Tourist Season: How Hospitality Businesses Can Prepare

In hospitality, business can come in waves commonly referred to as the ‘tourist season and it’s important that businesses are prepared to tackle all challenges. To do this, organizations need their strategies, tools, and technology optimized and ready to help provide great experiences for everyone involved.

Define Marketing Goals and Strategies

Digital marketing is a powerful weapon for hospitality businesses to wield during the prime tourist season

Here are the aspects of marketing that need to be ready and in prime shape to help connect with potential customers during the tourist season:

• Email Marketing: Nearly everyone online has an active email account, and it continues to be the best way to consistently communicate with customers and subscribers. Make sure your email campaigns are prepared to help you stay top of mind as so many people look to lock down travel plans.
• Website: As people come flooding into your site during tourist season, it’s important to have a website that not only looks good but is also easy
• Social Channels: When people look to connect with brands, it’s often done through their social channels. Make sure you have a strategy in place for content, copy tone, and posting cadence, as well as the automation tools and people to allow you to post consistently and interact with direct messages and replies from your audience.
• Ads Strategy: When it’s tourist season for you, it’s probably tourist season for your competitors, too. This means a lot of businesses will be pushing more of their budget into ads on Google, social media, and related websites. Make sure your ad strategy is set, you have your desired keywords, you’ve determined obtainable goals, and you have KPIs to track success toward those goals.

 Is Your Branding Ready?

An additional aspect of marketing that can be forgotten when the focus is entirely on tools, strategies, and goals, is branding and making sure everything on your website, marketing materials, sales collateral, videos, pictures, and anything else contains a consistent brand. Also, are you happy with the look, feel, and way that your branding conveys your business visually? Does it need updating?

These are all things to consider before the tourist season kicks off and, suddenly, thousands and thousands of people will be interacting with your site, social channels, and email marketing and seeing your branding more often.

The last thing you need during the busiest period of the year is having inconsistent branding (different colors, logos, tones, copy, etc.) in your different channels or an outdated brand that gives people the wrong impression and even drives them away into the grasps of a competitor.

Prepare Customer-Facing Processes and Relations

It’s important that you make sure the customer’s experience, from beginning to end, is smooth, simple, and free of frustrations that could end in a poor experience or loss of business.

This means providing an easy-to-use, secure, transparent, and efficient customer experience from the first touchpoint to transaction and customer service. Customer experience needs to be considered at every step of their journey.

Related: How CS Demands Are Driving New Tech Changes

A stronger, more positive overall experience leads to better reviews, repeat sales, return customers, and better word of mouth both online and in person. All of this combines to boost your company’s public image which turns back around to attract more customers. This cycle of growth is important for sustained success and ensuring customers come back to you next year.

Ensure Internal Teams Have Tools They Need

Making sure your customer’s needs are taken care of is very important, but it’s also critical that your own teams have the technology and tools they need to succeed, too.

Does marketing have an email platform that lets them report and automate? Are sales reps able to do ample research and track prospects? Does your administrative team need the tools to streamline processing and paperwork?

Related: What are Employee Expectations for Business Tech?

Every team in your organization has tasks that can be done faster and more effectively if they have the right tools and technology. Automation, data reporting, cloud storage, collaboration tools, and other modern business technologies are becoming necessary parts of a competitive business’ arsenal. Businesses that fall behind in these innovations risk losing ground to competitors that have better technology that empowers their employees to work faster and more efficiently.

In the grander scheme, organization-wide tools like a modern ERP or CRM can aid multiple teams and improve the way the entire company operates.

In Conclusion

To prepare for tourist season, businesses in hospitality need to ensure all their strategies and technologies are prepared, optimized, and ready to tackle the busiest season of the year. Whether it’s updating branding, optimizing a website or workflow, or establishing new best practices for internal processes, everything needs to be in order for the best chances of success.

Staying on top of business technology is key for organizations to stay ahead of their competitors and continue delivering a positive experience for both customers and employees. See how it’s evolving with our infographic, Emerging Trends in Business Technology for 2022.