The year 2020 has only brought bad news for travel agencies owing to the Coronavirus pandemic taking over the world. The pandemic has forced countries to shut their borders for a long period of time. There’s no doubt that the travel and tourism industry has been hit the hardest. Airlines have been grounded, hotels have had to lay off employees, and travelers have canceled trips and are asking for refunds. Moreover, no one can predict how long this unfortunate period will continue to exist.
Hopefully, by 2021 everything should fall back into place and the travel agency should be up and running with travelers focusing more on health and other factors. Since there’s nearly no activity in the travel sector at the moment, this is the right time to identify your improvement areas and work on them for future benefits. So, this post will give you tips on how to stop your travel agency from shutting down once the pandemic has vanished for good.
Tips to stop your travel agency from shutting down
1. Go online
If your travel business is still not leveraging the digital world, you are already losing out in the race. It is essential for travel businesses to establish an online presence as that is where you would find most of the travelers. As per reports, a large number of travelers search and book their travel online rather than with a travel agent in a brick and mortar travel agency. Going online will provide you with an increased global customer base and many other benefits. Building an online travel agency is not a difficult task anymore. You can hire a travel portal development company that will build your travel portal within your budget. You also have an option to choose between a white label travel portal or to get it built from scratch. The decision depends on your budget and business requirements.
2. Leverage social media
Indulge yourself completely into social media marketing. During the lockdown, people are keeping themselves entertained with social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, etc. This is a good opportunity to remind them of your brand and to ensure they book their travel through your website in the near future. You can engage your customers on appropriate social media platforms through posts, campaigns, images, etc. As it is, this lockdown has heightened the cravings of people to go out and travel. And surely once the travel industry is back in its game, it will experience an explosion of travelers. Therefore, you can use social media to your advantage and lure your customers with beautiful images of travel destinations.
3. Work on your travel portal
If your travel business is already online, it’s time to work on improving it for your customers. In this fast-paced world, no customer appreciates a slow and complex travel portal that makes their travel search difficult. Slow websites are usually the result of poor quality design. Therefore, to make your website responsive as well as attractive, you can hire a professional travel portal development company to improve your website. You can also research and analyze the current market trends and find out the advanced features that are missing from your travel portal. Offering the latest and unique features to your customers will increase the retention rate and increase your customer base. High-end travel agencies leverage the power of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence to offer the best features to their customers.
4. Build personalized packages
You can utilize this time to build unique and personalized travel packages for your loyal customers. You would know them and their travel choices the best. So you can stay a step ahead by planning amazing vacations for your customers based on their likings. For new customers, you can work on crafting unique packages that they will not be able to decline. For instance, travelers these days identify with a certain type of travel, from luxury travel to adventure travel or eco travel. So, you would need to identify the type of travel your customers like and design travel packages accordingly.
5. SEO techniques
Marketing of your travel agency is crucial to create visibility amongst your customers. You can make use of SEO techniques to promote your products and services. Include more blogs on your website hitting the right keywords for on-page SEO. You can also use off-page SEO techniques such as answering questions on Quora with your link embedded in the answer. Another way is to create quality content and post it on high traffic and relevant blogs. Moreover, you can learn more about creating content that is optimized for search engines over here.
These SEO techniques will help your travel portal to rank higher on Google. The other technique to promote your travel agency is using Google and Facebook ads when the time is right. The ads should be live when the travel and tourism industry has started its operations again.
In Conclusion
Aviation experts believe that the travel industry will soon restart with baby steps adopting social distancing. It will start with domestic travel targeting cities and regions where the health conditions are the best and the demand for travel is the strongest. Airlines are expected to maintain social distancing by blocking the middle seats and carrying fewer passengers. The future may be uncertain at the moment, but the days are not far when the travel industry will resume its operations in full swing. Travel agencies should be prepared to offer their best services when the situation is normalized. Staying a step ahead and preparing to beat your competition with the above tips is how you can stop your travel agency from shutting down.