prefer to do their shopping, make reservations, and do their trip planning from the comfort of their mobile devices, whether that's a tablet or smartphone. Since your platform will be web-based, your clients will have the opportunity to make their reservations for your tour packages at their fingertips, whether online or through a mobile app. This mobility increases the chances to retain your customers and encourages them not to wait to book until a more convenient time. The need to wait for a more convenient time is one of the most significant reasons customers postpone reservations. However, with your booking system being mobilized, they can book anytime, from anywhere, without sacrificing convenience.

Invest in yourself and your travel company with tour booking software.

Tour booking software is an incredible investment you can make into your travel business. With the ability to increase bookings, increase payment process efficiency, message and email marketing automation, provide valuable customer data, and offer greater mobility, a tour operator system is one investment in your travel company that's well worth it.

Why You Should Choose an Online Booking Software for Your Business

Wed, 12 Jan 2022 21:21:37 GMT

If you aren’t already utilizing online booking software, you‘re likely wondering why you’d choose to make the switch in the first place. After all, changing systems is never easy, and if your current reservation process is working, why would you need an online booking system to take its place?

Despite your natural reservations, it’s hard to deny that online booking is a powerful tool for modern businesses. From customer service to admin, you’ll find that the right online booking software and the integrations that come with it offer benefits that no other tool can compete with.

Your Audience Expects You To Use an Online Booking System

In the modern world, your ideal customer can do just about anything online. Google Calendar color-codes their schedule, while a credit card lets them shop from nearly any brand across the globe. They can even book their dentist appointments online! So, it’s no surprise that they’d look for the same sort of booking page on your website. In today’s day and age, online booking is a critical part of customer support. Your target audience wants to schedule meetings in the digital space, get appointment reminders via text message, and follow your brand on social media, not play phone tag trying to make an appointment in the first place.

Schedule a demo of our online booking system

Online Booking Features Streamline Your Efforts

While an online booking feature offers fantastic benefits for your customers, it’s even more beneficial to your team in that it streamlines the booking process and all that comes with it. Is your typical team off outside of conventional nine to five business hours? With a digital booking page, you’ll nevertheless be available for customer reservations around the clock.

Do your reservationists spend time each day taking payment details, trying to remember your updated availability, and even sending reminders to your customers? With online booking software, your team gets a well-deserved break: The best programs offer full integration with popular payment gateways, track real-time availability, and allow your customers to opt into helpful reminders and other updates. With one simple upgrade, your employees will have a lot of time and energy to allocate to more important tasks.

Schedule a demo and learn more about our online booking features

Your Competitors Use Online Reservation Systems

It’s every business owner’s worst nightmare: A customer comes to your business, ready to make a full payment and send their cash your way, only to find that you don’t offer what they need. Instead, this ideal customer passes you by—they click on your competitor’s site, find what they need, and pay their invoice with the same ease as making their appointment initially.

Not only do you lose out on that sale thanks to an inferior online presence, but you’ll also miss out on that customer’s repeat business, the referrals they make to friends, and even the gift certificates they bring home for the holidays! Of course, not having an online appointment scheduler won’t always impact your business so harshly—but why risk losing out to a competitor just because they’ve got an online booking page at the ready?

Online Booking Offers Greater Insights

The best reservation software is so much more than a simple appointment scheduler. Sure, it offers your clients the convenience of a free appointment scheduler and helps your team avoid the stress of double bookings, but your ideal software is a powerful solution for so much more. While you might have gathered some data from your manual booking system, you’ll be inevitably getting an upgrade with the aggregated analytics of online scheduling software. From providing customer demographics to pointing out where your business needs to focus its attention in order to grow, your online booking software offers unprecedented insight into your booking process and business overall.

Between improving the customer experience, making your job easier, making you more competitive in your niche, and even improving your business acumen, making th e switch to online booking software really is a no-brainer. Let your customers schedule their own appointments and know that to-date availability will make your job even easier. Then, integrate your online booking system with your accounting software to make your finances a breeze, too. Even if you approach the switch with some justified reservations, you’ll quickly find that your new booking platform is more than worth it.

Tour Operators: How to Prepare for an Uncertain Future

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 18:09:21 GMT

Tour Operators discuss the steps that they are taking to be ready

Chip Broyles:

Thanks for joining us on today's webinar. We appreciate you spending part of your day with us. Let me introduce a little bit of who's on the panel today. Before I do though, I just want everybody listening to know that there's a couple of housekeeping options here. There's a chat box that you can use to chat amongst yourselves but there's also a Q and A area, somewhere on your little task bar there with Zoom meeting that you should be able to ask a question to the panel and we will do our best to answer. But on the call today with us is Brian Merrill. He's joining us from normally sunny Utah but from what I can tell, it looks like there's a little bit of cloud and even some snow out there in the sky.

Brian is the CEO for Western River Expeditions, a multi-day tour company operating trips in the Grand Canyon. He also helps run the Moab Adventure Center, which is a tour company with operations based out of Moab, Utah, where they facilitate taking guests on all kinds of tours and activities, included guided hiking, mountain biking, zip lining, rafting, horseback riding, hot air balloon rides, you name it. A host of all kinds of things. Mike Smith joins us from Northern Vermont. Actually he runs an operation in Northern Vermont but he's joining us from his home in Michigan.

Mike is the managing partner of ArborTrek Canopy Tours, which is nestled in the hills just North of Smuggs Notch Resort and Ski area. Mike is an expert in the world of canopy tours and aerial adventure park building, maintenance, risk management and operations. He's helped build or start dozens of companies throughout the western hemisphere, is a board member of ACC, former board member of ACT, which is the association of challenge course technologies. Mike is also well versed in website design management, digital marketing.

We've also got Eric Wise joining us from his home in Western Idaho where he helps run and manage a handful of companies, in both Idaho and Oregon. That includes Orange Torpedo Trips, Whitewater Cowboys, and Eric is an advocate for at risk and disenfranchised groups and currently acts as the board chair for LEAP, which is an organization that creates opportunities for healing and growth through immersive wilderness programs that support people affected by significant health issues and psychological distress. ACT, With everything that's going on right now, I think we're probably all kind of qualifying right now for ... we're all going through a little bit of psychological distress. But I just wanted to start with each of you. Just find out how you are personally and where you are mentally right now. How's everybody holding up? Brian, how are things in your neck of the woods?

Brian Merrill:

We're doing all right. We're in a pretty good place to self isolate and my kids are all doing well and sheltered up where they are. This is the first Easter we've ever had without all three of our children home. Everybody stayed where they were and trying to do our part. But I think we're all holding up pretty well psychologically so far.

Chip Broyles:

Good everybody's... I know Mike, you mentioned earlier you decided the kids complained they were bored and so you of course took out the hair clippers and went after them. Is that what you were saying?

Mike Smith:

Yeah. Cleaned up the hair and the tears. Wasn't okay at first try but I haven't had a lot of practice in cutting hair in a number of years [crosstalk 00:04:02].

Chip Broyles:

That took care of itself. What about you Eric? How are you in your neck of the woods?

Eric Weiseth:

I mean, good. Living where I do in Idaho, if you're going to be holed up somewhere, it's a pretty good place to be. it's pretty easy for us to get out and roam around. We have a bit of space to roam and get outside. It's nice. Granted it's also snowing here today, so-

Chip Broyles:

Oh, it is.

Eric Weiseth:

That's kind of a downer I suppose.

Chip Broyles:

Yeah, it dropped. I'm in Sandy Utah, just on the South side of the Salt Lake Valley. Got awakened last night. Well I wasn't quite asleep yet but I was laying in bed reading to the kid and the house started shaking because we had a 4.1 something earthquake again, another earthquake that we ... On top of everything else we've got a few things that are happening outside of our control that don't make it any easier for us to ... But as far as I can tell, we're holding up okay. Governor Herbert did announce yesterday here in the state of Utah that soft closure for schools for the rest of the school year, which I anticipate just means that's it. My wife and I are the new school teachers for the rest of the year. We'll see.

What is the current state of your tour operation?

Chip Broyles:

Well, let's go ahead and get started and talk about a few things. We've talked about ourselves personally. What about your businesses? Where are things? What have you told your guides as of right now? Brian, you're in the Grand Canyon so you're regulated, I mean, outside of Moab, in the Grand Canyon with Western River Expeditions, I mean park service calls the shots on that. What do you know about your operation down there right now?

Brian Merrill:

As of now we know that the park is closed or the river operations in the park are closed through May 21st. They've told us that's a hard and fast date. They are going to reevaluate regularly as they go along. But they said they have no intention of shortening that. And then in Moab, which is where the Moab Adventure Center and all those tours are based out of there leave from, [inaudible 00:06:19] close through May 4th. They are reevaluating as things change. But we've sort of just conceded that we've lost May. We're planning as if we're not going to be operating in June, with the exception of our Grand Canyon multi-day trips we have not canceled trips beyond May 21st but we're trying to remain optimistic but that's our status currently.

You're right, we're at the mercy of what the national park service does. The BLM has also closed the river stretches and the off road stretches where we operate with their permits. They even took another step and sent us a notice saying that our permits were suspended during this time. I don't know why the extra step other than that, I guess if we decide that we were going to run a tour, we would now be in violation of our permit, which I thought we would have been anyway, but it seemed like a little overkill. But that's where we are.

Chip Broyles:

What about, is it the same where you're at Mike? Have you got a hard and fast date that nothing's moving till then or is it just a little bit more fluid and you're making those decisions? I think he might be muted. Let me unmute. There we go.

Mike Smith:

In Vermont, we're not a very big state, so we're not only dealing with regulations from our state but different orders from Massachusetts, New York, New Hampshire and then of course the border to Canada is closed, where we draw a lot of customers from. Although our hard and fast date right now is May 15th. However, lodging is not allowed in the state of Vermont to book reservations online until after June 15th. We're conceding that we won't really open until June 15th. Now for us right now, this is stick season, the snow is melting out. There's not a lot of tourism. It's really a maintenance period for us. We're hoping that we're allowed to start going back into the woods and do maintenance soon. For right now that's prohibited as well.

Chip Broyles:

Okay. Eric, the same thing?

Eric Weiseth:

Yeah. I think we, in the same way that Brian has Moab Adventure Center and Western River Expeditions, you have some diversity in what you offer. We have a pretty solid spectrum of things and they all kind of have different ... We're looking at different timelines on the different things. Our guided trip stuff, we've basically canceled everything through May 15th. Some of that was forced on us by the BLM being closed and with statewide stay at home orders even if the BLM hadn't closed like the Owyhee, we were canceling stuff anyway because we're not going to try and operate when the governor is saying you should stay home.

So that basically shut down our April and early May season. And so we've canceled basically everything out through May 15th public guided trips side and we're suggesting so far to everybody between May 15th and the end of may that they should look for a date later in the summer, try and push them back, multi-day, single day, everything. So our anticipation, we're anticipating guided trips at the earliest is going to be June and it's probably going to be a slow start. Granted all of that depends on the governor in Oregon opening things back up, which they haven't suggested really a timeline on that front.

They are saying they're working on it, which is great. Here in Idaho, just today, the governor here extended the stay at home order until the end of this month. It was going to end today and they extended it two weeks. So reevaluate then. But from a guide trip side, I don't think anything is very realistic until June. On our rentals, we have a big rental business and a big shovel business where people running trips on the road river in Southern Oregon, and we're right now getting phone calls about people wanting shuttles and we're not doing them.

We've turned them down because of the stay at home order. We don't want to encourage people traveling to our area, that kind of thing. So we're not doing it, but our hope is that the governor opens things up a little bit and then we can have some comfort to start doing those [inaudible 00:10:54] and RAF rentals as well for locals. We have big local contingent who will come out do day trips, the river's open. So I could see that market being there starting in May sometime.

How are tour operators dealing with cancelations?

Chip Broyles:

You mentioned people moving trips and encouraging people to move trips. How did you deal with that at the beginning? Were people just calling up and immediately canceling, or were you all encouraging people to move to later on? And how successful was that? I'm just curious, was there any incentives that you were able to kind of leverage? Instead of us giving your money back, maybe we can do this? Did you try that at all Eric?

Eric Weiseth:

Not so much. I mean, I think there's some people out there that have done move your money and you'll get 10%, the same trip you were booked on is going to be 10% cheaper next year or that kind of thing. We have dealt with a lot of forest fire issues and stuff over the years, and so a couple of years ago we got hammered pretty hard on refunds because the river was closed for fires. So we changed to a pretty hard, no refund type policy on multi-day stuff and really encourage buying travel insurance and all of that kind of thing. So I think we start our conversations with our people with a here's our normal policy, which is pretty hard.

And then because of this, we're doing things a little differently and it's a personal conversation we have as folks. Every person I think. We also got out front early, the day after the NDA shut down, we had stuff on our website about here's where we are, we want everybody just to calm down. Let's let this play out a little while. Let's not start making decisions on things in July. Let's see where this goes. And just we're very sort of forward about that and people reacted to that really well. They were encouraged, especially people early on that we were calling them to talk about it.

And in the stuff we've posted, we've put things in there like we are a small family business. We really would appreciate everybody, like you're buying gift certificates for your favorite restaurant in town to help them out, delay your trip, don't cancel it, support these rural communities that need you to come to them eventually by just delaying your trip. And people have been really responsive to that.

Chip Broyles:

All right. Brian, people book the Grand Canyon trip sometimes year, year and a half in advance, if not even longer, and your trips started there would have started this month, is that right?

Brian Merrill:

Our first launch was supposed to be April 1st. Yeah, we've already lost yeah. We're already into the season there and once May hits, we're into our busy season where we're going as heavily per week as we do throughout the rest of the season. And we've taken a similar approach to Eric other than we don't have a lot of experience with fires and things, so this is kind of our first mass cancellation event. But the personal contact that Eric mentioned has been key for us, calling every one of those people that have reservations and discussing with them what their options are.

And we have given them the option to move to ... We were able to add in some boats later in the season. The park service has made a concession to allow us a slightly larger group size to the rest of the season. And so we're able to move some people here and there. But mostly it's about moving them into 2021 or even 2022. And it's a challenge, when you have a group of 10 traveling together or a full charter, or they've chartered the whole trip, it's tough to find space for them. But we've had great success, and I wish I had the percentages in front of me, but the majority of our people have chosen to stay with us and move. And to leave their money with us. And then on the trips that were actually canceled where we've made the choice to cancel a trip, in this case it's because we don't really have a choice but we've offered them a refund.

But we are keeping the initial deposit, sort of like Eric said. We have our cancellation policy and normally, we're pretty strict with it. Otherwise you just get pushed around a lot and people who want to cancel for any reason. And that's a tough line to walk here. We find ourselves ... I mean it's always tough enforcing those cancellation policies because you hear a lot of compelling stories and we've given our people a little more flexibility in this case. Truly somebody lost their job and on and on and on, we've given them some flexibility but for the most part we're at least keeping the deposit. But having those personal conversations and we're finding great success with that and people are glad that we're reaching out to them and they still want to go on a trip.

That's the thing we realized early on, most of them still want to go. Now we're starting to get into more of those people who are just completely freaked out and regardless of what's coming or not, the unknown is too much and even if we're a hundred percent confident we're going to run that trip at the end of August, they still don't want to go. And so we're having to deal with that and taking a little harder line with them and saying, "Hey, the trip's going, you're probably going to be able to fly. Social distancing things will probably be more relaxed by then. We're not ready to cancel yet." But it gets harder and harder.

Chip Broyles:

One of your business associates is listening in and said that 22% have chosen the expedition credit. Mike in your case, have you guys just ... I mean, as soon as shutdown started happening was it just refund everybody? Or what about the folks that still kind of have ... Are they still on the books or is everything canceled and off the books now for the summer? Where are you percentage was with that?

Mike Smith:

Sure. Once this started happening, most of the groups that we had on the books for late spring, early summer were our camps and our schools. And they were returning guests year after year, they typically pay a deposit and then the full amount prior to coming out. But in this case we've refunded them. They've good loyal customers. We know they'll come back out, but we also know they're under strain from budgets and trying to figure out how to run their businesses as well.

This time of year is when we really start booking up the summer. We just haven't seen a huge influx where you have a number of calls coming in now for large celebration events for corporations, 40 or a hundred people wanting to come out, celebrate that they're back together. We've had some conversations with them, but we don't really know if we'll be able to honor those agreements or not. So at this point we've really scheduled them in and we'll see how it goes as we get nearer to that date.

How are tour operators dealing with new bookings?

Chip Broyles:

Right. That was one of the questions one of our listeners had was they've started to see the phone ring a little bit with people inquiring about things. Kind of like Brian where you said, people want to go. But yeah, are you turning them away or do you just say, "Hey look, you're welcome to book, but we don't know what's going to happen."

Brian Merrill:

Yeah, and Chip backing up a little bit. We sort of have three options. One is, if we've canceled the trip, they can just cancel and get their money back minus their deposit. This is on our multi-day trips. We've been just giving money back on day trips, but most of that business happens once. People show up in Moab, we don't get that many advanced bookings on our day trips. But so it hasn't been as many, but on the multi-day trips, they have the option of moving with no penalty, we'll honor this year's price if they move out into the future and commit to a date.

If they can't commit to a date, we've offered an adventure credit. So basically we're just keeping the credit on our books and they can use it on a future date. Now we've limited that to through the 2022 season. But with the idea that they can get their act together and then get back to us with a date positive, a date certain in the future. And then we have an incentive that we offer of giving them an additional 10% credit if they'll take that option. But that's sort of something we haven't publicized, but our people on the phone have the ability to offer that.

Chip Broyles:

Well too late, it just got published. We won't send this out to everybody that's booked with Moab Adventure Center. No, I appreciate you sharing that because I mean that is a real thing. Mike, I know you have some concerns about the idea of do you sell vouchers now? Is there any positive income you can create? But there's a downside to that. I mean, yeah, there's an upside, but there's a downside to that, isn't there? That people need to think about if they're thinking about trying to create some positive income.

Mike Smith:

Well, I think you need to know what your potential liabilities are and what the state laws are that you're in. For us being on vouchers now means we may have to give a refund on that voucher at any time. And so it's giving us money right now, but it's not really money that we've earned. And so we're going to pay taxes on it now despite the fact that it's not earned. And we may have to return it so it becomes a bookkeeping issue. And if we have enough cashflow to carry through without doing that, I would prefer to use the cash in hand, and avoid getting ourselves into a potential liability for later.

How to operator your tours with restrictions on group sizes

Chip Broyles:

Makes sense. Well, let's just move for curiosity sake, let's say that we can come back in the next few months and you are starting to get these tours out there again. But what if it comes down to a scenario where you're allowed to operate but you have to operate within the original idea was that groups of 10 people or less. Have you thought about that in your business right now? Could you come back and operate trips that way? Is that even possible Eric in your operation are there ... Obviously a rental going out okay, here you go take your equipment and you can have it, bring it back and you sanitize everything. But when it comes to trips and tours, and guided activities, is that even a possibility if it was smaller group concentrations?

Eric Weiseth:

So I think we've been talking about this a lot in sort of different groups of Outfitters that I participate with of what are the best practices that we can do? And we're looking at it all the Outfitters in Idaho they're Outfitters and certain sections we're in, we're all getting together and we're working on lists of what are the ways that we can change our operations or what are the ways we may need to change our operations to meet what are sort of the guidelines of today acknowledging that we don't know what the guidelines of the future are going to be? And what would be deal killers and what are things we can figure out how to work around.

So I think there's kind of the plan based on what you know today, but leave it open to adjust, go to the future. And part of the advantage of doing that, and this is the one that actually has me the most concerned, is we're seeing some of the federal agencies saying that they are going to instill certain requirements into your permit operations. And anybody who has had some of these agencies decide what is important and what is not, has probably experienced where maybe some things have been done with good intentions but without a real understanding of in field implications.

And so we are being proactive in contacting our permit administrators and saying, "Hey, when it comes time to open up when we operate, we acknowledge that we're probably going to have to change the way we do some things. And here's the things that we're thinking about." And so far those have been really constructive conversations that we're having with them where they're really receptive to our ideas versus them taking their ideas and just trying to put them on us.

One was, if you run a trip that's bigger than 10 people, you're going to have to sell three different kitchens and spread everybody out. We went to them we're like that is dumb and it's actually going to make things harder. We're going to be able to be less spread out, less safe, all those things for these reasons. And so they were totally receptive. So I don't know exactly what it is. I would say we're talking about do we run just one family group per raft? So ... Sorry, instead of six or eight people into a raft, are we just doing one family group of four and that's the cap or two groups of two spread out on each end. We're talking about that conversation.

We're talking about are we serving meals separately instead of here's dinner and you walk through the line and get your food. Is it plated and is it brought to your family group, wherever? But to be honest, the one that all of us have gotten the most hung up on, the one we can get our head around the least is getting people to and from the river, transportation. The days of putting 14 people in a 15 passenger van feel like they might be gone for a while, and that has it's concerns. Our friends who use buses I think have some other options. We are not a big bus user just because the roads we drive on are not terribly bus friendly. So I don't have that one answered yet, but I think that's the one we're all getting hung up on is how the hell do we get people to and from the river.

Chip Broyles:

Mike you've got a scenario where people are showing up on property, right? You're not having to transport them to the canopy tour or anything like that. Is that right?

Mike Smith:

Now, for the zip line tour we are having to transport people in both directions. For our tree top obstacle course and our climbing adventure and team building, that's all done on site. So now we're looking at scenarios where for the zip line tour rather than selling it per seat, what we will likely be doing is selling it per departure. So whether you have one person or eight people, there'll be a set fee for that departure and the clients will have to, if we're required by the health department, certify that they're all from the same household.

Chip Broyles:

Right. Brian, Eric mentioned already starting to talk to government agencies that regulate in his neck of the woods. I know you're a part of the GCRG or the Grand Canyon River Guide association. You guys been having meetings and discussing things like that or not even approaching that yet?

Brian Merrill:

Yeah, we've had conversations about that. Mostly our efforts have been along some different lines, trying to get some accommodations from the park about being able to recover lost use. But yeah, we're having those discussions and they've asked us to come to them with what does reopening look like with our ideas? The same way that Eric was talking to his regulators and the Moab agencies, BLM and park service there as well as have asked the Outfitters for their thoughts on what operations should look like going forward. And it really varies depending on the activity.

We have some activities where our margins are better and so you can run a smaller group and still be okay. Not as good as you were, but it's worthwhile doing it. But others where it's a challenge and we'll have to decide can we operate that tour? If the best we can do is our tiny little groups that are just not going to be profitable. But the same kind of thing as Eric is talking about, we're confident that in camp we can keep things sanitary and that we can socially distance properly if that's still the thing.

On the boats is the challenge. And that's another one where you start running into inefficiency issues. How far do you go? And you have a smaller number, lesser number of people. It takes more guides, it takes more vehicles if you're having to spread them out in the vehicle, it's a challenge.

Is it a good idea to talk with other tour operators?

Chip Broyles:

In both cases, I mean, obviously everybody is doing a lot of internal discussions with their own teams and their own managers and owners and whatnot. How much are you talking with Eric, you mentioned something about round table discussions you've been a part of. How much are you talking with other tour operators that normally you might consider your competitors? Is it important to be talking with them right now and setting a framework for maybe when we all come back, this is how we all want to kind of operate these trips so that we're all speaking the same language. Are those kinds of discussions happening even now?

Eric Weiseth:

Oh yeah. No, I mean, I think that's honestly I feel like this has been the age of the webinar, and here as we do one. And there's lots of great information to be gleaned from webinars and especially this one. But the most important thing I've done probably in the last three weeks is meet with fellow Outfitters. So again, because we've dealt with forest fires and all sorts of other stuff in the past on the Rogue, a number of years ago we started an organization of Outfitters where we have one annual meeting and we have like a Google group where you can send things out and it goes to everybody.

We're able to speak as one voice to ... The idea was to speak as one voice to our administrative agency, instead of a bunch of different Outfitters. And over the years we all became really good friends through that. And we're meeting once a week, every week now. We've got kind of an agenda of things we go through on access and on marketing and on whatever, all these Outfitters, and it's been amazing. A lot of the best ideas I've had the most encouragement we've had, the best conversations around how do we open up? What's it going to take to open up? What can we do to help pressure the federal government and the state government or lobby those for whatever our needs are? Those all come from those conversations.

So and as I'm thinking about from an operational standpoint, one of the groups in there sat down, they got five Outfitters together and they spent like three hours saying, "Here are what we think the best operational things would be." As we open up or start to open up the conversations I'm having with people is they're nervous. I'm getting calls asking how are you going to change your operation? And if we're all aligned, then those conversations are going to be better with people.

If we as a community can come out and have new press releases, all this stuff about we as the Rogue river Outfitters are doing this so that this place to help bring it here and socially distance, all that kind of stuff, that's going to help ease people's minds. Because I think there's a couple of pieces to this opening back up. There's solving the health problem and having actual solutions in place to allow people to travel and all that. But there's also going to be the mental problem of people being scared and wanting to stay home. And we have to do things to proactively demonstrate that we have their health in mind, to give them comfort to get out of their house and come to us.

And so working as a community, we're doing that, we're doing that in Southern Oregon with the Rogue and that's been great and really encouraging. It's like a mental health thing for me to have those meetings every week. And then the state of Idaho has Idaho Outfitter and Guides Association and they're doing the same thing at the state level there for all Outfitters. And creating sort of here's best practices and starting those conversations. I'm a huge believer in this industry, we are not competitors. We are competitors against cruise ships and Disneyland, all of us. We should all be working together to make the pie for all of us bigger. I'm not interested in taking a client from other rafter. I'm interested in making more rafters so we can all grow. And I think this is just another great example of the time where we should all come together and build everybody's businesses.

Will people just stay home or want to travel?

Chip Broyles:

Right. Well, Mike, Eric mentioned something about being able to talk to people and instill confidence in them when the time is right. I think in a previous conversation you and I had, you mentioned something about after 9/11 that there was a lot of folks that just stayed home. I think we were talking about summer camps and whatnot and that they weren't sending their kids to summer camps the same way they wanted their kids to stay home so they could spend some time with them. Obviously just a best guess, but do you envision the same sort of thing happening like it happened after 9/11 or will people have been cooped up with their family option B? I pick B, that they'll want to get out? What are your feelings on that? Anything at this point?

Mike Smith:

Well, I think you're going to see a huge spectrum of people, people that want to get out and really won't care to follow the social distancing. And then clients that are really nervous about the social distancing. In the aerial adventure park community, we're fortunate to have the Association for Challenge Course Technology and a magazine called Adventure Park Insider, which we're putting together a bunch of huddles and meetings so we can talk about this. Yeah, wonderful. But we have a lot of concerns of how do we go ahead and sanitize the harnesses and the helmets and the gloves and the trolleys and all this between uses.

So I think this is going to change not just short term, but longterm thinking about how we do all of this and how we run our business. I've never been a big person to about safety and use it as a marketing ploy and my opinion's kind of the same on this COVID, I think you have to have a very well written script as to what you're doing. But I get really turned away as a risk manager when I go to a site and I see people say stuff like, safety is our number one priority. Well, if it was, you probably wouldn't be running a zip-line business.

The reason people come out is for adventure and to accept risk. I think when you need to do is very clearly identify and communicate with them what are the risks and how are you trying to mitigate those? And it's up to the conversation between you and the customer as to whether both of you are comfortable entering into it. I'm far less worried about protecting our customers. I'm much more worried about protecting our staff.

Chip Broyles:

That's a good point. Yeah, plus you're also, your operation is right up there near the Vermont border, I mean the, the Canadian border with Vermont. I imagine that the first travelers are going to be people within their own country. So what's the border like there with Canada? I mean, is it just shut down? I mean, people are used to being able to go back and forth. Is that all different now? I'm actually not in the know about that.

Mike Smith:

Well coming into Vermont right now if you're coming in from out of state, you're supposed to quarantine for 14 days. So travel's kind of shut down altogether. But now my expectation for the Canadian border is travel probably won't open freely till both countries are fully open, staying as widespread and available and there are better protocols that we can put forward. So we're not expecting a lot of customers coming in over the Canadian border, but we're also very close to New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, all the areas that have seen the highest case loads.

And so I think there are a lot of people in our communities that are very anxious to open up, to get the economy running again. But at the same time, I think there's a real risk that if we open up too soon and allow people in and we're not really cautious, it's our locals that are going to take the brunt of the hit.

Are you starting to focus your marketing on local markets?

Chip Broyles:

All right. What about Moab Adventure Center Brian, have you guys started to talk at all about potentially when the time comes really reaching out to locals and people in the state of Utah? I imagine you get people, there's two national parks there in the Moab area, and you probably get people from all over, especially with the Mighty 5 campaigning that Utah does. Have you begun to think about how do we focus on the local market at all? Is that anything that's starting to come up in conversation?

Brian Merrill:

Yeah, I think that's going to have to be the strategy. I know the state of Utah, they've pulled back on their marketing, and trying to be sensitive to that, but they're trying to time their reaction into the advertising and marketing, and they've done a bunch of research. And they're going to target Denver, Phoenix, Las Vegas within Utah, and salt Lake and stuff. They're going to target the region. They're going to go in heavy and focus on the drive market. The people who can drive to the state of Utah and to places like Moab, and I think that's, yeah, I think that's what we'll have to do.

Back to the 2008 discussion, the summer of 2009 and after the market crashed or the summer 2002 after 9/11, we saw a shift to where our day trips had a bit of a boost, while our multi-trips were down. Because it was more of a drive in market and people doing things that were more affordable, things they could access easily because they drove there and we could see a shift. I think we're going to have to be ready to take advantage of that shift because there will be people who will just be too afraid to fly.

How has the Paycheck Protection Program impacted tour operators?

Chip Broyles:

Right. No, for sure. The planes and I was a part of a round table discussion the other day where they were talking about even when the airlines won't be in a hurry to push too many flights because they don't like to fly planes empty. So they won't be adding as many flights necessarily. They'll want to fill up the flights they have going before they start adding more rotations of flights, and that's something to consider. We certainly have a unique opportunity I think here being Outfit ... All of us on this call today are part of Outfitters that are based out of the US and so we have a good pool of people to talk to here internally inside the country.

But yeah, I think people traveling across borders. I think I noticed that I was going to right before all this happened, I had gotten a new passport for my wife and the kids. My kids needed a couple and I started to put that in, but I didn't. And then I just noticed that the state department isn't even issuing new passports for the time being, unless you can prove that it's a family emergency of some sort. So it's interesting. We did have a couple one or two people reach out a question about the small business loan stuff. So I'm assuming that everybody here has applied for the PPP, the Paycheck Protection Program. Have you started to see that actually come in or is everyone still waiting or what has been your experience?

Brian, I know you've been with the America Outdoors Association for years and as a past president of the America outdoors association. I know you've got your hand in a lot of discussions with regard to all of this. What's your take on how things are right now?

Brian Merrill:

Yeah, I'm hearing the full range of people who got completely funded as early last week. They all seem to be with Chase bank by the way. Chase was a hero organization. It seems to come down to who you're banking with and how quickly they got their act together and there are some delays that are just because of the program and it's difficult to roll out such a massive program in a hurry. But others that are getting funded now and others who haven't really heard much since they've put in their applications, it's the full range.

We put in for two different loans and we've had one funded and one not so far. So I don't know, I think we stayed in close contact with our banker and him trying to find out information and that was super helpful to some extent. You get some hand carrying of some of our stuff across the line, and so that was really helpful if you have a good relationship with your banker.

Chip Broyles:

Well, and you mentioned that because this funding comes from your local bank, having an open and frank conversation and continuing to stay on top of them is key because that local bank is either making or breaking your situation. And it was tough for a lot of them at first, they didn't get the approval that they could go through. Chase was an early proponent of that. Mike, did you mentioned to me in one of our conversations that you ended up having to reapply or something like that? Is that what I understood?

Mike Smith:

I have applied for three different companies now, and two of those which were with local banks, the banks became overwhelmed. And they have required me to reapply for a third party lending platform. And so both of those were resubmitted. But yeah, it's delayed things quite a bit, which in the long run, provided it goes through maybe in our best interest have it delayed a little bit longer so that we can get past where the present day opening date is likely to be. Because right now, if we got it today, we probably wouldn't be open till after that eight weeks, and so I don't know that I'd be able to ramp up do the number of FTEs I need to.

Chip Broyles:

Right.

Brian Merrill:

Chip, I don't know if you saw Carl Deck just put a little-

Chip Broyles:

Oh no, I didn't.

Brian Merrill:

It popped up said that his has been funded and he also got the $10,000 advance from the SBA disaster loan, two different loan programs and they made a deal where you could get if you applied, you could get that automatic 10 grand up front. He's received that, he's first person I've heard that actually got that so.

Chip Broyles:

All right.

Eric Weiseth:

I know a couple people that have gotten that emergency one in the last couple of days and we're supposed to get ours on Friday.

Has this situation given you time to finally take care of things you never had time for?

Chip Broyles:

Okay. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you saw that because I didn't see that coming across my radar here. Well last couple of thoughts. People have been trying to clean house a little bit where they can. If you've got access to your warehouse and you can do some things. Mike you mentioned you don't even have access to your course. Well, are there some other things that you've thought of lately that you're like, "Oh, I'm so glad I took the time to do that." Or having somebody in the organization do things like that website content. Anybody have any comments about that?

Mike Smith:

This time of year is always time where we're trying to get all of our marketing pre built for email, and e-blasts and stuff so that's all behind me already. I've got that caught up. But I think it's one of those I have a checklist of things that I've always been meaning to get to and things that I'd like to update that I'm not getting through pretty quickly as far as risk management forms and compliance and stuff like that. I think a lot of operators should take this time to look at the things they do well, and maybe the things they put off and what I find a lot of programs do when I do risk assessments is they do a great job of running the program, they do a terrible job documenting what they're doing. And so this maybe a good time to catch up on documentation.

Chip Broyles:

That makes sense. Anything else to add Eric?

Eric Weiseth:

Yeah, I mean we're kind of doing the same thing. We onboard a decent number of employees every year, we have about 100 employees between two states and onboard probably 20 to 30 new people a year out of that. And that process has always been pretty good, but it's kind of very hands on like I'm teaching you this thing. And so we started with an organization called Training Wool a couple of years ago, or a couple of months ago, it's an online onboarding staff training software where you can put videos in and all that. So I'm 70 hours into that process, which at the same time is going through it made me realize, hey, I need to update this policy or I need to change this whatever.

But we're building this whole online training thing for new employees to come in where our long term goal is if I get asked a question twice by anybody, it's because we didn't train well enough across all capacities in the business. It's actually kind of nice to have this time, especially as we're getting towards onboarding season, and my head is kind of in that space to really dive into redoing all of our training and onboarding stuff.

Chip Broyles:

Makes sense. Brian, have you guys done anything like that? Every half mile or so in the Grand Canyon seems like a guide is walking up to tell some story or Interp about whatever layer of rock is about to come out or whoever got this rapid named after him. That sounds like a good opportunity as well. Have you guys talked about things like that at all?

Brian Merrill:

Yeah, so we've been talking for a while about, hey, we need to really film our interpretive talks, specifically used for training and to create some consistency. Anybody who's ever had guides knows that sometimes these interpretive stories evolve over time, just strangely, but every once in a while you have to have a reorientation where you teach people the real story again. But we're taking this time to do some of that, to prepare some of that.

Now like Mike, we don't have access to all the resources where we go, so it would be nice if I could send some senior guides down the river and just have them film Interp talks all the way down. It'd be wonderful time to be able to do that. But that [crosstalk 00:49:50] now. So we're going to have to do what we can. There are places we can access or places that sort of look like that we can do some more generic stuff. But yeah, we are taking advantage of those kind of things. There's not much we can do in terms of maintenance and getting ready for the season because we were ready.

Chip Broyles:

I know.

Brian Merrill:

We were ready when we got shut down and we were like, now there's really not much left to do. So yeah, ideally, we can create some good content.

Chip Broyles:

That'd be nice. You could take the Bill BelKnap Waterproof River Guide and just go through it mile by mile and inform your senior guides. Well, what would you say right here at mile 132?

Brian Merrill:

Yeah.

Chip Broyles:

Well, I appreciate your time guys. I'm going to give a little plug for a week from today, April 22nd. We're going to do another webinar round table. We're going to be talking about COVID-19 and liability and waivers. Do we need to rethink our waivers? How do we talk about this? We've got Leah Corrigan, who is a lawyer familiar with the outdoor travel industry especially, she talks all the time at the American Outdoors Association gatherings. We might even have June, June Wright who has joined us before on previous webinars, so we're looking forward to talking about that and discussing some of the liability issues with going back to work, and what does it mean, and how do we protect ourselves in that regard from a lawsuit point of view?

And of course, everything is a fluid situation, everything is changing. But Gentlemen, I really appreciate your time today. Thank you. Any final words anybody want to say? I would say to all of you just wash your hands, and keep social distancing. But any final parting words of good cheer for anybody out there? [crosstalk 00:51:59]. Go ahead Brian.

Brian Merrill:

I'm choosing to remain optimistic, I have to for my own well being. But I think there is a significant segment of people out there who are going to want to travel. There are all kinds there are those who are totally freaked out about it. Those who see an article like I saw this morning popped up on my feed that said, hey, experts are saying it's a great time to purchase air fares. Pick the time when you're confident that you'll be able to go and there's some deals out there right now, and I think there's people who are going to take advantage of that sort of thing, and we're counting on that.

The drive in market, I think we have to prepare ourselves for a positive turnaround and at the same time being realistic. But this could be an opportunity to make something happen on the backside of this too. We saw that, we picked up some market share after the market crash in 2008 that we've never given back. It wasn't our objective to go out there and dominate the market afterwards, but we kept their foot on the pedal on advertising and we were brave, and we were a little aggressive and it paid off. And I think there'll be an opportunity on the backside of this to do something like that too.

Chip Broyles:

You're absolutely right Brian, the companies that either already are strong or those that figure out how to stay strong and can, will be stronger in the long run. There'll be others, you'll need to know what your breaking point is. Mike, you mentioned in one of our talks that we had, you need to know how to run your own numbers, you need to be able to look at things and be honest with yourself isn't that right?

Mike Smith:

Well, I think you need to know what your risk and what your potential exit point is. I'm less concerned about when we open coming up right away, as to what do we do if our staff gets sick? Because once we turn on the spigot, we're then encouraging another level of expenses. And if we have an outbreak in our own staff, it's not just training your staff to take care of the patrons that are coming in and forming those, but to do that internally and to make sure that you're hiring staff and that they understand the risk if they go out and party at night or socialize, and they're not protecting themselves and their loved ones that can really shut down the business very quickly again.

Chip Broyles:

Right. Eric, some final parting thoughts?

Eric Weiseth:

Well, I think I'm really optimistic. I think hopefully we'll be operating by June, I feel really optimistic about July, and I think people are really going to want to get out of their houses and go do stuff. The driving thing is really spot on. We're going to really focus in on driving stuff. The parts of my business I'm most worried about is stuff where most people fly to. But I do think people are going to want to get out. And I think the idea of going to Disneyland, or going on a cruise ship is not going to be what people are wanting to do, but going to the woods with a small group of people may sound really appealing. I actually think we could have depending on how quickly people can start moving, we potentially could have a really banner summer. And the other thing I would add is come back and listen to Leah next week because she's outstanding.

Chip Broyles:

Oh, right. Yeah, in fact, somebody asked again, so next week, same bat time, same bat channel, one o'clock Mountain Time. Three o'clock eastern doing the talk with Leah Corrigan and talking about waivers and whatnot, and COVID-19 and liability. So anyway, thank you guys. I appreciate your time today and everybody on the call. We'll make this recording available to everybody that's been here. But thanks again and we'll see you next time.

Considerations For Liability and Waivers During Coronavirus Recovery

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 17:58:37 GMT

Answers to common questions about Coronavirus recovery from 2 industry lawyers

5 Stages of the New Customer Journey

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 17:52:27 GMT

How to develop deeper connections, better manage expectations, and continually drive 5-star reviews

How Our Tour Booking System Improves The Customer Journey

[Chip]

All right welcome everyone. Today we're going to be covering the five stages of the customer journey and learning what we can do to create a deeper connection with our guests, get better reviews , and unlock revenue.

I'm Chip Broyles, Director of Business Development here at RESMARK and I have our CEO Brandon Lake with me today, who is also the co-founder of Moab Adventure Center and is an owner of Western River Expeditions; one of the largest rafting companies in America.

Before I turn the mic over to Brandon, I just want to talk a little bit about what we're about to talk about today. There's so much more to the overall experience with your customers and the experience they have with your company than just what happens when they make a purchase or show up on-site and particularly either a tour or an activity with you. If you think of it more like dating and marriage. There's the introduction meeting phase right. Then there's this dating phase that goes on. Then hopefully perhaps the commitment phase. After that commitment marriage, there's the long-term nurturing.

Today we're going to touch briefly on each of those steps and we're going to describe how RESMARK can help play a part in making that both easier for you and ultimately making your business more successful.

So again, Brandon Lake from RESMARK and Western River Expeditions, welcome.

[Brandon]

Thank you very much. I think that's a really good introduction. I think it's a great analogy for really a lot of what we're going to cover today.

[Chip]

So let me just remind everybody a couple of things about RESMARK and where we came from, a little background on RESMARK.

The new RESMARK application is an all-in-one reservation and marketing solution that handles reservations, digital waivers , marketing automation , and channel managemen t . Of course, it does so much more than that, as I described, we're going to talk about this customer journey. So, we do have several companies joining us for the first time today Brandon, so before we get into the details of this customer journey, just give us a quick background on yourself and an overview as to how RESMARK even got started.

[Brandon]

Sure so this is interesting Chip. I'm going to just share a little bit of personal background, a little background of how the company got started here.

Our story doesn't begin like many software companies you might expect. Our story actually begins in the middle of the Grand Canyon. So nearly 60 years ago, Western River Expeditions pioneered the concept of whitewater rafting vacations offering some of the first commercial trips on the Colorado River through this world-renowned National Park. In 1977 that my father together with two partners purchased Western River Expeditions.

[Chip]

Look at that little guy in the backpack.

[Brandon]

That's me back there. So I have literally grown up in the business rafting rivers of Utah and Grand Canyon each summer to guiding in my early 20's. Today, Western River Expeditions has actually expanded and grown to become one of the largest multi-day rafting companies in America and today we not only offer trips in Grand Canyon but also in Idaho, in Oregon, Costa Rica, and southern Utah. That's actually my oldest son and I sitting right there in Desolation Canyon.

[Chip]

Oh, that's a beautiful trip.

[Brandon]

So the story of RESMARK really begins in 2002. Our operation in Moab Utah at this time was really struggling to turn a significant profit. We had even contemplated shutting down multiple times. We just couldn't seem to find the right strategy to grow this destination and it was about this same time we came up with a brand new business model. We would call it the Moab Adventure Center. We would sell every type of tour from the very best suppliers in the area in addition to our own tours. The vision soon became a reality.

[Chip]

I'll say that looked exactly like the drawing.

[Brandon]

Bookings shot up in just the first year after opening. The problem was, we were taking every booking using pen and paper and given number the number of people we started to book it was totally inefficient. We knew we needed a system. But at that time there were actually very few reservation systems on the market and nothing really matched our vision of what was truly needed and we had somewhat of a unique vision we wanted in a system even unique for today.

We were a small business and given my marketing background I wanted a system that would really automate sales processes along the entire customer journey. At this time the concept of marketing automation was kind of a new thing and we knew that if we put something like that together it would really set us apart. After about three years and a substantial investment in development, RESMARK was launched. The impact at Moab Adventure Center and Western River Expeditions was incredible. Bookings skyrocketed. Our cost of sales decreased substantially.

Using RESMARK to automate these processes all along the customer journey really made all the difference. This is exactly what we will be talking about today. The path of walking your customers and guests from dreaming to booking to anticipating to experiencing to sharing. We'll discuss several key touch points within each of these stages and we found that as businesses implement these touch points what really starts to happen, Chip, your level of customer service really goes up a notch and you create a deeper connection with your guests, which is so important today.

[Chip]

Oh absolutely.

[Brandon]

You'll find that as a result that your sales will actually increase every step of the way. So a lot of times people will say well you know why not just stick with what we've done for so long right. We take a booking, we send a confirmation, and we create the best tour possible. I mean that's what so many experienced providers around the world are doing and they do those well sometimes.

When I think about this I think we really have an opportunity here to be different to be better than the status quo. To really stand out. To make a difference. To connect with our clients in ways that will help them appreciate our employees, our company, the locations we promote, and the experiences we sell. When this happens, it's magic. The thing is that as a business owner or anyone that works in business, you'll find that there is not only greater success but just fulfillment in what you're doing because of a lot of those connections.

[Chip]

You're right and it's creating this level of brand loyalty that starts at the very beginning touchpoints that are sometimes if you overlook and you just want to pump somebody through and get rid of them fine, but this is a long-term relationship we are talking about. We want people to talk about us and come back and share their experiences with other people. This is the way we do it.

[Brandon]

That's a good point. Even if our model is not to have return customers over and over, that sharing, that connection they feel will enhance the sharing and we'll see that.

I'm going to walk through a typical scenario with one of our Moab Adventure Center customers. We're going to try to accomplish two things as we do this. First, I'm hoping you'll see some solid ideas that you can implement in your business regardless of what system you might be using or even if you're using no system at all. Second, I'm hoping that everyone will gain a better understanding as to how RESMARK actually works through these stages. I know we have a lot who are curious about this system as well. Either way, I'm hoping everyone finds a lot of benefit from this.

The model will be a little bit different for us but I think you can find application to your own business as we do it. So let's go ahead and get started.

Stage 1: Dreaming

Our story begins with the Wilson family. Jameson, Cami, and their three kids. This family had never been to Moab but some friends told them about a recent experience rafting on the Colorado River in Moab and it was at this point that the Wilson family entered the Dreaming stage of the customer journey. Now in the interest of time, I'm going to shorten the Dreaming stage of the journey. But keep in mind, as people dream about where to go and what to do there, this part of the journey could be days, weeks, months, or even years. It may encompass hundreds of searches, website visits, videos watched, ads seen, and so on. We could spend an hour talking about just this phase. The important thing is to recognize that the Dreaming phase is often packed with information gathering and the key is that we stand out amidst all of that. It's you who ends up getting booked.

[Chip]

Right because they're gathering information about all kinds of choices

[Brandon]

Ya, competitors, other things to do, how to spend their time and money. So, how do we do that?

Let's see what happens with Jameson. He goes to Google. He searches rafting in Moab. Fortunately for us, he quickly finds Moab Adventure Center.

[Chip]

That's a whole nother webinar right there.

[Brandon]

Yes, it is.

He checks out the reviews, he likes what he sees, he clicks through to the website. While he's reviewing all the options he becomes a little indecisive as to what would be the best fit for his family. This is why we see the majority of our people come, look, and leave.

Now he's intrigued by several other adventures on the websites and decides, you know what, maybe the best thing to do is to gather some information here and discuss it with the family. Fortunately, he sees this at the bottom of the website. It's an insider's guide to Moab. It has information on restaurants, things to do, an area map, lots of fun information that only an insider would know. So he enters his email address and his name and he gets the guide. Fifteen minutes later, he gets an email from someone named Lecy. He's impressed by the responsiveness of the company so he clicks through to watch the video. Here Moab Adventure Center's operations manager, a Moab local, Jason Taylor explains how to make the most of your time in Moab. The next day, Jamison gets another email. This one contains Lecy's insights on the top ten things to do in Moab. Now some of these recommendations are activities sold by Moab Adventure Center, while others are not. Two days later Jamison gets a third email this time with a question, have you made your plans to Moab yet. Now he replies to the email. He finds Lecy to actually be a real person and to be incredibly helpful in making some decisions. A couple of emails back and forth and he decides to book the canyoneering adventure.

So, what just happened here? This is the part of our customer journey that we refer to as Dreaming. The goal, of course, is to move them to booking but it doesn't always happen immediately. As I said, this could have been much longer and involved a lot more interactions. But let's jump behind the scenes and see what just happened here with the system.

RESMARK has a module called Cruise Control. Cruise Control is built to automate key communications with your guests throughout the entire journey. Here we're only looking at the first two steps, lead forms and lead follow-ups . So let's take a look at the lead forms and lead generation process inside the system.

We're going to head over here to manage our lead forms. Within RESMARK's Cruise Control we can build an unlimited number of lead forms. They're super easy to create. You have all the fields that you might want together, plus you can even create custom fields, questions, different things like that for any information we want to gather. In our case, we built a very simple one. You saw it was just a few fields.

[Chip]

It was just a name and email address.

[Brandon]

That was it. Very simple, we copy the embed code, we plug it into our website, and in our case, we put it at the bottom of nearly every page. This is what we call in marketing a lead magnet. That could be on every page like we've done, which I suggest it's a great way to do it. It could be something people click on along your header or something and they get a form to fill out. Or it could even proactively pop up on the page after a certain amount of time on the website. All of these methods are worth testing on your own site but anyway you do it when someone fills out the form what happens is their contact information is automatically added to your lead or reservation system database in our case RESMARK.

Now here we find that RESMARK actually found an existing record, I'm showing you here with my sample record. So, if I had filled something out for myself you'll see that the information that was already there is updated now with this new request. Getting this contact information into the database is key at this stage because it allows everything else that follows to happen consistently and automatically.

Within Cruise Control you can set up as many lead follow-up emails as you want. That was that little sequence, 50 minutes later and then a couple of days later and so forth. Here you can see the first few emails we set up for Moab Adventure Center. If you wanted to create a message. Super straightforward, you come in here you click the new message, you select the type of message that you want, you then set your parameters as to when you want the message to trigger. This could be days, hours, or minutes after the lead is created. I like sending this initial one like 15 or 30 minutes after the lead is generated. I think it feels really personal. Most people assume, if you write it this way, that you're actually responding to them and of course, that's fantastic.

[Chip]

Right and I see that you've got the from name as Lecy Gillespie and it's not from just some kind of a generic thing and that helps. Sometimes we have to, sometimes it's info@url.com.

[Brandon]

Yeah, and we have experimented with that and sometimes you go back and forth and see which one gets the better open right.

[Chip]

I see that the reply to was more generic as well. So it came from Lecy and that's nice having those options in RESMARK.

[Brandon]

From there you customize your message and the key as you kind of saw in some of those is to be helpful and personal. They might be like this email that we see here on the screen, comes from someone in your office with a link to a video or other helpful information. It could be like this one with helpful ideas or it could be like this one that we trigger three days after a lead is created. It's super short, it asks a question, and its point is to start a conversation right. I suggest that when you go through this you set up several months of automated messages. We can't expect the Dreaming phase to be just a few days. It will be a week or sometimes people get excited about something and then they cool down a little bit.

[Chip]

That's how I feel about working on my garage. I get excited about cleaning that and then I cool down.

[Brandon]

Think about this, you're an expert on your destination and the experiences you offer and you use that to your advantage. Be as helpful as possible. You'll gain trust. You'll start building a deeper more connected relationship even before you have a customer.

[Chip]

As soon as the person makes a booking the follow-up emails, those lead follow-up emails, stop automatically don't they?

[Brandon]

That's exactly right and at that point, a different string of messages begin and we'll get into those here in a minute. This whole process that we're talking about here today is what we refer to as marketing automation. It's automatic because the system is triggering messages based on events that occur during the customer journey. Nucleus Research conducted a study and it told us that companies who are doing this experience a 12.2% reduction in marketing costs when using marketing automation . You can imagine all the things that become automated with this. The same companies experienced a 14.5% increase in sales

[Chip]

I think this is something that people don't really realize because we don't see the full picture of the research that may be going on behind the scenes and this is where a system like RESMARK really helps a company out. You already have the information about when these people have become interested, then if they book when those dates are.

[Brandon]

Yeah, and you're right the stuff that's going on behind the scenes can be way more complicated than we think it is from our perspective. So it's important. What we're trying to do at this stage again is move your potential customers from dreaming to booking, reducing your costs and increasing your sales while we do it.

Stage 2: Booking

So let's walk through the booking process and this becomes an important touchpoint all by itself, how do people interact with your booking process. We'll look at this for the Wilson family here, Jameson, we're going to see what it looks like for him to book something online.

He's back on the Moab Adventure Center website and he's ready to book canyoneering. So he's going to come into here and he's going to click on the button to book here. He's going to be presented with an option for a pickup. Since he's already taking care of his hotel in his case he selects the hotel that he's booked, he enters his quantity and the date, he selects his time that he wants, and he clicks Add to Cart. Now here he'll review the summary of everything that he has entered, he'll fill in his information, he'll review the policies, and he'll complete his order. Of course, he'll enter in his required payment and once the payment is made, Jameson is taken to the confirmation. Then something immediately pops up.

This is key to what we're talking about today. He's told that one or more guests are missing the required details. I love this step in RESMARK because it makes the booking the booking process we've shrunk down and made easy with as few impediments to booking as possible. What is about to follow makes all the difference to our marketing and our customer service, so let's walk through it. He clicks view participants, he's taken down to a section of the page where he's prompted to enter missing details for each guest. He's going to click himself here and in this case, he is traveling with the group so he'll fill this out.

Now as the tour operator using custom fields in RESMARK, I can collect anything I need to operate this tour. I'm not yet worried about all the important contact information. At this step Jameson simply fills out the fields I need to operate the tour, he clicks save, and he's brought to this point. Now Jameson sees that his signature is required on a waiver document, prior to participation, and this is where we see WaiverSign built beautifully right into the system. He's going to click get started. He verifies his date of birth and says he is actually Jameson.

[Chip]

Now, this is a nice step built right in the tour booking system here Brandon because while we can't totally prevent people from signing for someone else, if they're at home, this step really does help eliminate a lot of that, doesn't it?

[Brandon]

That's a good point you bring up because when you see that from a liability perspective it's important that we do everything we can to get people to review the documents by themselves. If we were to click no here he would actually get a link to send to the proper person. If he was attempting to sign for his wife, he would say oh no I'm not and then it would say please send this to her. Then that person can sign for themselves. In this case, Jameson is Jameson. He clicks yes and he completes any missing information that will be used in the process of signing his document. Now RESMARK makes it easy because it fills in as much data as it has to make it more efficient. This is where we're going to get an email address for each adult. We get a phone number. We'll get their date of birth and address information. Of course, you could choose what to gather but in our case, we like to gather that because it gives us a lot of good contacts and demographic information.

So once he's filled that out he clicks next, he reads through the waiver document, he applies his signature, and he agrees and submits. He's done. Then he's taken right back to where he started. Now two things have just happened. First, we're helping to protect our company from liability issues which is a really big deal right and second, we're gathering additional contact and demographic data that we can use to improve our marketing.

Now it's common to get some contact information for your customer, but the magic of this process really comes into play here as RESMARK helps you gather information not just for the customer but it also makes it easy for Jameson to invite others to complete the information. In this case his wife. So he's going to click here, grab that link, send it over to him to his wife Cami, she then, of course, is going to sign for herself and for each of her kids as the parent or guardian.

[Chip]

This is pretty cool Brandon. We may not be sending messages to the kids but we now have data that we've collected about each of the kids, each of the individual people on this reservation, the adults, and all the different demographic details for everybody. That's huge.

[Brandon]

The key with this, in this scenario we have an email for Jamison and we have an email for Cami and that's going to change everything. We'll see here in a minute. You can even view all the real-time results of that data collection right in the application, which is kind of fun as you're collecting this. Of course, this data is going to be key to the remainder of our journey.

At this point, we've helped Jamison move from dreaming into booking. We've collected all the details from each participant and we're ready to use that in our next step, which is anticipating.

[Chip]

This is one of my favorite stages. For so many people this is why we travel. This is why we book experiences. We love that feeling of something to look forward to kind of brag about, think about. I was thinking about some of the holidays coming up sometimes the anticipation is a little bit more exciting than the actual day or the morning of.

[Brandon]

True, I love that feeling of looking forward to some experience that we have coming up. It's important to understand too that that window maybe a few hours, it may be several days, might be months.

[Chip]

It could be a year and in the case of the Grand Canyon people are thinking about these trips a year year and a half out. This isn't something you decide lightly. Even staying locally people are planning. Even though people might walk into booked, they've decided where they're going the week before sometimes two weeks before and having that info gathering stage at that point is huge.

[Brandon]

So whether it's a short period of time and they are already in town and they're booking we probably still have some window of time to communicate to them even if it's just a couple of interactions before the departure and that's the key at this stage that's what we're talking about.

Back to the Wilson family again you're going to see right here that in this particular scenario the key was that we don't just have dad receiving the messages, but mom is also receiving the same messages.

[Chip]

That's huge because in my family my wife is more likely to open and read emails. The last thing I want to do after work is to read more emails if I am honest.

[Brandon]

You can imagine how much more effective it is if you have a group of adults traveling together. rather than just the customer getting the info. he might not be passing the info on. That's a big deal.

Let's see what happens with Jameson and Cami. They booked their Canyoneering adventure about a month in advance. One day after the purchase, Cami opens an email on her phone. The email says she can save 10% if she books other activities. She is reminded of the rafting trip her neighbors mentioned earlier. She clicks the link. She hands them the Moab Adventure Center website. After reading the options she has some questions about rafting with her kids. She hasn't done it before. She taps the phone number and makes a call. On the other end of the call, Lecy answers the phone. Now Lecy addresses Cami's questions and concerns. She is ready to book the rafting trip. Lecy tells her she would be happy to help her with the booking.

[Chip]

So, we're about to see the in house process that Lecy is helping her with. We have seen some of the online processes.

[Brandon]

That's right and I am going to walk through a few details so you can see how RESMARK interacts with the booking process, some of the tools that it has. So we will walk through this booking as she is adding to an existing booking in this case. So cam's ready to book. Lecy signs into the tour booking system . You can go to any web-enabled device, you can come in and make this booking. Lecy is going to sign in. In this case, Cami of course already booked the canyoneering trip. She wants to add the rafting trip. She's going to come up here, she's going to do a search. She could look for Jameson or for Cami. Either way, she's going to find the reservation for the Wilson family right here. She selects it, she confirms she has all the right details, she comes up here clicks add product.

Now when we're signed into the application we have several other tools available that we didn't see online. We have customizable search filters it can help us kind of dig down to what we want. We have different ways to view availability. We can see the list view with a lot more details about who sold. I can click this number 13 right here and see a list of everyone who's booked and all kinds of stuff here. What I'm about to show you can see from either view but this is the grid view here. If I click on one of the tours maybe I'm new at Moab Adventure Center and I don't know all the details yet, I can see all the details for the tour. We can even drill down to things like what does the trip include. I can quickly be an expert on the phone.

[Chip]

Perfect for those seasonal employees that we pull on board and then want them to answer the phone or talk to somebody stand right in front of them.

[Brandon]

A common question is cancellation policies. They can just pop down here click that and have all the details right there before they make that booking. When we're ready to book we'll come in here and we click the Add to Cart button. We follow a very similar booking process to what we saw online. This is a little bit different depending on which view you're seeing but in the grid view, we see a calendar like this. We're going to select the date and then this is kind of cool we can actually show policies within the system or you know notifications or whatever at different stages in the booking process.

[Chip]

We can do that per product, can't we? So if you've got a zip line tour that requires a policy that's different from some other guided walking tour, a lot of systems don't provide that flexibility, but RESMARK allows you to do that at multiple states.

[Brandon]

That's right. This is a great one, you have maybe a rock climbing type experience or something that requires some previous experience. Maybe it's a more advanced level and you need to say you to be comfortable with X Y & Z before you sign up for this. This is a great place to say that before they even start Booking

We're going to agree to that, view the summary, and Add to Cart. We have several more tools of this stage as a reservation agent, logged in, that we didn't have online. For example, we can edit the details of a pickup location or even add special notes when they vary from the standard notes. Another really nice thing we can do here is to change the name of the product. Perhaps the Wilson family decides let's make this a family reunion, so they're going to take over the whole trip. I could you know put in some notes it is a private charter for the Wilson family. That's cool because it's going to show up on their confirmation but it doesn't actually change the reporting for my trip it's still going to report under the Colorado River.

[Chip]

Which is huge for a lot of companies that do that sort of personalized touch. It's great it lets the customer know that you're taking care of them and that you love them and want them to be happy.

[Brandon]

Yes, a lot of this just these personal touches.

You can also add comments to the reservation when you're signed in. For example, maybe Lecy notices from the waiver information or the conversation that Jameson is actually celebrating his birthday on the day they're booking the rafting trip. So she wants to put in a note here and maybe surprise him with something during the trip. So she marks it to say, I don't want him to see this but I want the guides to see it. I'm not going to mark confirmation but I'm going to say show it on the manifest. Then we saved that and we see that comment sitting here whenever we log in. We'll see that later on the manifest as well.

We can come into the cost summary. If we have the right permissions in the system we can come in and do things like edit the price, apply discounts, or promo codes. We could manage tax exemptions or fees. So we've got a lot of tools that we can handle all kinds of stuff with the booking itself here.

We're going to move down and collect the customer information and in this case, we're adding to an existing reservation, so we see that it's already saved for us. That's nice. If we finish the reservation Lecy is going to review the policies and check that Cami's agreed to them. As you said, Chip, they might be different for this product. We're going to agree to those and then complete the order. The payment pops up. Of course, we have different payment options when we're signed in. It's going to default the credit card, generally the most popular, but we have other choices there as well. We make that payment and then Lecy is automatically prompted to send a confirmation email to the customer. I like this because there's very little training required as reservation agents get into the reservation system . A default message is shown right here, but you can actually customize it based on the conversation. So again, a nice little personal touchpoint that we're looking at here.

Next, she clicks to send the email, confirmation is received, and shortly after the booking is made we see another email come through. This email is really one that has helped us increase sales in a big way. We see that this particular email, they're not going to see it again, but this is the email that prompted them to book that additional activity.

[Chip]

Absolutely it's huge. You want your reservation staff, your office staff to be suggesting and upselling things like that along the way. Hey, you should think about this. It's your first time to Moab, you're doing this is a great activity but you should think about this because it's a whole different way to experience it.

[Brandon]

Some reservation agents are really good at that and others are a little nervous to go there if they're still learning things and so forth. So having that email follow-up like this is really really important.

Stage 3: Anticipation

Now we have two activities booked. We're still in this anticipation stage, so they're going to get a few other helpful messages before the departure date. One of the questions that I get a lot of times as we're talking about this kind of stuff is, how do I come up with these emails. You see some of these emails that maybe you set up here, but how do I come up with them?

I want to step back for a second and just talk about a little bit of a process to come up with the email. Particularly for this anticipation stage. We'll just quickly go through this it could be a whole webinar in and of itself right here, but I find it helpful to go back to psychology class. We're going to think about the basic human needs and in fact, we're going to talk about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Science and research have taught us that as humans we have six basic emotional needs. We sat down and actually went through this to come up with some messages here.

The first need that has to be met is our physiological needs right where to eat, where to sleep, how to prepare for some basics. All of that stuff right. So what can we say that will help provide this basic information? So Jameson receives an email that contains exactly this. This message contains quick links, recommendations, and tons of helpful information about additional things to do, where to stay, where to eat. Just the basics. Again you're an expert on your area. You have this information and you can share it and make this easier for people.

Next on our hierarchy of needs is safety. In our industry, our lawyers tell us don't ever describe something as safe. Don't use that word in your materials or in what you say.

[Chip]

Unless it's where we put our keys in our wallet before we go rafting. Into the safe.

[Brandon]

How can we provide a feeling of safety and security? I think for most of us we feel less secure when we don't know what to expect and we don't know what's coming. So shortly before his departure, Jameson gets this email. It's kind of cool because the system lets you send messages just for a certain activity. So in our case when someone books the Colorado River full day trip or a half-day trip they're going to receive this specific message. The point is to help them understand what to expect in terms of water levels, weather, and let them know that also that a full safety orientation will be given before they get onto that raft. We find when we're thinking about giving that feeling of safety and security and what to expect a message like this right before departure goes a long way. It helps set expectations as well.

The next thing we need is to help our guests feel a sense of love and belonging. How do we do this? We found that by sending a message containing a link to a video maybe with our CEO or a local manager like that other email you saw earlier welcoming them to Moab providing helpful information helps them feel a greater sense of connection and belonging to our company.

[Chip]

How do you think Brian Merrill would feel if we if he heard that we were including his image there with love and belonging?

[Brandon]

He would love it.

Now the last two can be a little more challenging but really powerful if we can make this happen. People need to feel esteem. How do we do this? We can insert language like this into emails throughout the anticipation phase. Things like the following. You've made the right decision, reassurance in their purchase. You're among the few who will ever experience X. Which we can say

[Chip]

Everyone can say I mean right you can say that about just your own business in your case you've got the Grand Canyon so I know that most people visit the Grand Canyon from the rim as opposed to the river, so you can say you're among a few. But any business that you're in, your activity or your product that you sell is unique to your business so you can even leverage something like that. You're among the few that will experience this version of this activity.

[Brandon]

The final need is self-actualization. This is about helping our guests really realize their potential. If you ever hear a guest say something like I can't believe I did that or they realize, gosh that was kind of hard and I did it or that was a little bit scary and I did it. I overcame. I had a little bit of fear of heights but I did it. We don't find this as much with like a sightseeing tour in Arches but we definitely see it with something like canyoneering or ziplining or even rafting sometimes when people have these experiences. If we can set that up during this anticipation phase along with all these other great messages we've discussed, a few things should have happened. First, our guests should feel a deeper connection to our employees and our business because we've addressed those basic core needs. Their expectations are in line with what they will encounter during the activity and they are ready for the experience itself.

Stage 4: Experiencing

Now while much of the experience comes down to our guides and how well we can orchestrate those special signature moments during the tour, one of the keys at this stage is that we have the tools we need to operate effectively and to facilitate the very best experience possible.

So a couple of examples. RESMARK provides a pickup report. It sorts the pickups chronologically making sure that that part of your operation is really efficient and effective. The reservation systems also has a manifest. You can use this to review the needs of each guest. I can see that right here Jameson is celebrating his birthday and I have all of that information that they filled out. So when the Wilson family arrives and we can check them in we ensure all the waivers are signed and we make sure the balances are all paid and we're ready to go. The Wilson family is here they're ready for their adventures. They have an incredible experience canyoneering.

Stage 5: Sharing

The rafting trip is wonderful and after the experience, they want nothing more than to share it with the world. That's what we hope. I think after you've created this relationship with your guests you know, which is more than just the status quo right let's book it and do it, you're inserting some of these other things in there. The whole interaction with your company helps this step of sharing become very natural. People think oh gosh I have to do this I have to share. Of course, there's going to be sharing by word-of-mouth and we have a hard time knowing how much that happens. We're not out there recording conversations.

This step, at least on the digital side becomes really natural and effective. So RESMARK's, of course, going to send a message immediately following the booking or the end of the last activity. It's going to make it really easy for them to share reviews on TripAdvisor, on Facebook, and on Google. Which of course helps you get those top search results and influence others who are dreaming, bringing us full circle. As an added bonus now that you know what people have done you can actually trigger messages that help your past guests begin dreaming of new experiences.

So just a quick recap. In the Dreaming phase, we talked about making sure that we know that it's a complex phase with a lot going on. We talked about the importance of lead magnets, getting that information into your database so that you can move them towards the booking stage. In the booking stage, we talked about making sure that you have the right tools and systems in place so that you can make that booking as effective as possible gathering all the information that you need to then come into that anticipation phase. Ideally, you have emails for every single adult participant. You're able to then communicate with each one individually. We talked about the hierarchy of needs and thinking about your message structure during that phase. That's going to help the experience be more fulfilling. It's going to reach hopefully that very top of the pyramid with self-actualization and we're going to be able to get there more easily. They're going to have that greater connection, which then, of course, enhances what we're doing in that sharing phase, gets us more reviews, better reviews, and more word-of-mouth and all of that's happening.

I've found that as businesses put this in place we're taking our customer service up a huge notch, we're creating a deeper connection with our guests, which is so important today, and we find that sales increase. We also find a lot more fulfillment in what we're doing.

[Chip]

Well good. I almost feel like we should hug. We've touched on some really important practices today that can really make a difference for a lot of companies.

So before we close today, I did get a couple of questions that popped in while we were talking and I didn't interrupt you because I felt they work at the end. If anybody does have a question you can add it now.

One of the questions that came in Brandon was somebody picked up on the price change that you commented on, that it was a user right.

How flexible is the user settings in RESMARK?

[Brandon]

Yeah, that's a good one. So the user settings, I don't know what the quantity is, there's probably 20 plus maybe towards 30 individual settings that you can say can this person just create a reservation or not. Can they manage the price? Can they apply discounts? Can they do all of those types of things all the way down to what reports can they see? What can they see in the reports? Just sales that they made or sales from other people? All of that kind of stuff.

[Chip]

One of the slides you talked about the pickup functionality you can even create a user so that they can look at particular reports like you said. One of my favorites was at the beginning when you talked about how you could take the lead form and drop it on your website. You can actually create a user in your RESMARK account that they can't do anything else in the system except get to the website tools which is where you create your book now button and your lead form buttons.

[Brandon]

So if you have a web person who is maybe not even one of your employees or something, you could actually make them a user and say, you can log in, you can get access to all of this stuff whenever you need it but not do anything else.

[Chip]

Somebody else asked, 'Loving the automated emails how long does it take to set them up?"

[Brandon]

Ya, it could seem overwhelming as you look at this. My suggestion for that is the tour booking system is super easy to set up the emails, I mean they can literally take 10-15 minutes per email as you're setting them up. We suggest that they stay personal. I find it's helpful to actually look at some of the questions you really do get from your real guests. Stuff that you're answering all the time. You probably have emails already written. You grab some of that you refine it a little bit and that becomes the email that you're sending out to help answer those questions even in advance of the person asking them. The other thing I think too, I mentioned it's helpful to have lead follow-ups for months. That can be a little daunting but I think what you do is start on a certain month maybe it's February first. You just start and you kind of go through your own sequence, say okay I'm going to have a one day after email. Five days later another email. Write it on the fifth day. You can kind of walk yourself through the sequence and go through several months of writing those, a few emails each month or whatever. Now you've got a whole series of emails.

[Chip]

One person said, "it's not a question but a comment," and they said, the specific emails for a particular product is fantastic because some of these other systems out there have limited functionality as far as a follow-up email. They've never seen a system like RESMARK that actually makes it so that you could send messages strictly based on this product completely different than messages based on that product that they sold.

So right there we'll cut it off. I will remind everybody. Questions about pricing or setting up a demo you can always go to resmarksystems.com and waiversign.com to get some of that information. If you haven't done so, set up a demo today, and let's discuss some of the details of what it is you do and what it is you offer and see if RESMARK's a good fit for you and your company.

Thanks again Brandon for joining us today and thanks to everybody for chiming in today. We'll be in touch and we'll see you next time on Webinar Wednesdays.

Thanks[Chip]

10 Steps to Grow Your Tour Business

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 17:37:12 GMT

How one small business grew revenue by over $450,000 in one year.

Tour Booking System + Sales Formula Yields Big Results

(Chip) Welcome to our webinar today!

I’m Chip Broyles, Director of Business Development at RESMARK. I have our CEO Brandon Lake with me today, who is also the co-founder of Moab Adventure Center and an owner of Western River Expeditions, which is one of the largest rafting companies in America.

(Brandon) It’s good to be with you Chip! I’m really excited about our topic today. We’re going to be covering a 10-step formula that Moab Adventure Center has implemented this year. We’ve really seen some great sales progress as a result.

(Chip) Brandon, I’m excited to get into this, but before we get started, let me just give some quick background on RESMARK.

For those who don’t know, we’ve recently launched a brand new RESMARK platform. It’s an all-in one reservation system and marketing solution that handles reservations, online liability waivers , marketing automation software , and channel management .

The new RESMARK and WaiverSign platform is used by hundreds of companies all over the world. One of these companies is Moab Adventure Center.

Brandon, why don’t you give us a little background on Moab Adventure Center and get into how and why you’ve implemented this 10-step formula…

(Brandon) Absolutely! So, I’m going to back way up here, so everyone has a little better understanding of how Moab Adventure Center and RESMARK got started.

Our story really begins back in 2002.

Our operation in Moab, Utah was struggling to turn a significant profit. We had contemplated shutting down multiple times as we couldn’t seem to find the right strategy to grow this business.

About this time my wife and I, back when I had some sweet sideburns, took my mom on vacation to Branson, Missouri.

Now, here’s the interesting thing about Branson it has a population just over 11,000. It attracts over 7.2 million annual visitors. Branson has more theater seats than Broadway in New York.

During our trip, I quickly learned how they were filling nearly every seat, every night, all year long. When you booked a show like Shoji Tabuchi, they would also sell you tickets to the Acrobats of Shanghai and the Hollywood Wax Museum. If you bought tickets to the Hollywood Wax museum, they’d sell you tickets to Jim Stafford and Elvis and Frank Sinatra and it goes on and on.

Now, keep in mind this is in 2002, well before online ticketing services were a big deal. These businesses had truly figured out how to work together for the benefit of every business and as a result they’re now generating over $2 billion in tourism revenue every year.

As I return home, I realize that in Moab, Utah we’re doing exactly the opposite.

If you walked down the main street of Moab in 2002 you would find companies selling rafting tours, National Park tours, Off-road tours, Horseback riding, Rock climbing, Mountain biking, and the list goes on and on.

Not one of them is collaborating with each other, making it totally inconvenient and confusing for someone on vacation to plan a full week of activities and wasting the potential they had to be more successful by helping one another.

At the time we were selling rafting tours. And that was it. Our annual guest count was only about 3,000 people.

One day, my partner and I were on a drive back from Moab after visiting a new potential location for our property and we were discussing a new concept.

We would call it “Moab Adventure Center.”

We would sell every type of tour from the very best suppliers in the area, in addition to our own tours. The vision soon became a reality - and tour bookings shot up by 300% in the first year.

The problem was, we were taking every booking using pen and paper which, given the number of people we were booking, was totally inefficient. We knew we needed a tour booking system , but at that time, there were very few reservation systems on the market and nothing matched our vision of what was needed.

We were a small business and we wanted a tour booking system that would automate sales processes along the entire customer journey and help facilitate our supplier relationships.

After 3 years and a substantial investment in development, the first version of RESMARK was launched. The impact at Moab Adventure Center was incredible. Tour bookings skyrocketed and our cost of sales decreased substantially. But, after about 10 years of significant growth our bookings at Moab Adventure Center began to plateau, and since about 2014, we just hadn’t seen much increase.

(Chip) You might expect a curve like that in some businesses, but knowing what I know about visitation to the Moab during those years, this is probably more concerning.

(Brandon) That’s right! This might not be concerning if the we knew we had the same amount of travelers in town each of these years but it is more concerning when you see that visitation is increasing by hundreds of thousands of people over the same time period. It’s even more concerning when you see this happening on our website.

In 2014, we see a slight drop in overall sessions. In 2015 an even bigger drop In 2016, still dropping. Now, in case this isn’t sinking in, all these red numbers - those are not good.

(Chip) Yeah, I’m thinking, if everything was green, that would be better.

(Brandon) Now in 2017, things start to fall off even more. So, in 2018, we put together a new formula to turn this around. By the end of the same year, we also launch the new RESMARK platform and we’re ready to see the impact of all of it.

This is what we’re going to talk about today. It’s a 10-step formula that completely turned things around for Moab Adventure Center and one you can use to grow your own business.

(Chip) I’m getting excited. I feel like we should play some music from Rocky right now.

(Brandon) I know! I love this stuff!

Now, we’ll have future webinars to dig deeper into each one of these steps, but today, we’re going to briefly touch on each.

The results you’re about to see relate to Moab Adventure Center, but I want everyone to understand that the concepts we’re discussing aren’t just for Moab Adventure Center or only for tour companies. They really apply to any experience.

I’m hoping you’ll find you can apply them to YOUR business.

So whether you’re selling Tubing experiences for kids or tractor pulling for seniors, I’m hoping you’ll see some application for at least some, if not all, of these steps.

Let’s get into it!

Step 1: Drive online booking traffic

We started by asking one simple question. What is it that our potential customers are asking about your business, your industry, or your location? For Moab Adventure Center, it’s all those people driving through Arches National Park each year and staying in Moab, Utah. What do they want to know about the area?

Where does most of the world go when they want to know something? Google, right?

People ask everything to Google.

You know how you can start a query in google and google will predict what you going to type based on other similar queries. It’s crazy what people ask. Take a look at this. People are asking google what would…an accountant would use a spreadsheet for? I mean, really? They ask, what would an alien look like?

My favorite, what would a chair look look like if your knees bent the other way? I know you’re trying to envision this right now. I had to look. There it is.

All the answers to world’s most important questions.

Now, back to what matters for our business.

Using some SEO tools, we find out what are people asking google about Arches & Moab.

These were some questions we found to be common:

-What should I do in Moab?

-Can you drive through Arches National Park?

-Where to camp in Arches National Park?

-Lodging in Moab

-Best Mountain Bike Trails in Moab

-Top Restaurants in Moab

Once we know the questions, what do we do? We answer them by building content.

We build the content on our website.

In our case, we built pages about driving through Arches National Park, Lodging in Moab, and The best mountain bike trails. In all, we built 1,220 pages of content and refined each of them for speed and optimal content (which we’ll cover in another webinar devoted entirely to this topic).

The result?

We’re getting top organic rankings on driving through Arches National Park, Moab lodging, Bike trails in Moab, and hundreds of other keyword phrases. This gives us a 29 percent increase in new users coming to the website from organic traffic. That’s 42,000 more users from organic traffic.

That’s 42,000 more users from organic traffic and $354,000 more in revenue.

(Chip) Now that’s not really free because you had to build the content.

(Brandon) That’s right. But unlike a paid ad, when we stop paying, we still get results.

But the increase in revenue didn’t come simply from having more traffic.

Notice the increase in revenue is much greater as a percentage.

(Chip) Wow! That’s a 64% increase.

(Brandon) Compared to a 29% increase in users. So, what did we do to convert so much more of the organic traffic than before?

Step 2: Initiate contact

Marketing is about conversations. It always has been. So, how do you get the conversation started? We implemented 3 ways to initiate contact. Of course, our main goal is that someone hits the site and books several tours right away, but when that doesn’t happen immediately, these 3 items are key.

First, we made our phone number super easy to find. In our case, we put right at the top of the website inside a box that draws attention.

Second, we added live chat to our website. We tried to make it obvious and even make it appear automatically, like someone walking up to you in a retail store.

And third, we came up with something valuable to our customers. We offer to email it to them. It’s an “Insider’s Guide to Moab.” It has information on restaurants, things to do, an area map, lots of fun information that only an insider would know.

People love it!

We’ve had this guide for several years, but this time, we tried something new. We put this form on the bottom of almost every page on our website. It’s incredible how many more leads we’re getting.

To build the form, we go into RESMARK.

Under CruiseControl, we can build unlimited lead forms. They’re super easy and you have all the fields you want, plus custom fields. Then you copy the embed code and put it in the website.

Now, whenever anyone fills out the form, we are notified and their contact information is automatically added to RESMARK. In fact, if they already had a record. Their information is updated with the new request.

We’re now driving more traffic to the website and we’ve implemented 3 easy ways to initiate contact.

Which brings us to our next step.

Step 3: Follow-up and convert the lead into a booking

Within cruise control, you can set up as many lead follow-up emails as you want. Here you can see the first few emails we have set up for Moab Adventure Center.

To create a message, you simply click “New Message”. Select the type of message you want. Enter your parameters as to when you want the message to trigger. This can be days, hours or minutes after the lead is created. Then customize your message.

The key with these is to try and be helpful and personal. You can see in this email, we’re sending a link to a video. Here, our operations manager, as a Moab local, explains how to make the most of your time in Moab.

Other emails like this one are super short and simply ask a question.

(Chip) So, it looks like the goal with this one is really just to start a conversation.

(Brandon) That’s exactly right! The intention of the other email example to drive them back to the website. Messages like this are simply to start a conversation so we can help them. And it’s great to use both types.

(Chip) So what happens when someone books?

(Brandon) That’s the beauty of having CruiseControl built directly inside RESMARK! As soon as a person makes a booking, the follow-up emails stop automatically and a different string of messages begin.

This process is what we refer to as marketing automation . It’s automatic because RESMARK takes care of it for us.

Nucleus Research conducted a study, revealing that sales grew by 14.5 percent for companies when marketing automation software was implemented. Those same companies experienced a 12.2 percent reduction in marketing costs. Now, generally, marketing automation can be quite challenging to set up. But, as you can see, when you have this built in to the same tour booking system where all your bookings happen, the process becomes much more simple.

As so many of these messages will keep driving your potential customer back to your website.

Step 4: Make booking tours and activities easy

How much of a difference does this really make? Take a look at this. After we implemented what I’m about to show you, along with the new RESMARK platform, we saw our online revenue increase by over half a million dollars.

Here’s what we did.

First, wherever we list a tour, we make sure there is a simple path to purchase. A prominent call to action that you DON’T have to search for. When we present various pages for each tour we make sure that button is in the same place for every page.

We also present the same button in multiple places on the page. Once again, if we have a similar page for a different tour. You’ll find consistency. This all seems super simple, but it’s amazing how often it gets overlooked.

Now, in addition to this, you of course want to ensure that the tour booking process itself is as easy as possible.

I’ll do a quick walk through of our online tour booking process, using the booking flow I have embedded here from RESMARK.

- Click book my adventure

- Select any pickup options

- Enter my quantity

- Select a date

- Select my preferred start time

- Click “add to cart”

- Review my selection

- Enter my information

- Agree to the policies

- Complete my order with any payment that is due

Now, one thing you’ll notice here is that RESMARK didn’t ask for information from all the participants. Resmark ONLY asks for the customer information on this initial step.

The reason is, the more information and decisions that people have to make during the tour booking process, the fewer people actually make it through checkout.

So, again, the tip here is to “make the tour booking process easy” for your customers.

Step 5: Collect the participant data

Now, you’ll soon see why this part of our formula is so critical for steps 6 and 7, but let me quickly show you how we collect participant data. After I submit this payment I’m actually taken to the confirmation and my booking is complete, but then something immediately pops up.

I’m told that one or more guests are missing required details.I love this step in RESMARK and what is about to follow, because it makes all the difference to our marketing and customer service.

The person clicks “View Guests” in the little window. They are taken down to this section of the page where they’re prompted to enter missing details for each guest. Now, using the custom fields in RESMARK, I can collect anything I need to operate this tour, but I’m not yet worried about all the important contact information.

At this step, the person simply fills out the fields I need to operate this tour, clicks save, and is brought to this point.

They see that they need to sign some required documents prior to their participation. This is where we see WaiverSign really beautifully built right into RESMARK.

They click “Get Started” and they fill in all the information that will be used in the process of signing their documents. This is where we’re going to get phone numbers, date of birth, address information.

Once they’ve filled that out, they click next. They read through the document. Apply their signature and they are done!

They’re then taken right back where they started. You’ll notice the record is now green and cannot be changed again unless the person calls the company.

(Chip) So, we’ve gathered the customer information which is great because we have some additional contact and demographic information for our customer, but we would usually get that anyways, right?

(Brandon) That’s true. But, the magic of the formula, really starts with getting data for these additional guests. It gets even more exciting when many of our reservations have several participants. Using WaiverSign we can collect contact and demographic information for every one of them.

You can view the real-time results of that data collection directly in the tour booking system . In fact, when we started using WaiverSign together with Resmark, we’ve tripled our email database and collected all the other valuable data for these guests.

(Chip) So, this really makes a difference as to how you can interact with not just the customer, but also the other guests?

(Brandon) That is the key. And that is exactly what will make the difference in our next steps of the formula.

(Chip) So, hold on a minute. Before we go into these next steps, let’s review where we’re at in our formula.

Step 1 was to drive online traffic. We built lots of pages to answer the questions that our potential customers were asking. As a result, we saw the big increase in organic traffic.

Step 2 was to initiate contact. We make sure we have a prominent phone number, an obvious chat function, and a simple lead form.

Now that we have more leads, we need a tour booking system to follow up and convert more sales (Step 3). Using RESMARK, we set up several automatic emails to follow up with our leads.

Step 4 was to make booking EASY. We made sure we had prominent, consistent booking buttons, and the easy tour booking process from RESMARK. As a result of all this, we saw this massive increase in sales.

STEP 5 was to collect participant data. We did this by using WaiverSign after the booking was completed. Which helped us to collect information for each participant. As they signed their individual online liability waivers .This gives us more contact information, not just for the customer but for every adult participant on the reservation.

(Brandon) That’s it! And as we mentioned before, having that contact information for every participant is key to these next steps.

So, once we have this, we are ready to move to STEP 6.

Step 6: Begin the tour and activity experience

Now, most of us might think of the experience as the tour or activity itself. But we have a window of time when we can further strengthen our relationship with our guests. That window occurs between the time of booking and the start time of the activity itself. The window might be less than 7 days, meaning they’re likely in town already and we have a chance to only have maybe one or two touch points before the activity. The window might be more than 7 days, several months or over a year in advance, in which case, we might have an opportunity for several touch points.

We have to think about both groups.

In RESMARK, we have 2 sets of messages. Messages that are sent out a certain number of days after purchase or booking. Messages that are sent out a certain number of days before the activity.

Now, while some of these are reminders about unsigned waivers, payments due and other time-saving messages, within these time frames, I really like to send 3 types of messages.

First, I like to send messages like this one that up-sell other experiences. The more these people experience with us, the more connected to their overall experience they will be and the stronger our relationship.

Notice the little send option at the top of the screen. You can actually choose whether you want your messages to go out to the customer only or ALL the other people on the reservation as well.

(Chip) So, this is why gathering that contact information for all participants is such a big deal?

(Brandon) Right! It might be my my wife who opens the email and says, “Hey, let’s some other activities.” And that makes a big difference! I’m usually setting each email to send to all participants for most of these emails.

Second, I like to send messages that help set expectations. If we ever get any negative reviews, they are more often related to a gap with expectations regarding water levels and weather - both things that are completely out of our control.

This one goes out just before thee trip if someone has booked a full or half-day rafting trip.

(Chip) I like that! I could see this make a really big difference in reviews.

(Brandon) Third, I like to send messages that provide information that is truly helpful for our guests. In this email, we provide a link to a video of our CEO talking about the best ways to get to Moab and get around while in town.

(Chip) I can see how setting this up would really help set you apart from the competition and make your guests grateful they chose Moab Adventure Center.

(Brandon) And it totally does! We get so many comments about the helpful communication received before before the trip. We love it. And the beauty of it is that it’s always consistent because RESMARK is sending it for us automatically, every time.

(Chip) But what if you don’t want to send an email for a certain activity?

(Brandon) Great question! One really cool thing about RESMARK is that you can set messages to send only when certain activities are booked or even send different messages for each activity. You can also see exactly what messages every contact has opened and even the exact links they’ve clicked, including the date and time they clicked them.

Pretty awesome stuff!

So, once you’ve up-sold other activities, sent helpful communications to your guests, set expectations, and your guest has had the experience they always dreamed of. You’re ready to move to the next step.

Step 7: Solicit sharing

After you’ve really created this relationship with your guests, not just through the activity itself, but the whole interaction with your company, this step becomes very natural and even more effective.

We solicit sharing in 2 ways.

The first, of course, is to get all our participants to share their experience in the form of a review.

Now, I’m sure everyone is doing this, but the fact that we now have contact information for every participant from our digital waiver integration , our chances of getting more reviews goes way up.

In our case, we send a message to every guest that makes it easy to share reviews on trip advisor, Facebook, yelp, and google.

The next way we ask people to share might not be something that everyone is doing.

We make it easy for them to share their stories on our website and then, share those published stories with their friends.

An email is triggered by RESMARK after the trip. The guests are directed to our website where they can upload and picture and write their story. Some stories are short and sweet. Others are much longer. Each of them end up creating content for the website that helps with search results.

In fact, we do the same thing on our Western River Expeditions website and posts like these have created over 3,000 pages for us.

Then you start to see some rankings for words like freaking awesome. Which, sure enough, has about 300 people that type in that phrase every month!

(Chip) and that is freaking awesome! What a great way to automatically build content that drives traffic.

(Brandon) That’s exactly what I love about it!

You’ll notice that these first 7 steps of our formula feed each other and create a cycle. We often like to portray it like this.

It’s the journey of our guests and RESMARK facilitates each step of the way, allowing us to see big increases in satisfaction and revenues.

The last couple steps of our formula bring customers into this cycle from a slightly different angle. Let’s run through these. For Moab Adventure Center, they’ve provided some significant results.

Step 8: Get bookings from other local sources

Using RESMARK TrueConnect, we were able to give complimentary RESMARK accounts to both outside travel agents and local hotels and even other tour providers. So far this year. This has generated over $143,000 in additional revenue from local sources. And this is only those who logged in directly to the system without even having to take any of our time on the phone.

Step 9: Sell tours and activities from other local sources

Using RESMARK TrueConnect, we’ve been able to not only have other companies sell for us, but we’ve also been able to sell the tours from other local suppliers. Since we’re looking directly at their real-time availability, as if we were just an extension of their office, we’ve been able to sell with far less friction and inefficiency. The result?

The new RESMARK platform has helped us generate over $313,000 in additional revenue over selling the same supplier tours the previous year.

Step 10: Repeat, report and refine

We use the reports in RESMARK as well as our analytics reports and continue to constantly improve this process.

(Chip) I love it. From the numbers, this formula has really turned things around for Moab Adventure Center. When you find something that works this well, it only makes sense to keep doing it and continually improve it.

I’m looking forward to hearing more of what you continue to learn in coming months as we continue this webinar series and dig into each of these steps!

Thanks Brandon! We’ve touched on some really important practices today that can really make a difference for a lot of companies.

Before we close today, let’s take a few questions. I’ve already received some as we’ve been talking. Feel free to send any question you have via the chat.

Questions
Q: I’ve been using WaiverSign for the past 6 months and I love it. After hearing this, I’m thinking about maybe upgrading to the full application so I can have my participants register online and have everything in one tour booking system . What is the upgrade process and how easy it?

A: Contact support at help@waiversign.com . They’ll turn everything on for you. They’ll help you’ll get your events or activities set up as well as your payment processing…

Q: Can you turn permissions on or off for each user in RESMARK?

Q: How much flexibility would my reservations staff have in customizing in-house bookings on the fly? Can they do things like change pricing, change payment due dates, or other details?

A: Edit pricing, change deposit and balance amounts and due dates, customize discounts, add comments, personal the confirmation email, even edit the product name on a per-reservation basis. (chip) We would be happy to run through all of that on a demo.

Q: Do you guys have any kiosk / check-in features?

A: Resmark check-in, WaiverSign kiosk

College basketball tournament, 30 kiosks, 50,000 waivers in 48 hours.

These are some great questions! For any of you interested, we’d be happy to get on a personal demo and show you how your products would look in RESMARK, see if it would be a good fit, and help you get this 10-step formula in place.

Build a Killer Website

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 16:47:17 GMT

When users first arrive at your website, it takes less than a second ( about 0.05 seconds ) for your site to make a first impression based on how it looks, and for the users to decide if they're going to leave. The way a site visitor initially perceives your website is the basis of how they see your brand and your company. The easy answer, obviously, is to build a killer website. But not every business has the tools, resources, or skills required to build a good one—let alone a high-converting one .

It takes less than a second for users to decide if they're going to leave your website.

Building a website can be a complicated business, and depending on the size of your operation, you may not have anyone else to count on to do the work for you. Even if you can afford to pay a team of professionals to do it for you, where do you even begin? Don’t worry; we're here to help.

In this series of posts, we can give you some guidance on how to design and build a website—whether you're using that site to get more bookings of zipline adventures or to sell more "Like a Boss" coffee mugs. So buckle up; we're about to help you make a good first impression.

Step 1: Establish Your Domain and Web Host

First and foremost, if you want to have a "home" online, you need a place to put it. That digital location, the web address reserved for your stuff, is called a domain.

If you want to have a "home" online, you need a place to put it.

The simplest way to get a domain name is to purchase one from a web hosting provider. A web host is where all your site's images, content, and other files will be stored. If your domain is the address to your house, the web host is the plot of land that it's built on. There are many reputable hosting providers like Dreamhost , Rackspace , and Liquid Web to name a few.

Once you have your domain and hosting provider settled, you'll need to put something there for people to visit. This can be done in one of two ways: either code it yourself or use a website builder. What's the difference? It’s kind of like the difference between building your own house and buying one that's already built.

With the former, you get exactly what you want, but it takes longer and costs more. With the latter, all you have to do is "furnish" it—i.e. you drag and drop the options you want into the site builder. You lose out on a little customization, but you save a lot of time and money. Additionally, with website builders, you cut down considerably on the cost of maintaining your site.

Step 2: Develop an Up-to-Date Website

If you're reading this, odds are you aren't a coder, a programmer, or a developer. Your expertise likely lies elsewhere (like whitewater rafting , adventure course design , or off-road adventure tours ). There are still a few things you need to pay attention to, and a few important areas you can focus on to make sure your site runs properly.

Maybe even more importantly, since search engine algorithms take how your site is built and how it operates into account, there are development-based issues that can affect how visible your site is online. Let's cover the three most important items.

Mobile Friendly

Over half of today’s web traffic is generated by mobile devices. That means half of the users that visit your site are looking at it with a much smaller screen. Your site needs to be designed in such a way that it looks and functions in a way you’ll be happy with, regardless of the device used to view it.

Over half of today’s web traffic is generated by mobile devices.

Now, we’re not going to get into the weeds here and differentiate between responsive design and mobile-friendly design . What you need to know is that if your site looks like garbage on mobile, half of your visitors will assume your business is garbage and bounce like a fully inflated basketball.

Again, this is something that will at least partially be taken care of if you’re using a site builder. But that’s not a guarantee that your site is performing well on mobile. So if you find your bounce rate is uncomfortably high, talk to customer support (or your local designer), and see what you can do to optimize it .

Site Speed

Next, we have site speed. This is a measure of how quickly pages on your site load on the device being used by the visitor. Now, site builders are going to (again) help with this a little, and making your site load faster takes some pretty technical knowledge . But even without that specialized skill set, you can still do your part to cut down on lag.

One of the biggest factors that contributes to site speed is how resource-heavy elements on the page are (especially images). So, if you want your pages to load faster, you can reduce the size and resolution of images and associated files (javascript, css, etc) on the page.

Now, we know we just barely got done telling you that you need high-quality images and video. But that doesn't mean you want a page filled with 8MB images. Its critical all images are resized to web dimensions (below 1600px wide) and optimized for the web when saved (lowering your images file size). Also, the number of images and javascript/css calls on the page will affect load time.

Step 3: Design an Engaging and Easy to Use Site

Design is a pretty big umbrella, and a lot of different things fall under it. In this post, we'll start with two basic concepts, and focus on more artistic elements in a future post. What’s most important is the lesson that you don't have to be a web designer to make the site give a stellar first impression. You just need to follow a few of the important guidelines below.

Layout

In many ways, how you arrange your design elements is as important as what those design elements are. Now, there's a lot of complicated "rules" that designers are keeping in mind when they are setting up the layout of a web page, but the core concepts are pretty easy to understand (and to remember).

When design elements are used properly, it will show the user what is most important.

Visual Hierarchy is a term that refers to how you draw the eyes of users to certain things on the page by using visual cues. When design elements are used properly, it will show the user what is most important, and guide them toward the parts of the page you want them focusing on (like, say, the "Call to Action" button; more on this below).

Here are three key design elements all high converting websites use in their layout.

Size

This one is the most obvious—larger items on the page will seem more important. It's why titles are bigger than section headers, and why section headers are bigger than the text in the body. We draw attention to things by making them harder to miss. So if you want people paying attention to something on the page, you can increase its size (or bold it for a similar effect).

We draw attention to things by making them harder to miss.

You can overdo this, though. Obviously, if your "book now" button fills the screen it’ll look a teeny bit weird, so use a little judgment as to where and how you apply this.

Placement

You also need to be careful how and where you place things on the page because it affects where the user places their focus. Obviously the top of the page ("above the fold") is the most important, so you'll want your primary headline prominently placed in this position.

Often, this is accompanied by a large image called your "hero." But placement is also important "below the fold." For instance, elements that are grouped together will look related or connected, and having one element above another will make the higher element look more important.

Without a proper hierarchy, everything looks equally important, or in other words, nothing looks important.

What you want to avoid is a lack of hierarchy of hierarchy . Without proper placement, everything looks equally important, or in other words, nothing looks important.

Spacing

Rounding out our coverage of design topics is spacing. Bad and inconsistent spacing is common among many non-designers. Most of those among us who are not designers have a tendency to want to cram in as much information on the page as they can.

Let your page elements breathe.

The problem is (as any designer will tell you) text, images, videos, and other elements need room to "breathe." Put elements too close together, and everything ends up muddled and confused. In fact, leaving plenty of white space around the most important elements emphasizes them even further. Apple , for example, has sort of cornered the market on using white space for emphasis.

Bottom line: don’t be afraid of white space. Let your page elements breathe. Your website visitors will thank you for it.

Navigation

If you've laid your site out properly, users will be guided toward the content you want them to see. But you also need to make it possible for users to reach what they want to see. In other words, you need to make it as easy as possible for people to find the content they’re looking for on your site, whether that be your contact information, your features page, or a specific item you sell.

Good navigation makes pages easy for users to reach. Bad navigation makes content hard to find and access.

This is where site navigation comes in. Good navigation makes pages easy for users to reach. Bad navigation makes content hard to find and access. And when it comes to making it possible to navigate to a page on your site, you have three tools in your toolbelt:

Buttons in the top navigation bar
Hyperlinks at the footer of the page
Hyperlinks or buttons in the content of the page

That's also the order in which they are most easily accessed. Obviously the top navigation menu is both the easiest to see, and the easiest to reach, and it's on every page. The footer is fine, but people have to scroll all the way to the bottom to find it. Lastly, embedding hyperlinks or buttons in the text is risky, because you have to trust that people will read all of your copy, and most people don't.

Our advice: put your most important pages in the navigation menu. Links to your home page, your contact page, your support page, and your features or product pages are all great links to include. You may also want to include your blog if you have one (and you probably should—more on this in a future post), comparison pages, search buttons, "view cart" buttons, review and testimonial pages, about pages, FAQ pages, and the like. If you need to conserve space, just use drop-down menus.

Your page footer (the bottom of the page) is a great place to repeat your top navigation bar, or to include the less commonly visited pages that you didn’t put up top. "Meet the Team" pages, "careers" pages, links to any video or audio content you do, privacy policies, terms of use, and terms of service are all good candidates for this.

As for links in the copy, use those as "second chance" links to the pages you actually want them to see (especially your "contact us," "schedule a demo," "book now," or product pages). That way, if people actually do read your copy, you’re still moving them further down your sales funnel.

Your navigation should have a hierarchy—an indication of which pages are most important.

Above all, much like your layout, you want a sense of hierarchy—an indication of which pages are more important than others. How do you do that? By using a little psychology. On your top bar, for example, the first and the last button will stand out and seem more important. Try to reserve those for your "home page" and "try it free/buy now" buttons, respectively.

The same also applies to vertical lists and drop-downs: the closer to the top, the more important it seems. Avoid nesting drop-down menus, as that can get clunky, cumbersome, and confusing.

Make sure your CTA buttons stand out so they're easily seen.

And finally, when you're using CTA (Call to Action) buttons, make them stand out so they're easily seen. Make sure the text contrasts with the button color, and the button color contrasts with the background. Make the wording clear and direct (like "buy now" or "try it free"; see above). And try to save the " ghost buttons " for secondary actions like "learn more" or "contact us."

Step 4: Add Visuals to Your Website

While how you present the content on your site is important, the best visual hierarchy in the world will be wasted effort if the stuff on your site looks unprofessional. Now, not everyone's a photographer or videographer, but that's not really an excuse for displaying grainy photos you took with a flip phone on your site.

Not everyone's a photographer, but that's not really an excuse for displaying grainy photos on your site.

If you want people to take your business seriously, if you want them to book online, or purchase online, or sign up online, or do anything on your site, you need to look like you know what you’re doing.

Images

In most business contexts, images come in two forms: photos and graphics. For photos, your best option is to hire a photographer. It will give you exactly the pictures you want, and they’ll be high quality. Not everyone has the budget for that, though, so you have two alternatives: take the pictures yourself, or use stock photos.

Some stock photos are free to use and can be placed on your site without worrying about who owns it. Others you'll have to pay for, but the cost will be a lot less than paying a photographer to take an original photo for you.

Just be careful you're not using photos that look too much like stock photos, or that are in prominent use somewhere else. The last thing you want to do is add a picture to your site that’s used thousands of times a day for internet memes.

As for graphics, you'll probably have a hard time finding stock graphics that meet your needs, so you have two options. You can learn to tool around in image editing apps yourself, or you can hire a freelancer to do a one-time job.

Sites like upwork.com, designpickle.com, and fiverr.com give you access to hosts of designers who are willing to do the work, and because you’re only paying for a single project, you won't necessarily have to pay through the nose for the image.

Video

Video is a little bit harder; high-quality videos are more difficult (and more expensive) to produce. That said, if you pick up a little bit of savvy and the right equipment, you can get away with a lot. Here's what we mean.

If you pick up a little bit of savvy and the right equipment, you can get away with a lot.

Your videos (should you decide to do any) don’t have to be ultra-polished, big-budget productions. You can actually do really well with a halfway decent camera, some simple equipment, and a little bit of branding.

Cameras are pretty easy to come by these days. And while you certainly can spend thousands on a high-end device, you don't have to. Even iPhones and other quality smart devices have way better cameras than the polaroids we used to use back in the 90s.

If smartphones aren't your thing, you can pick up a dedicated camera from most tech shops. Point and shoot cameras work fine for most things, but you can go for a camcorder if you’re doing a lot of video content. Or, if you need action shots for your tour business, you can use drones or a GoPro.

Once you have a decent camera, what you'll need is something to hold it for you (since human hands tend to be a little shaky). If you're doing action video, you'll need something to hold it in place during all the ruckus. If you're doing stationary videos, you'll want a tripod.

If you're not doing action video, you'll want to get a good microphone for best sound quality— either a stationary mic or a wearable one. With those three things alone, you'll dramatically improve the quality of your videos.

Beyond that, you can get into video editing. The professional apps are pretty expensive, but there are some free ones out there. With those apps, you can add graphics, transitions, music, and more, leveling up your production game even further.

Keep in mind too that you don't have to jump straight into the deep end. You can start with a camera, and slowly work up to the other stuff as your time and budget allow. And finally, remember that you can always do another take if you’re not satisfied with the previous one. Just like Hollywood, you can always "fix it in post."

Conclusion

Following these basic steps in this post will ensure you have a firm foundation to build or redesign your new website on. In the next post in this series, we’ll give you tips on how to start getting more traffic to your (now new and improved) site.

The 13 Most Common Questions People Ask About RESMARK

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 16:56:33 GMT

We're asking the hard questions about online booking software so you can know which platform to use

When you walk into a sandwich shop, you usually have a pretty good idea of what you want to get. You'll have preferences on bread, protein, veggies, condiments, and whether or not you want it toasted. You’ve had sandwiches before; you know what works for you.

The same can't always be said when we go looking for digital solutions for our business. That's especially true when the solution we're looking for covers things as important as online booking and inventory management. Here’s the problem: unlike sandwiches (which you've probably had thousands of in your lifetime), you’ve never tried online booking software before, so you don’t know what to expect.

It's hard to know what you're going to need out of your solution before you've even used it. Luckily, we've done that song and dance before. More importantly, we've even played the music (i.e., we built our own app), and that's taught us a lot about what companies are looking for when they start shopping for a reservation system .

So, in order to make your search a little easier, we've put together the 13 most common, most pressing, and perhaps most important questions that come up when we talk to people about our solution—questions you should definitely be asking of every solution you consider.

1) “How Much Does Your Booking Software Cost?”

The first one is the most straightforward to ask. After all, the people on the other side of that conversation know you have to ask it eventually, otherwise they're never getting paid. The problem is, the answer isn't always straightforward.

First of all, most software providers will charge you different rates for different things; one rate for online bookings, another for offline bookings, and a monthly fee as a cherry on top, for example. Then, there are the pricing tiers, where online booking providers will gate off functionality behind higher price tiers, denying you access to the features you need unless you pay more.

Lastly, there are the providers that don't even bother to put their prices on their website, so you have to waste time calling them just to find out that their pricing structure won't fit your budget. Nice.

Look, we go into deeper detail about this in another blog post , so read that one when you’re done with this one.

Our Answer

We like to keep our answer as straightforward as the initial question. Here at RESMARK, we have three pricing options based on meeting the financial needs of our users:

Our first option is a fully commission based—3% on every transaction (for those who don't operate year-round)
The second option is a 2% commission and a $95 monthly fee (for those who process larger volumes of transactions)
Finally, we have a custom option for businesses that do more than $3 million in business each year (offering a discount commensurate with the extra high volume)

That's it. No pricing tiers, no restricted functionality, no complex pricing structures. Just simple pricing, and full access for every client.

2) “How Many Users Do We Get?”

Remember, like, 150 words ago, when we mentioned that providers sometimes put restrictions on usage, based on the pricing tier you pay for? Well, this is one of those things. A lot of providers like to limit how many users you get. Or how many resellers/partners you can sign up. Or *shudder* both.

As a result, you’ll want to ask what allotment of users you get, so you can know beforehand whether the solution will actually field your whole team.

Now, you could, of course, just have a single user for everyone on your team, or put multiple employees under a single user. While that's an option, we advise against it, because having separate users allows you to track who made changes to reservations, and when they did it. Good systems will track everything, even down to a reservation simply being opened. That way, there's more accountability and transparency.

Our Answer

With RESMARK, you have unlimited users, unlimited resellers and partners, and you can even customize what privileges each user/reseller has, so no one can get up to mischief they shouldn't. It’s all included in the base price.

3) “How Does Your Booking Solution Process Credit Cards?”

Obviously, a booking system does you little good if it doesn't move the payment from the guest to your account. How it gets there, though, varies by provider, so you'll definitely want to ask this one. Functionality varies, payment processor varies, and how you get set up varies. What we're saying is that there a lot of variables.

A good follow-up question, at least, for those whom it's a good follow-up for: “Do you work with PayPal or Stripe?”

Not every provider works with every processor. Some openly advertise a policy of BYOPP—Bring Your Own Payment Processor (it's totally a term people use, right?)—but most have one, or a small cadre of processors they work with. And not every provider can process card swipes. So if that's something that's critical, you need to ask.

Our Answer

Here's how our system works. Tour Operators will have to have a merchant services account arranged with their bank that allows them to conduct e-commerce. Our payment gateway ( NMI ) will connect with that merchant service account so that all transactions are done securely between the cardholder and the merchant (i.e. the tour supplier).

As for card swipes, that's where we lose a few points. We're working on the functionality to process swipes and the like, but we're not done with it yet. So, until then, we're living proof that nobody's perfect.

4) “How Does Your Event Booking Software Handle Refunds?”

Let's face it—refunds happen. As much as we'd all like to hoard all the money given to us, sometimes you gotta give some back. The question is, does the reservation software make that easier or harder? A good number of them have simply built the functionality into the platform, but we stop short of saying everybody because as soon as we do, some provider will pop up that doesn't.

Our Answer

This is as simple as clicking "refund" on the booking in RESMARK . The funds will be returned to the credit card that was used for the transaction. With a refund process this easy, it leaves plenty of time to curse pandemics under your breath afterward.

5) “Does Your Reservation System Do Discounts?”

This is apparently a big enough problem that some of our competitors have started advertising this functionality right on their websites. We're not sure who's not enabling discounts for their clients' guests, but we recommend asking just to be sure.

Our Answer

Yes. Were you expecting a more wordy explanation? Ok, you asked for it.

RESMARK provides capability for nearly every kind of discount. Among the discounts you can offer your guests are:

Discount codes
Discounts for tour dates
Discounts for booking dates
Discounts for specific times
Group discounts

In other words, you have the flexibility to set discounts for nearly every kind of scenario, and you can set them manually or make them automatic. Plus, adding discounts is really easy to do. Not that we're bragging or anything.

6) “Does Your Online Booking Software Accept Multiple Currencies?”

As much as those of us in the U.S. hate to admit it, the world doesn't actually revolve around us. There are, in fact, other countries beyond it, with economies of their own. Who knew? Anyway, the unfortunate part is that sometimes digital solutions (not just online booking software) treat all figures and values as U.S. dollars (and only U.S. dollars), and can't accept currencies from other countries.

The reason for this is obvious: exchange rates fluctuate all the time, and none of us providers are bankers, so it's not necessarily a "quick fix" to build an API that calls an appropriate database so that the software always has accurate exchange rate information, so it understands what's equivalent to what, and how much money your guests are actually paying.

Our Answer

Whoops, you caught us. We were talking about ourselves there. RESMARK does not currently have the capability to distinguish between currencies, and as a result, assumes all figures entered into the system are US dollars and processes transactions as such. But hey, we never said we were right for everyone.

7) “Does Your Booking System Offer Digital Waivers?”

Here's an important one. For a lot of us in the industry, the experiences we offer come with some level of risk. Or rather, risk on the part of the guest, and liability on the part of the tour supplier. While we obviously do our best to mitigate the former, it’s also critical to manage the latter (at least, if you want to stay in business).

Now, paper waivers are just fine, but digital waiver signing can make your system contactless and paperless, and drastically reduces the amount of storage required to keep all of those waivers on file.

Thing is, not all event reservation software offers integrated waivers . And of those that do, several categorize it as a higher-tiered functionality. Getting it separately can sometimes be costly, and the lack of integration is a drag, so be sure you ask so you can get a system that includes it.

Our Answer

While we do sell WaiverSign (our online digital waiver system) separately, we don't do the reverse. If you're paying for RESMARK, you get WaiverSign, and it’s fully integrated. You can set reservations to require waivers, and can send automated messages to customers letting them know that they (and members in their party) will need to sign them.

Considering the tours and experiences we offer are pretty high-adventure, we've understood the need for waivers since the very beginning. That's why, when we built RESMARK, we made sure to include the functionality. We use it on a daily basis, and we figured a lot of our clients could benefit from it, too.

8) “Does Your Reservation System Work Offline?”

This is where a lot of providers get a slap on the wrist (including us; see below). While some software suites started as offline apps you downloaded on to the devices you wanted to use (much like, say, Quickbooks), that’s not really how any of them work now. As functionality expanded, though, and as the need for regular updates increased, things had to change.

The web-based application format that's used today facilitates some key elements that offline apps lacked. Functionality such as enabling your resellers to sell from your live inventory. At this point, providers are expecting that either everyone is already connected to the internet all the time, or that you’ll want the functionality badly enough to find a way to connect.

Our Answer

Unfortunately, you'll need to have access to the internet in order to use Resmark. There's a lot of features that require it, such as being able to process transactions, having unlimited users, and digital waiver signing. Plus, it allows us to continue rolling out new features regularly, without having to force you to buy a new version of the app.

To be fair, we do make it pretty easy. You can even run RESMARK on a mobile device, so even if you don't have a computer that's connected to the internet, you can simply use your smartphone. It’s not a perfect answer to the problem, but we do our best to make the app as accessible as possible.

9) “What Is Your Customer Support Like?”

Ok, this one is kind of an umbrella question that won't get you any real answer unless you dial down into specifics. If you just ask something along the lines of "How good is your customer support?" you're just going to get empty, positive responses. If, however, you ask questions like…

When (as in what hours) is your support team available?
What methods of contact are available?
How long is the average wait time?
What does support cost (as in, does it cost extra?)?
How many support sessions do I get a month?

…You’ll get a better sense of how they’ll take care of you. Then, once you’ve asked these questions, look them up on review sites, and find reviews that specifically mention their support . This will give you a more honest representation of the quality of their service, and how agreeable their team members are when you call in.

Our Answer

Here are our answers so you can see these questions in practice.

When Is Your Support Team Available?

Our business hours are 9 am to 6 pm MST, and you can expect full support during those hours. For emergencies and urgent messages, we have team members available from 6 pm to 2 am, and from 6 am through the workday. We also offer weekend support for urgent issues.

As a final note, all of our support team is US-based. We do not outsource this important part of our team.

What Methods Of Contact Are Available?

We can be reached by email, in-app chat, our on-site contact forms, and by phone. With phone calls, typically we receive them by voicemail, and we respond to them same-day in the order they were received.

How Long Is The Average Wait Time?

This depends on the urgency of the issue. For emergencies, we typically respond in less than 15 minutes, regardless of the contact method. For less time-sensitive problems, wait time depends on how many issues are in the queue, but we typically reach each client within an hour or two. And since you’re not waiting on the phone, you can continue working while you wait.

What Does Support Cost?

Nothing. Full support is included in the price of RESMARK.

How Many Support Sessions Do I Get A Month?

On the same note, you can call in as many times as you like. We don’t limit your sessions, your hours with support, or anything else. If you need help, we’ll provide it.

10) “Can Your Online Tour Booking System Integrate with Our Website?”

Obviously, you don't want to be rebuilding your whole website just so you can add a "book now" button. That said, not every booking software is built to integrate easily. Add to that how you may have built your site from scratch or used one of the many platforms like Wix or Squarespace to do it, and integration can be downright complicated.

Most providers will have some form of integration; the question is just "how do I do it?" and the answer to that will vary. So ask them upfront.

Our Answer

We've worked really hard to make integration very simple for our app, and the results are the following two options.

First, there's the "Add to Cart" widget . This tool requires a couple of strings of code to be embedded on your site, and it requires your site to be JavaScript compatible. You can add as many buttons as you want and customize the buttons how you want, and it will host all of the shopping on your own website.

Second, there's the RESMARK Shopping Page hyperlink. Just add the link to your Shopping Page on your website, and guests will be routed to your RESMARK page where they can do their shopping. For example, here's what Moab Adventure Center’s page looks like.

11) “Can We See Where Our Bookings Are Coming From?”

This is a question about analytics (and not just Google Analytics). Growing a business is hard if you can’t tell what's working and what's not. And while you can certainly track things by hand, having analytics built right into the system you’re using is the objectively better option.

Not all online booking platforms have reporting and analytics functionality, though. And some that do only have the capability to produce a few simple reports. More advanced features such as in-depth, nuanced reports and integration with Google Analytics are not standard. So before you commit to a platform, be sure to ask how deep their analytics well goes.

Our Answer

RESMARK has very robust analytics tools and full Google Analytics integration. We knew we wanted to be able to see where our bookings were coming from, so we baked the functionality right into the system. So whether you want to see your customer data organized by transaction date, order creation date, or product start date, we’ve got you covered.

12) “Can We Trust You Won’t Go Out of Business?”

This is a legitimate concern, especially in the wake of COVID-19, which has hit travel- and experience-related really hard. You don't want to start using a digital booking system, spend all the time and money getting things up and running, only to have the provider go under. It's essentially the business equivalent of losing your video game save file.

Answers are going to vary, but what you're looking for are signs of stability. Ask follow-up questions like "How long have you been in business?" and "Are you a startup?" Smaller providers without a parent company or alternative sources of revenue aren't necessarily deal-breakers, but they are red flags.

Ideally, you're looking for companies that have been around a while, that have multiple revenue sources, and/or that are decently sized businesses.

Our Answer

RESMARK Systems was started to meet the needs of two companies: Western River Expeditions , and Moab Adventure Center . Those two businesses depend on our online booking software to allow them to continue operating. Additionally, we sell WaiverSign as a standalone digital signature solution (and business is booming during the pandemic; more on this below). So our eggs aren’t all in a single basket.

Did we mention that our parent company Western River Expeditions has been around for 60 years? So, yeah, while we're not immune to hardship, we've got some solid foundation beneath us.

13) “With the Coronavirus On the Loose, How Do We Go Paperless?”

Speaking of pandemics, you may be concerned about that, either because you're personally worried about the spread of the virus, or because you want to accommodate guests who are. That’s fair. All other factors aside, no one really likes getting sick, and cutting down on the risk of spreading a highly contagious disease is always a good idea.

Part of that reduction of risk can be done by going "contactless" or "paperless" in your transactions. But how might a business achieve such a thing?

Our Answer

Ok, so maybe we're not the only provider who might say this, but our whole system is designed to be free of contact. Guests can make reservations online, check in via mobile (like, you know, the one they brought with them), sign waivers online or via mobile, and even provide reviews and testimonials, all without paper or physical contact.

While this obviously won't remove all the risk related to Coronavirus (you'll still need waivers to handle some of that), it will certainly keep you, your staff, and your guests safer, and that’s got to be worth something.

Conclusion

Whew! You made it to the bottom. Good work! But if we've done our part right, that effort should earn you the information you need to pick a tour booking solution that actually meets your team's needs. These 13 questions should serve as a solid guide, a yardstick you can measure providers against.

So go ahead, put your newfound knowledge to good use. And when you finally realize you liked us best, we'll be here to talk .

How Much Does An Online Booking System Cost

Thu, 25 Jun 2020 14:11:13 GMT

A Back-of-the-Envelope Breakdown of Going Digital with Reservations

If you're reading this, odds are you're running a business that offers tours, activities, classes, or other date-based events to your guests. Odds are also good that you're currently reaching a point of critical mass in your work, where your manual systems are seriously hindering growth. You're probably thinking, "Man, a digital solution would be nice, but how much is it going to cost me?"

The answer is...well, it kind of depends on how you decide to get that solution.

When it comes down to it, you have three options regarding any digital solution: you can build your own, you can use someone else's, or you can go without.

Which one you choose will depend on your team's needs and your company's budget. Let's talk about each of them, so you know which one fits your business best.

Building Your Own Tour Booking App

Custom building online booking software is a great way to get exactly what you want. It's like the difference between going to a restaurant and ordering off the menu, and going home with ingredients and cooking exactly what you're craving. With a custom-built solution, you have complete control over what it looks like, what it can do, and what features you leave out.

This is why so many major corporations build their own tools. When you have the budget for it, developing an app that's custom fit to your organization is as great as having a pair of shoes molded to your own feet. When done right, it makes everything the company does a lot easier. And when there's problems or bugs, you just go back to the dev team and ask them to fix the issues.

You've probably already noticed the biggest drawback, though. Building an application requires a team of developers, either in-house or outsourced, and team like that do not come cheap. Coding is a skill that's in high demand, and companies pay through the nose for experienced professionals who do it well.

It always starts small. You hire one or two devs (or outsource to an agency) to build a simple app with only a handful of features. But as you start using the app, you start adding to the list of things you want it to do. This "scope creep" increases the work required to build and maintain the app, forcing you to hire a larger team to keep up with release dates. From there, the cycle recurs until app development is the largest item in your overhead and operating costs report.

It may seem easy to build an online booking software , but even the costs from start to initial release can reach as high as hundreds of thousands of dollars . Then, if you want to maintain the app (and you will want to maintain it), you'll need to pay the person (or people) who keep it updated. In short, it's an option that's nowhere near feasible for the majority of small businesses.

How We Did It

Full disclaimer: if you can't tell already, this is the option we chose here at RESMARK . RESMARK was built to service our needs as tour operators ourselves, running both Western River Expeditions and the Moab Adventure Center . What we're trying to say is that we know first-hand how expensive app development can be, and we can't recommend it unless your company size warrants it, or you're planning to take it to market.

Using a 3rd Party Online Booking System

Using a third-party solution is the most common route tour operators go when deciding on online booking software . That's because it's the best option for most businesses looking to switch to a digital reservation system. The truth is, the bulk of tour operators, day spas, yoga studios, and other date-based businesses are small outfits, and what they (read: you) are looking for is a way to cut down on paperwork and get back to offering the service they love.

Especially when you don't have a massive corporation with a wide variety of complicated needs, picking up a pre-built online reservation system can solve a lot of problems while costing a fraction of what building one would. The question is, which system should you use? For many businesses, it comes down to an issue of price. So let’s take a look at some hard numbers.

The Cost of RESMARK's Software

We'll start with what we know the most about: the system we built ourselves. We developed RESMARK because we were tour operators tired of running our bookings and reservations manually. With very few options on the market and some very specific needs on our part, we decided to build our own online booking software to solve our problem.

Once we realized that the reservation system we had built would benefit other companies as well, we started to share it. When we did, though, we knew we wanted pricing structures that were as straightforward and transparent as possible, so we kept it simple. Here’s the breakdown.

Our first pricing option is a straight transaction fee—3.5%. There's no monthly fee, and you can pass the fee onto the customer by including it in the final booking price. That's just $35 per $1,000 of bookings you sell. We recommend this option for businesses that don't operate year-round and don't want to pay for RESMARK when they’re not using it.

Our second pricing option is a hybrid option: a $95 flat monthly fee, plus a 2% transaction fee. So if you sell an average of $50,000 in reservations in a given month, that's a total of $1,095 a month (as opposed to $1,750 on our 3.5% pricing plan). We recommend this option for year-round businesses, especially if they have larger cash flows.

Finally, for businesses that process more than $3 million annually, we offer custom pricing in order to account for the larger volume of transactions.

What You Get

Our pricing options aren't tiers; they're designed to accommodate businesses with different financial needs. That's why, in all three pricing categories, we offer the full suite of RESMARK features. Here's what that suite includes:

RES+Plus —our flagship online reservation and booking platform
CruiseControl —our lead generation and marketing automation powerhouse
WaiverSign —our fully integrated digital liability waiver solution (signing, tracking, and management)
TrueConnect —our distribution channel manager; let your resellers connect to your real-time inventory tracking

The Cost of Competitors' Systems

As you might expect, the pricing structures of our competitors come in a lot of different shapes and sizes. When it comes down to it, though, there are only three ways that companies in our industry charge their clients:

A flat monthly fee (sometimes billed annually)
A flat, per booking fee
A percentage-based per booking fee

The vast majority used some combination of the three in their fee schedules, even if just one percentage rate for online bookings, and one for offline reservations. And there’s quite the spectrum on all three types of fees.

These, of course, were only the competitors that listed their prices on their website. Most did not, leaving only a prompt to call in and talk to a representative to learn more (don't you hate it when you can't see the sticker price?).

Monthly fees, for example, range from around $40 on the low end, to almost $250 on the high end (for a total of almost $3,000 a year). Flat, per booking fees range from $.70 on the low end to $1.50 on the high end, making it costly if you process a large number of less expensive transactions. And we found percentage rates as low as 1% (when combined with a high flat monthly fee), and as high as a whopping 6% (without a monthly fee).

Now, for both kinds of booking fees, you have the option to pass that cost onto the customer by including it in the final price of the booking (just like you can here at RESMARK). In our experience, whether it's a subtotal of $100 or $3,000, lower transaction fees (around 3% or less) don't typically bother guests.

When you get into the neighborhood of 5 or 6% however, they tend to care that you're tacking on an extra $180 to their $3,000 bill. Some competitors do put a cap on how much they charge per transaction to keep these numbers from getting out of hand. Not all of them do, though, so you'll have to make some judgement calls on how much you think your customers will be willing to swallow in fees.

Another important detail: most of the pricing structures are complicated. There were a few that were straight commission-based (a percentage of each sale, usually pushed on to the guest), but the rest had different prices for different things. Among the most complicated was one that charged a flat monthly fee, a percentage of online sales, and a flat, per booking fee on offline sales.

Here's a good example. Some providers charge one transaction fee for online reservations and another for offline reservations. In these cases, the online booking fee is always higher, often by a significant margin. Others don't charge an offline fee at all, incentivizing guests to call in and book over the phone (which of course adds to your team's workload).

What You Get

Perhaps the most complicated part of the pricing structures of other online booking platforms is the fact that nearly all of them organize their offerings into tiers. In other words, getting the full functionality of their software required paying a high monthly price or even an annual licensing fee in one case.

Several of our competitors have features that rival what RESMARK offers, and in some cases, they support functionality that we don't support (at least not yet).

We would be the first to mention that our platform doesn't cover every use case, but we offer the full suite to every customer, regardless of the pricing arrangement.

With our competitors, most locked important tools behind higher price tiers. Functionality like external agent management, mobile app usage, POS usage, or integrated liability waivers (if they offered those at all). If it wasn't functionality that was lacking, it was some form of restriction—a limited number of users, a limited number of bookings per year, a limited number of partner accounts, or even limited methods of contacting support.

Bottom line: only a few competitors offered everything RESMARK can do, and of those, all of them locked away some of the functionality in a higher tier.

The Costs of a "Cobblestone" Solution

Of the solutions we surveyed, all of them covered at least online bookings, inventory and reservation management, and distribution channel management. It makes sense; it's the core of what businesses in the adventure travel industry do. Online digital waivers were less common, and few had features like lead generation and marketing automation.

We want to reiterate that we have yet to cover every possible need our clients and potential clients have. For example, RESMARK doesn't have the feature set yet to handle things like foodservice and retail goods. What RESMARK can do, though, is cover the core needs of most businesses in our industry: online booking, digital waivers, connecting to resellers, and increasing sales.

The point we're trying to make is that you get more for your money with RESMARK. Case in point, to replace our system, you’d have to cobble together multiple separate programs to meet the same needs. Let’s break down the numbers.

With RESMARK, selling $25,000 worth of tickets in a month either costs you $595 ($500 of which can be passed on to the customer), or $875 (all of which can be passed on to the customer). Compare that with the average rate for competitors that didn’t include a monthly fee (about 4.5%), which would cost you almost double at $1,125.

Beyond that, assuming the solution you've chosen also includes digital waivers (which, if you want unlimited signings, could cost you anywhere from $23 to nearly $500 a month), you have to account for lead capture forms and marketing automation.

There are a number of solutions on the market, and like booking and reservation system, almost all of them have pricing tiers, and the limitations are steep. The most common limitations are contact list sizes, page views, numbers of subscribers, number of users, and in some cases, whether or not you actually get the automation feature. We'll make it simple and use a popular platform: Hubspot.

Just to get the actual marketing automation, you'll be shelling out $800 a month* (none of which can be passed on to your customer).

To tally all of that up, you could be spending as much as $2,425 a month for a collection of tools that aren’t even integrated together.

Going Without Digital Reservations

At last (bear with us, we're almost done), we come to the final option: going without. Maybe you have a system that's been working fine so far (or, at least, that’s what you tell yourself as you toss and turn at night). To be fair, you're not alone.

More than half —55%—of tour and activity suppliers don't have an online tour booking solution. Among those suppliers, 67% just resort to using a calendar or email to manage all of their reservations. Sound familiar?

So it's popular to do it by hand. That must mean it works just fine that way, right? Maybe. But consider the following: 85% of travelers use mobile to book activities for their trips. Eighty-five percent.

This will be a very rough calculation, but if you're a $500,000 a year tour operator, and you don't have a way to offer online bookings, according to the above statistic, you could be missing out on as much as $3.3 million in revenue.

Ok, that's a very rough estimate. But it demonstrates just how much is being trafficked via online transactions.

Now, maybe all the paper trails and phone calls are getting you through, even if there's some overbooking, or lost sales due to lag in the reservation process, or missed opportunities because your guests can't order online, or less-than-stellar customer experience as you try to get everyone to sign their waivers as they show up in groups of 30.

Maybe you're ok with people visiting your website and bouncing, never leaving a trace that they were there, or giving you a way to offer them more.

Maybe you're ok with the frustrations of trying to manage all of the travel agents, concierges, partners, and other resellers who are trying to help you drum up business.

Maybe.

Or maybe it's time your operation got a whole lot easier to manage, a whole lot easier to scale up, and a whole lot cheaper to run.

8 Tips for More Last-Minute Tour and Event Bookings

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 14:18:49 GMT

Some people are consummate planners. When they take vacations, for example, they know where they are going and what they are doing six months or more in advance. They might research their vacations for years before making financial commitments. By the time they’re done, every moment of their trip is so meticulously scheduled that it makes even Batman look unprepared.

Most of us are not those people.

Now, it's true that transportation and hospitality are typically arranged in advance, even for severe procrastinators. But it's incredibly common for travelers to wait until they arrive at their destination to plan their activities. According to Phocuswright , over 50% of travelers book their activities the week of, and nearly 40% book within 48 hours of the start date.

What we're saying is, there’s ample opportunity to capitalize on guests looking to make last-minute tour bookings. And in this article, we're going to draw on our 60 years of experience in the industry to explain exactly how you can do that.

1) Build a Killer Website

If you learn nothing else from this article, remember this: you need a solid website. And we're not being vague here—we're going to drill down into the specifics. But the overarching principle is simple: a subpar website will result in fewer sales.

And we're not saying you have to shell out tens of thousands for a web developer to build you a site from scratch. There are a lot of cost-effective options on the market right now. Websites like Wix and Squarespace make building a website very straightforward, for example. Some tour booking systems even offer website platforms, or website building services. These options allow you a high level of customization—more than enough for your average small business.

Just having a website, though (whether you already do, or still need to build one), is not enough. There are a few things your website needs in order to do its job right. Let’s go over the biggest ones.

Make It Look Nice

First and foremost, your site needs to look up to date. Perception is everything on the web. High-quality videos and images sell more tours. We've come a long way from the objectively bad websites of the nineties . That said, some sites are still lagging behind in the aesthetics department, and it's costing them sales.

Your website is your company's curb appeal—people make judgment calls about how established and trustworthy you are based on what your homepage looks like. You need them to be making those calls in your favor.

Making your website look professional requires a couple of things, and it gets a lot easier if you're using a website-building platform (like we mentioned above). You'll need high quality, professional-level images and pictures. You'll need a solid logo. You'll need a complementary color palette that matches your company's branding. And then you'll need a visually appealing layout.

If you know someone with an eye for design, color, or that sort of thing, have them take a look at your site and make some suggestions (and seriously consider their input). If not, consider finding a professional and paying them for a consultation. We promise, just sprucing the place up will cause an increase in sales, and you’ll be happy you made the investment.

Make Booking Easy

After website design, you have UX (or user experience). The key to a good UX is giving users the shortest, easiest path possible to what they want. And what you're hoping they want is to book an activity with you. So make it easy on them: put the “book now” button on every page, in places that make sense, like at the top and the bottom of the page.

Of course, for this to work its best, you'll need that button to take them to a page where they can actually book online (which is probably going to take an online booking software), but even if it just takes them to the contact page where you keep your phone number, that's better than nothing. Just make sure that the button is within reach, regardless of what page they're on.

Make It Visible

Your website does very little to help you drum up business if nobody can find it. Now, making your site rank higher on search engine results is a field of expertise in its own right (and mostly outside the scope of this article), but there are two terms you need to know (and become familiar with) if you want people to see your business’s name when they Google "underwater orca rodeo" (or whatever kind of tour you sell). Those terms are:

SEO (search engine optimization)
Content Marketing

SEO is all about (among other things) search keywords, and how to use them so Google recognizes that your site should be associated with those words. Content marketing is all about creating content (blog posts, podcasts, videos, infographics, etc.) to boost SEO, and to create an audience you can advertise to. In both cases, you'll have some research and legwork to do, but a little can go a long way to making you rank higher in search results.

Keep in mind, you also have to worry about whether or not your site is up to date. This isn't a huge problem if you're using a site-builder platform, but if you've built your site from scratch, be aware that sites coded using older programming practices don't rank as high as those using more modern systems and languages.

Make It Mobile-Friendly

This last one is simultaneously the simplest, and the most complicated piece of advice. What you need to know is that more and more people are using mobile devices to do their web browsing. It's already an established fact that most web traffic comes from mobile , and it's a gulf that's only going to get wider as time goes on.

If you want people to book on your website, it has to be easy to use your website. Making a site mobile-friendly will require technical expertise if you built your site yourself, but if you’re using one of those platforms we mentioned, a lot of it may be taken care of already. Just make sure your site looks as good on a phone as it does on a computer—loading speed, formatting, scroll functionality, online booking, the works. You'll thank yourself later.

2) Connect with People

Once you've fixed up your website, you’ll (hopefully) start seeing more click-throughs, page views, and just more traffic generally. Your next step is to turn all of those browsers into buyers. You do that by finding ways to interact with them.

There's a number of ways you can turn a user into a “lead,” but pretty much all of them involve offering them something they want in exchange for their contact information. One method we’ve found success within the industry is by offering an "insider's guide" to the area your business is located.

People who come to your website are there because they're looking for something to do at a particular destination. They're travelers, and they're not familiar with your location, so they're trying to determine what their options are. If you offer them a guide to that location, though, it will be easier for them to find what they want to do, and they'll be able to enjoy their vacation more.

The insider's guide method makes them feel special and associate a positive feeling with your brand.

What do you get out of the exchange? Their email, at the very least. With this, you can send follow-up emails to suggest activities in the area, provide additional resources, and just generally give them reasons to like your company. As you do, you'll build a relationship that will very likely turn into a transaction.

You don't have to capture a lead through your website, though. You can actually do it over the phone if they call in. Just ask what their email is so you can, for example, send them some ideas for activities, or resources for local hotels, or something of that sort.

The idea here is to be helpful. Most people aren't ready to buy during the research phase (we call it the " dreaming " phase here at RESMARK), but if you keep your business top of mind, they'll remember you when they arrive at their destination.

3) Use Digital Upselling and Cross-Selling

If you sell more than one tour or activity, it's important to capitalize on upselling and cross-selling. Obviously, you want each buyer to buy as much of your stuff as possible, but a lot of businesses don't bother to offer anything else once the initial purchase is made. If you want more sales, offering more is something you should consider.

Now, there are two ways you can do this digitally. First, you can send them emails saying "You've bought X (or "put X in your cart"), why not also buy Z?" It won't always result in additional sales, but some customers will be happy to learn you have other experiences to offer, and that they can book more of the things they want to do without having to go somewhere else.

The second way it can be done is by using your online booking platform . Depending on what reservation system you're using to allow online booking, you may have the feature to upsell right there on the same screen. Amazon is a good example of this with its "people also bought" feature.

Not all reservation software has this feature, though, and not all of them advertise it when they do, so you’ll want to ask. Don't be afraid to call up the support team and drill them on relevant features that can help you cross-sell. There might be whole toolsets you’re not using yet; do a little digging, and make the most of your tour booking solution .

4) Ask for Last Minute Bookings

In the same vein as the previous tip, sometimes all it takes to get reservations is to just ask for them. You interact directly with customers all the time, both over the phone and during tours/activities. Getting people to make additional bookings is just a matter of teaching your staff how to make the request.

If your customer service staff is simply answering a caller's questions and hanging up, they’re missing out on potential sales. Teach them to ask follow-up questions, the most important one being "Are you already in town?" Once you know that they're in the area, it’s a lot easier to offer them open seats on tours that start in a day or two.

Get a feel for what kinds of activities they’re looking to do, and then make some recommendations. Don't be afraid to point them in the direction of other suppliers in the area (more on this below), as it shows you care about them getting the vacation they want.

It's also important to teach your guides to talk about other activities in the area as a natural part of their conversation during the tour. Odds are, during the course of the tour or activity, guests are going to pass by places where other activities happen. You just need your guides to talk about them and mention them as an option.

Statements like "This is a popular rock climbing spot, and we actually offer tours that do that here," or "You think this is fun, you should try that." However you do it, make sure the guests know you offer more than just a single tour.

5) Partner with Other Suppliers and Resellers

A couple of years ago, we realized that tourism numbers in Moab were still going up, but sales numbers at our Moab Adventure Center weren't. What did we do to remedy this? We started selling tours offered by other suppliers in the area. We made the Moab Adventure Center a one-stop shop for all things Moab, and sales dramatically increased because of it.

What's important to remember is that your fellow tour suppliers and operators aren't your competitors. Yes, you’re all looking to occupy a valuable slot in your guests' time. But that doesn't mean you can't work together to reach that end.

By partnering with other businesses and cross-selling each others' tours, you make it easier for guests to find what they’re looking for, and sales increase across the board. After all, who doesn't want more advocates for their business?

It's also important to consider partnering with other kinds of resellers. Hotel concierges, travel agents, and other individuals that provide industry insight for guests are all good options. Again, the more people selling for your business, the higher your sales numbers will be.

You don’t even have to limit your partnerships to just businesses and professionals in your area. Expand outward; the internet makes the world a very small place, so find like-minded individuals wherever you can, and partner with them.

This tactic is most effective, though, when everyone knows how many seats you have available. Now, you can just manage this all over the phone, taking calls every time a potential guest even asks about availability. Or, you can use digital event software that allows you to connect to all these resellers.

With the right system, you can manage real-time inventory, and your resellers can book real-time inventory, all from the same online booking platform. With some solutions, you can even embed "book now" buttons on their website, making it as easy as a single click for users.

A Word About OTAs

The use of OTAs (online travel agencies) is a hotly debated topic in the industry, and for good reason. These sites (like Expedia , Hotwire , etc.) can dramatically broaden your market reach, putting you in front of potential guests you might never have reached otherwise. The problem is they usually take a very steep commission.

While that's obviously less than optimal, you can limit how much inventory they are allowed to sell, essentially reserving some seats for the OTA to fill, and keeping the rest open. If done right, this can boost revenues without having to sacrifice too much on profit margins.

In other words, OTAs have their pros and cons, but they’re at least worth a look. If you think you could benefit from a wider audience, don't be afraid to call them up and ask them some hardball questions. It might turn out to be a profitable option for your company.

6) Go Where the People Are

Your destination attracts visitors. It's why you have a business where you do. Sometimes finding more sales is as simple as making your presence known in places where those visitors tend to congregate. That means places like hotels, shopping centers, restaurants, transportation hubs, and other places like that.

How do you do that, you ask? It's up to you. You could go simple, with flyers, posters, cards, and other things you can post on a physical bulletin board. You can go big, with billboards, or ads for TV, radio, or local newspapers. You can produce brochures, leaflets, or magazine-style guides that can be placed in gas stations, hotel lobbies, airports, and the like.

You can go high tech, and set up a kiosk in places like hotel lobbies, and equip those kiosks with tablets advertising "things to do in the area" that route them to your website to book tours. Or you can go for the human touch—building relationships with local hospitality employees (especially concierges) so that when guests come to the desk asking for popular activities, they mention your tours.

There are a lot of ways you can effectively "broadcast" your presence locally, and each of them is an excellent way to attract guests who have already begun their vacation.

7) Communicate With Your Guests

These last two tips are about people who are already customers—those who have booked a tour, and those who have completed the activity, respectively. See, much as major corporations like to overlook this, individuals who have already given you their money are still people, and they deserve a little TLC like everyone else.

And one of the best ways to show your guests-to-be that you appreciate them is by following-up with them via email.

What you send them will depend on you. You can send them a reminder of what to bring, a teaser email titled "What to Expect," offer them other tours and activities (as mentioned above), share customer testimonials (more on that below), or pretty much anything you can imagine. In some ways, what you send is less important than actually sending something.

The goal, here, is to get them excited about their activity. You want them looking forward to their experience with you, and well prepared to make the most of it. It doesn't have to be a lot of emails. It could even be just one. But let them know that you haven't forgotten about them and that they shouldn't forget about you.

A Note About Marketing Automation

Now, obviously, you can do all this by hand. You can personally send out each email (or email blast), entering each email address into the bar each time. That's time consuming though, and difficult to manage. Marketing automation can take a lot of that work off of your hands, and simplify the process considerably by handling all the lists and emails digitally.

There are a number of solutions on the market, but they tend to either cost an arm and a leg or severely limit the number of addresses you can store. If you’ve chosen the right tour booking software, though, marketing automation will be part of the toolset, integrated into the rest of the solution. Not that we know anyone personally who does that (* wink wink, nudge nudge *).

8) Encourage Word of Mouth bookings

Lastly, you need to be doing what you can to give guests a positive experience (obviously), but you also need to be giving them ample opportunity to share their experiences with others. We're talking reviews, ratings, and testimonials here, people. Customer feedback, if you will. These days, people put a lot of stock in digital "word of mouth," and it's important to capitalize on happy customers.

Here's some hard data: 97% of users read reviews for local businesses. That means people are almost certainly looking at your business before deciding to buy. More importantly though, 90% of people say that positive reviews influenced their buying decision. And even bumping up your Yelp rating a single star can result in a revenue increase of as much as 9% .

Now, sites like Google My Business, Yelp, and TripAdvisor aren’t the only places that reviews and ratings can be put. You obviously want your guests to put their positive feedback there, but it’s not the only medium you can take advantage of. You also have social media to consider.

Depending on what social networks you're on, even a little positivity on your profile can leave a huge impact. When people look at your profile and see former guests leaving testimonials about their wonderful experiences, they'll be far more likely to book with you.

On the other hand, getting those testimonials yourself to use on your website and marketing materials is another good idea. People are often more than willing to give a response when prompted, and those responses are incredibly valuable.

Of course, there’s the obvious problem: not everyone gives feedback at first. It can take some prodding to get people to care enough to leave a review (a fact every smartphone app is a little insecure about).

Yet again, this is where email comes in. Setting up a marketing automation workflow to send a message automatically, say, 30 days after the guest's trip is a good way to do it. Ask if they enjoyed their experience and if they'd be willing to share it—either with you, on a review site, or on social media. Not everyone will respond, but you’ll get quite a few more than normal.

A Tip About Negative Feedback

You're probably thinking, "If positive feedback is so great for business, what’s negative feedback going to do?" That’s a valid concern. Not every customer is going to be a happy one, regardless of your best efforts.

Our advice? Don't be afraid of it.

Bad reviews and ratings come to every business, brand, and product. If you don't believe us, try looking up the one-star reviews for your favorite restaurant, book, or Youtube video. We promise you'll be quite surprised.

Now, don't confuse "don't be afraid" with "ignore it and it will go away." While you don't need to hide or bury bad reviews, you do need to try and address them. Reply to them wherever you find them, and try to address their concerns. A lot of times, you can turn a bad review into a positive one with some post-purchase customer service. It's always worth a shot.

And for those customers who apparently don't want to be happy? Just do your due diligence. People can tell when a customer is being whiny and unreasonable, and after trying to answer their concerns you'll seem that much more sane and considerate in comparison.

Bottom line: as much as people like to read customer feedback, they trust engaged and understanding customer service responses even more.

A Warning About "Buying" Reviews

Some businesses like to shortcut this feedback system by "encouraging" positive reviews. This can take a number of forms—offering freebies for five-star ratings, giving discounts for positive Facebook comments, or even straight-up paying someone to write a good review (even if they've never been a customer).

This is a bad idea. Not only is this questionable ethically, it's often easy to pick out the disingenuous feedback, and people usually find out eventually. You don't want to be labeled as a company that cared more about their online reputation than their customers' experiences, so avoid this "black hat" tactic at all costs.

Conclusion

Growing a business, no matter the industry, is a lot of work. It takes a lot of know-how, some of which you won't have, and may not be able to pay for yet. But if you know where to look to learn the basics, and you have the right tools , getting more last-minute bookings—or just more bookings in general—can happen a lot faster than you think.

The Top 5 Reasons to use Tour Booking Software

Thu, 30 Apr 2020 14:22:07 GMT

Why do I need a tour booking software?

For the majority of our customers travel is on their minds throughout the year. They are browsing the internet and social media looking for inspiration and researching new places to visit and activity options for different destinations.

Now more than ever our customers want the ability to book instantly, from any device, anytime, anywhere. And according to Phocuswright’s Global Online Travel Overview 2019 , online travel bookings are growing twice as fast as the overall market.

As the surge to keep up with consumer demand grows, transitioning to an online tour booking software will allow you to meet the demands of your customers. But there are many other reasons to make the transition to online booking software.

Here are the top 5 reasons from a 12 year industry veteran on why you should have a tour booking software .

1: Organization

Day-to-day operations can occasionally be a bit of a struggle, believe me I know. With RESMARK’s tour booking software , you will be able to streamline your availability, bookings, pricing, guides, and more. The time you save by bringing everything together under one roof is priceless.

2: Up to date availability

RESMARK’s tour booking software gives you the ability to view real-time availability, eliminating the risk of overbooking. Limit any last-minute bookings by setting predetermined cutoff times, and ask your customers to contact you directly for their booking request within those times.

Adjust your availability as needed to reduce the risk of overbooking and to aid in your staff scheduling, cutting down on those last minute surprises when you are short a guide.

3: Online tour booking

According to Google 48% of travelers are booking their experiences once they arrive at their destination and 54% from a mobile device. Travelers’ today want the ability to book instantly, from any device, anytime, anywhere. With online tour booking software you are able to meet your customers demands, leading to a potential increase in bookings.

4. Seamless guest experience

Online tour booking software gives you the ability to create a seamless booking experience for your customers. Eliminate the need for them to call, email, or use a third party to book. In addition RESMARK’S online liability waiver tool , WaiverSign, allows your customers to sign liability waivers prior to their experience/tour.

5. Transfer of Information

Eliminate the hassle of extra administrative work and make your tour booking software work for you. Receive all your customers information easily during their booking process. Connect with resellers and suppliers using RESMARK’S channel management tool , TrueConnect. Securely store your guest’s information, booking history, remarketing campaign emails, and more. Pass along important information to your staff and your guides with custom manifests, tied directly to your customers booking and history.

Regardless of the size of your tour and/or activity business, this is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what you can do by transitioning to an online tour booking software . RESMARK can help you keep up with consumer demand, grow your business, and allow you to get back to providing the best experience for your customers by sharing your love of travel and adventure.

Schedule Demo of Our Tour Booking Software

Feeling ready to implement and take advantage of online tour booking software ?

Schedule a demo of RESMARK with one of our Business Development Managers. We will walk you through the application and answer all of your questions. We want to learn more about your needs and make sure that RESMARK will be the perfect fit for you and your business.

What is an online tour booking system?

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 14:30:43 GMT

Customers in today's high-tech world use the internet and their multiple devices to call home from across the world. Communicating with family and friends through video chats and on social media. They now have the ability to find almost anything they need. Shopping, ordering groceries, and booking vacation destinations and activities in just a few clicks. The world has moved online in a big way.

By having a site that supports online tour booking you open yourself to a host of new customers and opportunities. Allowing them to view all you have to offer and to book right from their device be it a computer, tablet, or cell phone provides the convenience that users prefer.

Online tour booking systems are software that allows businesses to accept and manage online reservations. By integrating an online tour booking and reservation system to your website you give your customers the ability to view the services you offer, make a reservation, and submit payment via a payment gateway. This can all be done within a few minutes from any device with internet connection.

Reflecting updates and changes to your booking schedule in real time, these systems allow both you and your customers to see your availability. There are many different uses for an online tour booking system and they can be put to use by a multitude of businesses. The information collected is stored securely and protected by encryption and SSL security protocols.

Advantages of implementing an online tour booking system

Implementing an online tour booking systems can give your business advantages over your competitors and create a better user experience for your customers. A few advantages are:

Increase in bookings

You’ve closed your doors and gone home for the day, but that doesn’t mean customers have to wait for you to open to book a tour or make a reservation. With an online tour booking system you can accept bookings 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Mobile online bookings

Your customers can not only make a reservation when it fits into their schedule, but they can book from anywhere, even while they are on the go. With online booking you will be able to capture more of the people who are actively looking to book.

Business and customer insights

An online tour booking system will give you data and analytics, at-a-glance, that is easy to read and understand. This will help you to determine what is working and allow you to focus on your customers, what they want most, and growing your business in the process. It will also allow you to automatically follow up with customers after their booking. They can recieve their booking confirmation as well as a series of helpful emails leading up to their trip. You can even schedule messages to send out after they have experienced your tour asking to review your services.

RESMARK Systems: Online tour bookings are only the beginning...

RESMARK offers a fully-integrated tour booking system for today’s fast-paced world. It covers all the critical steps of the customer journey from a website visit to closing a sale which includes: lead generation , automated follow up emails , lead nurturing , collecting signatures with an online liability waiver and guest information, and posting trusted reviews . All this, and more, in one powerful application.

Here are a few of the other advantages to RESMARK:

Online Liability Waiver Software Integration

Ensure every customer on every booking has their paperwork completed with our built in integration with WaiverSign. It’s a seamless process allowing customers to sign their liability waivers online or on an in-house kiosk.

Reports

Once you are logged in view real time stats of your tour booking information. Sales by day, by products, overdue payments, refunds, and more all from your dashboard. RESMARK even allows you to customize your report parameters for sales, accounting, commissions, and net rates.

US-based Support Team

Our support team is based in the US and there when you need them, at no additional cost. With backgrounds in businesses that were using RESMARK they have a deep understanding of the industry as well as the business and system processes needed for success. Our support team is passionate about helping you be successful. They know that when you succeed, we all succeed.

Hair salons, gyms, property rentals, tour operators, and more, if your business involves booking of any kind an online tour booking system will be a great benefit to you, your staff, your customers, and your business.

Feeling ready to implement and take advantage of an online tour booking system? Schedule a demo of RESMARK with one of our Business Development Managers. We will walk you through the application and answer all of your questions. We want to learn more about your needs and make sure that RESMARK will be the perfect fit for you and your business.

Sales Funnel

Fri, 27 Mar 2020 14:33:12 GMT

Guide Your Guests Through The Sales Funnel

In order to increase your business you are taking your potential customers on a journey, starting with planting the idea, generating interest and excitement, and guiding them through the sales funnel.

Here are some ideas to help you improve your sales funnel to generate more leads and convert them into bookings.

Awareness

Once a potential customer makes it to your website, you will want to capture their contact information and direct them through your sales funnel to a book now button. At this stage it is important to be clear in what you are offering.

Capture new leads using your customizable RESMARK form. A great way to entice users to fill out the form is to incentivise them, by creating an item that is neat and attractive to potential customers in exchange for their email address.

Many RESMARK clients have had success with offering an “Insider’s Guide” to their destination or a “Top 10” list of recommendations.

Generating Interest

Your potential customers might not know what they want. In this stage, you want to generate interest, excitement, and desire. Make sure to show them what you have to offer and why they should choose you in a lead follow-up campaign, consider implementing the following to direct them to purchase with you.

Create a customized follow-up campaign, automating a portion of your follow-up with RESMARK Systems tour operator software . Each lead is customized with personalized emails and will stop sending emails once a reservation is made, ensuring consistency.
Share guest videos and comments that are in line with their interests.
Include different packages and options, so they can make the final decision to purchase.

Clicking the book now button

Make the booking process easy and secure. Don’t cut corners or cut steps.

Minimize the number of steps and the number of form fields in the checkout process.
Use one-click options when possible.
Offer a secure checkout page with a similar design scheme so that your customers feel like they are on the same website.

RESMARK’s online booking software is customizable, allowing you to define the sales process and gather only the information you need.

Customer Retention

Interaction with your customers doesn’t have to stop after the tour ends. Continue to engage with your customers after their trip.

Ask for feedback using surveys/outreach
Encourage reviews
Consider sending out special offers for the next season
Create and share content, including videos, on your blog, and in newsletters

Repeat customers are happy customers. Often, they can become brand advocates, generating new leads by word of mouth, and no one does it better than a happy customer.

RESMARK Systems Tour Operator Software offers a way to track leads, conversions and track the cost of advertising. It allows you to engage with your customers throughout the important travel phases of dreaming, booking, experiencing, and sharing.

Marketing Ideas for Tour Operators During Tough Times

Tue, 24 Mar 2020 14:36:10 GMT

Thoughts for keeping your tour business...in business.

The last few weeks have been incredibly tough for all of us. And as of this writing, it appears we’re not out of the woods just yet. In fact, some days it seems we’re just about to enter them…

Throughout it all, the Support & Sales teams here at RESMARK have been working closely with our clients and prospects, discussing challenges, ideas, plans, and uncertainties as we look at the weeks, months and years ahead.

And we have some good news!

While these days are undoubtedly challenging and uncertain, no one that we have spoken to believes that the tour and activity space is going to disappear in any way, shape, or form. In fact, the general consensus is that people are going to be craving the types of experiences RESMARK users offer even more, as soon as the world starts opening back up and gets moving again.

With that in mind, here are some of the positive thoughts and good ideas we’ve been hearing from tour operators in the adventure travel sector, who are already planning ahead and thinking about marketing initiatives now, while things are still quiet:

Staycations

While it may seem a world away right now, traveling will indeed begin to happen again at some point. That said, “stay-cations” will likely be the destination of choice. Folks will be yearning to get out of the house and regain their sanity, but they probably won’t be willing to travel far. Figure out ways now to be ready to connect to people in your city, people in your state, or people within your own country.

Incentivize Local Travellers

We’re all feeling the financial pinch that has already begun, but remember what it will mean to locals to get back out and re-experience what you have to offer. The more you can encourage them to join you, the more immediate and positive impact they'll be able to have on the rest of the travelling public as they begin to travel again beyond their immediate comfort zone. Think of these initial travelers as your own personal sales force. Their thoughts and reviews will end up helping you cater to more customers, and you’ll feel good about spreading goodwill at the same time.

Refresh & Update Your Website

There is no better time than right now to revisit your own website with fresh eyes and a new view on the world. Try to imagine what it’s like for a brand new customer to land on your site for the very first time. Is it helpful? Is it beautiful? Can you easily navigate the site? Updating content and cleaning things up will go a long way when people start shopping again.

Gathering Leads Through Marketing Automation

People may not be booking too many experiences right now, but no doubt they're starting to dream about them. Make sure you’re leveraging all of the lead gathering tools that RESMARK has to offer including Lead Forms and Automated Follow Up Email Campaigns . People are looking for ideas and information. Create some new marketing materials and start growing your contact database now.

Connect With Other Local Businesses

If this whole situation has taught the world anything, is that time is precious. As your first customers begin to return to see you, they’ll be looking for you to help them navigate the world around them as efficiently as possible. Look for other businesses or experiences in your area that may complement what you already offer, and send your customers in that direction. If that other business is doing the same for you, then everybody wins. RESMARK’s TrueConnect allows you to do this with real time availability, so that anytime you book a seat on another user's tour, they see that booking in their RESMARK account immediately! You can also track commissions and net-rates, along with automatically created billing statements between the connected businesses.

Find Something You Can Offer Right Now, Today

Do you have something you could offer your customers or potential guests right now, today? Something free, perhaps? What about offering training seminars or classes? What about some history lessons on the area you live, work, or offer activities in? Especially in the case of outdoor adventure tourism, many of us live and work in the same general area. If you still have access to the outdoors and can take a video camera with you, perhaps you could share some scenes of what your woods, or your rivers, or your canyons look like right now. What a fantastic way to share the love you have of these beautiful spaces, and to share it with folks that will ultimately want to come see it with you. And on top of that, who knows what kind of positive and mindful impact you might have on someone who desperately would like to be where you are...even if you’re feeling like you might want to switch it up and be where they are.

Focus On Direct Bookings

Think less OTA’s, and more YOU. Take the time now to focus on some SEO and learn how to capitalize on keyword placement. The more you can do to drive traffic to your site in the coming months, the more opportunity you’ll have to grow and rebound from all the down time.

Words & Images Are Powerful

Not since man first landed on the moon have more people around the globe been talking about the exact same topic at the exact same time. And right now, it’s happening everyday. It’s important to understand that, but it will also be important to move on when the time is right. Recognize some of the needs many people will have at the beginning, like smaller groups, and hyper awareness of cleanliness. Embrace that as you look at your business, from images to verbiage.

Words matter, so make them count. But at the same time, don’t linger. People will be ready to STOP talking about the current drama in their lives. They’ll be looking to you and your business to help them move on and feel normal again. Tour operators and activity providers will become more valuable than ever. After all, it’s what we do, that ultimately makes us who we are.

Resmark Wins Most Promising Travel and Hospitality Tech Solution Providers

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 15:40:09 GMT

Resmark Systems selected as one of the 20 Most Promising Travel and Hospitality Tech Solution Providers

Resmark Systems , a leader in adventure travel reservations, was selected by CIOReview as one of the 20 Most Promising Travel and Hospitality Tech Solution Providers for 2019. CIOReview evaluated leading travel and hospitality solution providers on a wide range of parameters including execution, technology and market reach capabilities.

From CIOReview:

"The increasing complexities in the travel and hospitality space evolve as a significant challenge for organizations, leading to the need for technological advancement. Tour and activity companies possess the most diverse and intricate product set, forcing them to combine multiple solutions for marketing, sales, and operations to produce favorable outcomes. This proves to be inefficient and leads to costly mistakes and missed opportunities. On the marketing side, most companies struggle to sell inventory through common reseller channels such as travel agents, activity desks, hotel concierges, online travel websites, and other local suppliers. They are confined to rely on tiresome phone calls to check availability and update reservations, leading to slow customer service, higher staffing costs and lost sales opportunities. On top of that, tour companies today have an unprecedented level of collaboration between themselves and resellers. This all-too-tedious process of checking availability and confirming bookings is time and cost-intensive, and fetters immediate services to customers. No longer will just a “Book Now” button and a prepossessing website help organizations stay ahead of today’s competition and anticipate for tomorrow."

Continue reading here

How to Increase and Optimize Video Content

Fri, 19 Feb 2016 15:56:03 GMT

Why should quality, entertaining video be a priority for your adventure travel and tourism business?

As smartphone and tablet usage soars, viewers are drawn to compelling, visual content. Google seems to know everything about us and they’ve tracked our viewing habits extensively. According to Think With Google, video for tourist destinations and attractions is growing by 179% year over year!

Video Interest by Age Group

It’s not just the millennials and younger generations who are captivated by video these days. YouTube data shows a surprising age group breakdown of online video subscriptions.

50% of travel video subscriptions belong to the 25-64 year-old age demographic
38% of travel video subscriptions belong to 18-24 year olds

Source: YouTube Data, March 2014, United States.

YouTube has found that the younger audiences are captivated more by video blogs (Vlogs) and fresh content, whereas the older demographics tend to be interested in a wider range of content including a variety of travel channel types, brand channels, official networks, how-to videos and specific travel/tour footage.

How Are Customers Searching?

Of the top 1,000 travel queries from March 2013-March 2014, Google data shows us that 71% of travel searches on YouTube were for specific destination names with only 6% of viewers searching by the travel brand. On the flip side – Google searches for travel during the same date range found just 26% of travel searches were for destination names with the majority (58% of searches) looking for the travel brand.

Keys to capturing audience interest

The result of an explosion of social video in the last few years is more content for your brand to compete with. Videos can easily get buried before they capture and engage your target audience. To produce videos that stand out and make a quick first impression, make sure your content is:

Creative

Unique videos that master the storytelling art stand out. New to social media video? Checkout the 7 Keys of Storytelling: Begin at the End .

Funny

Social media videos offer a chance to entertain your guests and offer an authentic view of your business. But beware – humor gone wrong can be dangerous.

What’s funny to some may not be to others and even the big guys get it wrong some times as shown in this Samsung video.

This awesome video created in 2014 by Zoar Outdoor went viral and had subscribers of their YouTube channel rolling with laughter. The video offered a fresh way to showcase the variety of activities available to the outfitter’s customers.

Short

Social media videos should be kept short because they’ve got just an instant to engage your audience. An Ad Age study found you have:
10 seconds to grab a viewers attention
If you don’t engage the audience within 30 seconds you’ll loose 33% of viewers
Video that doesn’t engage within a minute has lost 45% of viewers

Helpful And Useful

Over 100 million hours of how-to content was watched in North America during the first 5 months of 2015. How-to video content is not entertainment – instead how-to videos offer useful tips to help your customers. In the tourism and travel industry they can range from packing lists to activity demonstrations.

The moral of the social video story? Short social media videos that are creative and helpful are a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal.

How to get a Plethora of Customer Reviews

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:13:02 GMT

What are you doing to get reviews from your guests?

Talking about your travels is much easier than reviewing the plumber who fixed the toilet yesterday. As tour operators, we should have no problem getting a plethora of reviews .

A recent post from KISS Metrics highlights 7 creative ways to get customer testimonials .

Facebook Reviews
Linked In Recommendations
Youtube Video Reviews
Local Search Directories
Niche Review Sites
Rewarding Customers Who Review
Google Alerts and Social Mentions

As tour operators, it is so easy to garner trip reviews and we should be collecting those reviews in as many locations online as possible, as well as consolidating them on our own websites.

But how do you do this consistently? It’s critical that we have some form of automated, post-trip communication . Using Resmark Tour Booking Software , you can trigger an email right after a trip that solicits reviews of the travel experience. You certainly don’t want to give them every review option in that email, but choose a couple that work well based on the experience they’ve had. Vary it up to get reveiws in all important locations.

If your travelers meet at your place of business, you might consider a review kiosk that defaults to the facebook reviews tab or a web cam where customers can talk about their experience. Perhaps offer an incentive for providing a review.

What are you doing to get reviews from your guests?

Would you say I have a plethora? Let’s relive this for a moment…

Automated Lead Follow Up for Tours, Events, Classes and Rentals

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 17:14:36 GMT

What follow up emails are working well for you?

Someone visits your website, requests an itinerary, a brochure or a guide to your area. You’ve generated a lead . Now what? Statistics show that nearly 50% of companies never follow-up with a prospect. They also show that over 80% of sales are made after the fifth contact. What are you doing to followup?

Resmark Systems provides tour operators a way to trigger emails based on certain events such as a new lead, a reservation, or a trip departure. Triggering emails automatically from within the tour booking system makes for consistent customer service and incredible return on investment.

Many of our clients often ask for email ideas. Here are a few to get you started on the road to greater sales conversion.

FOLLOWING UP WITH A LEAD – EMAIL IDEAS

Send a short personal email ending with a question about dates and trips.
List the top 10 things to do in your area. Be helpful. These might include your trips, but also other activities and places to visit.
Feature a specific trip that would be of interest to the potential guest (based on their location and trip type interests). Perhaps include an offer to book the tour online.
Share a personal experience that relates to the interest of your guest (using the dynamic content rules in Resmark).
Share guest stories (preferably told by the guest) that relate to the travel party type specified by the lead. For example, if someone has an interest in "corporate team building," send a story from another guest that had a wonderful experience with their business group. These could be links out to a blog where your stories are collected.
Information about events and festivals. You can customize this content based on the dates of interest and location interest gathered during lead generation .
Inside tips and information about a destination of interest. The more people are educated about an area, they more likely their interest will be stronger.
Link to a facebook page that reveals a secret code when someone likes your company page. This allows you to continue building your relationship in other ways.
Discuss reasons why someone should choose your trip over another experience. Have fun with it and be creative. Realize that your competition is often not the tour operator down the road. Perhaps you also compete with Disneyland, a cruise or a beach vacation.
What common concerns do you hear constantly while making a reservation on the phone? Address these in advance with an email. Perhaps include a guest testimonial that addresses the concern.

Certainly, your followup emails will vary based on what you sell, but hopefully this short list helps get the ball rolling.

All too often, we don’t follow-up enough with potential clients. Some interesting statistics from JMJ Direct show that over 80% of sales are made after the 5th contact. If we have only 2 or 3 follow-ups in place, we’re missing a huge opportunity. Remember that not every email is opened so it often takes several contacts and perhaps even some phone followup to close a sale.

Statistics will vary per industry, but one thing is certainly true. Automating a portion of our follow-up through tour operator software like Resmark makes all the difference in ensuring consistency.

What followup emails are working well for you?

Tour Operator Reservation System Saves Marriages

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 17:56:24 GMT

How the canopy tour industry uses tour operator reservation system

Michael Smith, President of AdventureSmith, Inc. responds to questions about Resmark Systems as a reservation and marketing solution for the Canopy Tour and Challenge Course industry and tour operators in general.

Michael has 16 plus years experience in the challenge course industry as a facilitator/guide, builder, manager, trainer, and business consultant and holds degrees in Wilderness Leadership and Master of Training and Development. Michael has worked with numerous Fortune 500 companies as a business consultant, facilitated hundred of challenge course programs for schools, teachers, and youth organizations, authored and published climbing guides, worked as a Chief Field Instructor for the Outward Bound School, and managed challenge course programs. Through his work as a consultant in the canopy tour field he has helped to design and launch more than a dozen canopy tours in the United States, Canada, and abroad and has provided training, site feasibility and business planning services to more than 40 canopy tour and zip line operations. Michael is currently the President of AdventureSmith, Inc., a niche consultancy focusing on business consulting, marketing, and staff training for zip lines, canopy tours, and adventure parks. He is extremely excited about his two newest projects: www.ZiplineNirvana.com, a social networking site for zip line and canopy tour enthusiasts, and ArborTrek, a new canopy tour company with locations under development in the Northeast United States.

Q: How quickly is the canopy tour industry growing?
Canopy Tours first came to the United States in 2003, but it was not until 2005 that the boom really began. As of the end of 2009, there were 85 commercial zip rides, canopy tours, and zip line tours in the U.S. and Canada. By mid-summer 2010, I anticipate there will be 120 tours (an increase of 41% in the first half of 2010). For more information, please refer to the Zipline statistics and trends on the Zipline Nirvana Blog.

Q: What problems or challenges were you trying to solve when you found Resmark?

Unlike Aerial Trekking Courses and Zip Rides, most canopy tours and zip line tours rely heavily on reservations. While tours can occasionally accommodate walk-ups, walk-ups create staffing, screening, and risk management challenges. Well located and marketed canopy tours will often serve 250-350 clients per day during peak season. To manage these numbers, an efficient reservation process is necessary; ideally that process would allow for 24/7 access to data and for clients to easily book online.

In seeking a solution, I explored more than 15 different systems. While there were a number of systems that offered some of the features I was seeking, many lacked efficiency and from a functionality standpoint, they were limited. Resmark was clean, efficient, and powerful. As a marketing specialist, the integration of the marketing toolbox was the icing on the cake.

Pricing for reservation systems is across the boards. Systems were available from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands. As a web-based software developer, I was looking for a product line that I knew would have a long life cycle, would see continuous development, and would be well supported. I found all of those criteria in Resmark. From a value standpoint, Resmark won hands down. Further, it was one of the few systems I researched that showed a positive ROI.

Q: Why do you recommend Resmark to tour operators over other systems?

It’s simple.

The system has a clean, user-friendly interface that instill confidence in end-users when booking.
On the backend, Resmark is powerful and has the necessary features to grow with businesses if they have multiple product lines, elect to diversify their offerings, or wish to become a reseller for other tours.
Resmark offers integrated marketing features that reduce marketing costs and improve the front-end and follow-up experience.
Resmark is a supported product line with a bright future. We’re talking about the storage and accessibility of critical business data. I have to be confident that any product I recommend my clients use will continue to be secure, will have new features added, and will be well supported in to the future. While I tested many less expensive products, most of the product lines lacked long-term vision and high-end support.
From a marketing standpoint, Canopy Tours are the “sexy” item that sells. Operators who understand this can leverage their marketing to sell other tours, lodging, and products. Resmark’s ability to setup agents, embed the booking process into other sites, and to establish relationships to sell tours for other operators provides opportunities for operators to dramatically grow their business beyond a single product.
It provides owners the ability to run reports, track marketing, and pull critical business data necessary to make good business decisions.
Resmark automates many of the most time consuming and mundane functions of the booking process greatly reducing staffing costs and improving customer service.
Anecdotally, of the twelve tours I have helped to install since 2005, four operations elected not to invest in a reliable online reservation system. Those four owners are now divorced. Could Resmark have saved their marriages? Hard to say. What it could definitely have done is reduced the stress of non-stop phone calls late in to the evening and the fear of lost income if the phone was not answered. It has been my experience that tours operating without a good reservation system frequently underperform. It has also been my observation that tour operators without an easy-to-use online reservation system arrive at the office each day to a full or near full voice mailbox. During the busy season, some calls can go a full day or more before it can be returned. That’s bad business, especially when many of the most common questions and requests could easily be handled by Resmark.

Q: What would you say to tour companies who are having a hard time with the cost of computerized reservation software like Resmark?

Resmark is not appropriate for all tours and must be calculated accurately in to the business plan. My experience in reviewing business plans is that new tour operators almost always underestimate the time required to book tours and send out confirmations. Everyone looks at the revenue side of the business and almost no one looks at the expense side.

For modest size tours (those serving over 10,000 clients) and up, the cost of Resmark is often completely offset by the reduction in staff wages. For larger tours concerned about giving away a percentage of their revenues, my recommendation is to charge a convenience fee or service fee of 1% to all customers. You could even charge a 2% service fee and make a small profit. Most guests will not complain about the additional fee and you will cover the costs of Resmark.

When it comes down to it, if a company has to justify the cost of a good online reservation system , it is likely that they have already made a series of poor business decisions. While there are a few examples of tours whose business models do not require a reservation system like cruise-fed or resort-fed tours serving a single client, most businesses have to plan it into their expenses.

Whether a company elects to use Resmark or another system often has more to do with how the owner views the world. Are they the type of person that see long-term value and return on investment or are they simply looking at upfront costs. Having worked with numerous CRM systems and web-based solutions, I can honestly say that each time I have selected a product based on a one-time fee and not a license with continual support, I have been disappointed and often had to invest significantly more in the future to transfer data to a new system.

Q: How can tour operators take advantage of Resmark to make their business more efficient, save time, or save money?

Automation is one of the top reasons I recommend Resmark. Analysis of many of the tours I have worked with show that most reservations occur early in the morning or after normal business hours. Clients have three options: 1) carry a cell phone at all hours, 2) spend money staffing an office early in the morning and late at night, or 3) install a user-friendly online reservation system. It’s a no brainer in my mind.

The ability to collect customer data online or over the phone and automate custom responses leads to cost savings, happy customers, and happy staff. After all, who really wants to constantly be entering data and tinkering with Word templates and e-mails when it can be automated. Automation allows key staff and customer service representatives to focus on what they should be doing (servicing customers’ needs and growing the business). Instead, I watch a lot of underperforming business pay good money to have their staff simply enter data and send out confirmations. What a waste.

As an owner, I value the reporting features. Reports allow me to more efficiently schedule staff, plan for the future, track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, and check on the bottom line. In the past, these were functions that required tying up other staff on the phone or manually compiling data. Through Resmark, reports are available 24 hours a day from anywhere in the World provided that an internet connection is available.

Q: How can tour operators take advantage of Resmark to increase sales?

Achieving great success in the canopy tour industry is a matter of leverage. The ability to setup agents and to leverage the marketing capacities of many agencies rather than just your own is the single most strategy to growing a business quickly. Resmark makes the process fast and simple.

For operations with multiple tours and products, the up-sell features built in to the Resmark System are top notch. Whether as part of the booking process or through automated e-marketing , Resmark provides options for operators to build the process once and benefit for months.

See a demo of Resmark Systems today!

What to Look for in an Online Reservation System

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 19:45:44 GMT

What functionality should you look for in an Online Reservation System?

When selecting reservation software for your tour business, there are several things to keep in mind. I have comprised a list of functionality that should be sought after by business in the Adventure Travel Industry.

System Cost

As is the case with most business software, you get what you pay for. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the most expensive booking management system will be the best solution for your business, it simply means that a more costly system generally has more functionality and is more robust. With that said, be sure to demo a few different reservation software solutions and find one that is rich with functionality you will use. Of course, what this all comes down to is a cost/value analysis. Some systems will provide basic reservation functionality. Other systems will provide reservations plus operations features. The most comprehensive systems, such as Resmark, will provide reservations, operations, accounting, and best of all – marketing automation. When you look at the time and cost saved with online reservations, operational efficiency, accounting time and new business generated from incredible marketing tools, its easy to see how much value is packed into a system that runs most of the critical elements of your business.

Book your Resmark Demo today

Software Longevity

Because an electronic reservation system will likely cost your business thousands of dollars, you want to make sure that you find a system that will be around for the long run. Be weary of systems that do not cost you anything on a monthly basis. I say this because this usually means there are no upgrades or new releases and internet reservation systems can fall out of date quickly. You want to find a system backed by strong software engineers who are not only adding new functionality, but also fixing bugs and performing regular maintenance development. Find a reservation booking system that is continually changing as technology changes, as this will keep your business on the forefront of your industry.

Who is Using the Reservation Software

When selecting an online booking system it is also imperative to know what other tour operators are using it and what type of results they are seeing. Request a list of references from the reservation system provider and speak with their users. The sales person can tell you how great the system is and all of the functionality it has, but you never know until you speak with the tour operators who are actually using it. If a reservation system provider has a client base built of successful, respected tour operators, this is always a good sign. It doesn’t necessarily matter how many clients they have, but it does matter who those clients are. In some cases, a smaller client base might be a good thing for you, because you will be able to receive regular support.

Support

This is one of the most crucial aspects of selecting the right reservation system for your business. More often than not, business owners in the Adventure Travel Industry are not extremely savvy when it comes to technology and software solutions. With that said, make sure you find a reservation system provider that will be able to readily support your business whenever it is needed. Support can often be a hidden cost and become quite expensive, especially during set up and installation. Find a provider that will offer unlimited support and upgrades, to ensure you are getting the most of your reservation system. It is not uncommon to find a system that costs thousands of dollars to purchase and then thousands of dollars to support during its use. Find a reservation system that has the support costs built into the monthly licensing fees.

Functionality

Most reservation systems will take reservations. With that said, always determine what else the system can do for you. Find a system that is rich with functionality, even if you are not going to use it right away. This way you will never be left wanting for new functionality as your business evolves. You’ll spend a lot of time configuring the system and entering your data and it’s not something you’ll want to repeat frequently. Consider where your business is now, and where you want it to be in a few years. Is this system going to facilitate the growth you hope to achieve? Will it allow you to grow your business more quickly and assist you in the entire process? If so, you have found the perfect reservation system for your operation.

Ease of Use

I mean ease of use in two ways. Is the online tour booking system easy to become acquainted with and is the system going to increase the ease of operating your business. It is imperative to find a system that has a simple, clean and attractive interface and is easy to follow and "figure out". This, coupled with support, will make the transition into a new reservation system feel seamless. You and your staff should become fully comfortable using the new reservation system in a short amount of time. Also consider if the system is going to be able to increase efficiencies in the office for you and your staff. Will it integrate with your existing accounting practices, generate financial and marketing reports, follow up with people viewing your website and convert them into bookings. Always ask the question, what can this system do for me in order to allow me to focus on operating the best trips in my region. A system should be able to allow you to spend more time focusing on what you love to do, whether it be sailing charters, scuba trips, white water rafting, zip line tours, operating your bed and breakfast, etc.

There are always additional thoughts to keep in mind when looking for a reservation system that will be right for your business; these are just a few considerations. Do your research, participate in a reservation system demo for several systems, keep functionality, support, ease of use and cost in mind and you will find the right system.