How to cope with festivals and events?

There are festivals and events throughout the year. Traditional festivals can be a reason to attract travelers to a destination, while different events may feed the interest of various travelers. Tour guides shall consider such special cases to promote unique sightseeing tours.

Firstly, a tour guide needs to be well equipped with the latest news. You shall know what is going on this year. How long is the festival period? What celebration will take on and where? Is there anything new this time? Then, you can design a special holiday sightseeing tour. If there are big events in the city, e.g. Xi’an Horticultural Exposition in 2011, it is recommended to combine the event with routine tours. Travelers will therefore have more choices during the visit.

Secondly, take negative factors into consideration. Are there a lot more visitors into your destination during the festival? If yes, arrange transportation, hotel or activity bookings in advance. Think proactively to provide a vivid tour while avoiding the crowds. During the holiday period, do shops and restaurants still open as usual?

Thirdly, mind the local tradition and customs. Mind this especially for traditional or religious festivals in your destination. Do local people welcome foreign visitors to join the celebration? Will it bother your clients who hold a different religion? As a tour guide, it is necessary to understand both the local custom and client needs.

Lastly, target the right market. Effective marketing will help you to receive more travel clients. Think before you promote the festival tour - will my clients be interested in this festival/event and is the timing right? For example, it is hard to promote Christmas tour to people who spend the same period at home with families.

What is special or unique this year in your place of guiding? Share with us.

How to be personal in customer communications?

A private tour guide may express yourself personally during the sightseeing tour. How can you be personal in pre-tour communications? You can sound personal on a phone call. But nowadays, more bookings by overseas clients are communicated via emails or websites. How would you present your personal attitude in emails?

Treat every tourist as an individual client. The sightseeing tour itinerary may be identical covering similar scenic spots. Yet a lot of factors vary, e.g. days of stay, arrival or departure location, number of people in the group, demographic background of the visitors, public transportation vs. private vehicle...And personal interest matters for sure. Considering these facts, your itinerary to each client will be more personalized. You can differentiate yourself from a standard offer in travel packages.

Talk in the language of your client. It is more than using the language they speak. Quote in the currency they are familiar with or with both the local currency and the currency your clients use. Use less local name/description in the itinerary, so that it is easier for clients to understand the visits during the sightseeing tour.

Address to the specific queries. Make sure that all enquiries from your client are properly answered. If certain requirements need extra time to arrange or involves third-party suppliers, tour guides shall inform when a reply can be expected.

Offer something more if noticing the interest of your clients. It can be special scenic spots, e.g. art gallery to tourists with an art-focus. Restaurants with nice local cuisines are also good recommendation to people who would like to try local foods. Suggest fun places for families with kids.

Encourage feedback or further queries. Always ask your clients to give comments freely. A tour guide can be more prepared when clear about client’s preference. Therefore, the sightseeing tour would be conducted with great success.

Do you have any tips on a personal communication with clients before the actual sightseeing tour? Share with us!

How to promote sightseeing tours via twitter?

Twitter is a new and quick-developing method for online marketing. Think first, is this a platform to show your personal characters or to present your sightseeing tours. If it is a personal stage for you, then you can tweet anything you like. But if you want to make it a marketing channel, how can tour guide use this word-of-mouth to get more clients?

Create a profile with clear business info. Choose a user name relevant to your business. Your user name will appear in the URL and be mentioned through communication with other users. It can be your company name e.g. http://twitter.com/ViatorTravel. Show your key service is also a good choice, e.g. http://twitter.com/tour_guide for OurExplorer. Take some time to complete your biography info including profile photo, location, web and bio. This is one-time effort and tells visitors who you are. If you want to do more, you can edit the background picture of your twitter page, matching your website or business.

Connect twitter with other platforms to maximize your tweets. Twitter has applications for user to choose. On the other hands, many websites provide option to include your tweets directly. For example, you can add twitter to your network profiles for more automatic viral. You may combine twitter with your blog, to maximize the effects of single post.

What can you tweet to promote sightseeing tours? New available sightseeing tours, seasonal promotion for certain tours, client testimonials on your tours, updates in the popular sightseeing tours… Use your creativity to viral in 140 characters.

Twitter is also a social network platform. You can connect with other people by following or being followed. Your sightseeing tours would enjoy word-of-mouth all over the world with successful viral marketing.

Update regularly to keep it live. Twitter is a mini-blog, as some people call it. Like blog posts, regular updates are recommended.

OurExplorer twitter - http://twitter.com/tour_guide. Welcome to share your twitter experience here or @tour_guide.

How to keep your sightseeing tours fresh?

As a private tour guide, do you design your sightseeing tours yourself? If yes, it is important to keep it fresh. Tour guiding is not repeating what’s written on the guide books. It is to introduce the local scenic spots vividly with your own culture, customs and history. That is to say, a tour guide adds his/her own knowledge and wisdom into the sightseeing tours. It is how one can differentiate from others. Therefore, the best way to keep a sightseeing tour fresh is to keep learning as a guide.

Learn the latest news of your place of guiding. Travelers are interested to hear what is happening in the destination. It helps to learn more about the local life. History facts will not change often but people are changing in the daily life. With the up-to-date information, a tour guide is not repeating himself all the time.

Keep an eye on industry related information. You are not working alone as a tour guide. When leading a sightseeing tour, many parties are involved. E.g. transportation, restaurants, scenic spots, hotels… A professional guide needs to be well equipped with industry related information. It is no good taking the clients somewhere only to find out the place is closed under maintenance, isn’t it?

Expand your knowledge on what’s going on in the outside world. For a foreign language tour guide, you may pay particular attention to news of your major client sources. It contributes to wider topics at guiding. Also, when a tour guide understands more of other cultures, you can present your own culture in a better way and make easy for foreign travelers to learn.

Note the seasonal changes. Some destinations vary a lot in different seasons. For example, lakes in the city of Beijing (China) freeze in winter time. Local people do skating and ice activities on the lake. Such scene can not be seen in the summer time. When a tour guide is showing around in the winter season, the remarks shall adjust along with the seasonal change. This way helps the travelers to remember a more lively city.

By keeping the sightseeing tours fresh and interesting, a tour guide makes his own career a lot more fun. It is not only for the benefits of travelers, but for the growth of a guide as well. Now, are you ready to take a new look into your sightseeing tours?

Build up your own client base

When you work as a private tour guide for travelers, you have the opportunity to know more about your clients. In many cases, a happy client and the tour guide can turn out friends after a trip. Therefore, build up a client base is important for guides to continue the friendship.

Why is it important to have a client base? You can not keep everything about your clients in mind. Popular tour guides especially need written records as they may meet different travelers on daily basis. You do not want the mess, trying to find out one client contact through thousands of mails. Records of client preference will help to grow your future business.

How can you build up your own base? It can be as easy as a collect of emails. You may save them by date or by country origin. A better way will be setting up a spreadsheet to centralize information. So you can easily sort out client info from various fields. If you have a mature business and want to have a more efficient client base, you can check out customer service software. There are many choices on the market. You just need to compare and pick up the one that fits your needs.

What to record in your client base? Basic contacts including name and email are critical for you to keep in touch. Personal backgrounds of your travel clients are useful to design a customized tour for their return trip. Some travelers do pay a return trip to the destination they like. If the tour guide has noted their preference, e.g. culture, adventure, foods, entertainments…, your client will acknowledge your personal service and become a loyal customer. Places visited during the sightseeing tour. It is similar with each tour, but not exactly the same. On one hand, you can avoid repetition of route for a return client. On the other, noting down the route helps the guide to remember tour details with different clients. It is also helpful to track client’s country of origin or source of the client booking. Country of origin helps to settle a targeted market, while the guide can decide promotional channels with data on booking sources.

Have you already had an existing database of clients? What other fields do you think are important for a better service? We would like to hear from you.

Only 1 month to go until launch!!

Now that we have sucessfully reached March, I am delighted to let all the tour guides know the OurExplorer site will go live on the first week of April.
All Tour Guides who register during the months of April and May will get lifetime free membership. Yes tour guides, lifetime free membership!

Our Explorer is so confident that the website will be a huge success we are willing to give this away for free. All we ask of the tour guide is to populate their full profile as complete as they can.

This is a win/win anyway as it will give the tour guides more business.

Any questions?

Private Tour Guides - Word of mouth marketing

Hello to all you private tour guides looking to increase business. Lets discuss today the free and all important marketing tool - "Word of Mouth" which is a form of viral marketing.


Q. How does a private tour guide create word of mouth?
It is all about creating a point of conversation that your client will have to tell their friends and family when they return home.

People love to tell everyone about their holiday and travel adventures - especially when they have something funny or exciting to say. So be creative and think of something cool, exciting and different during your tour. Give the client something to talk about!

*********Some Examples
1. Bring the client to a unique and very local cafe or restaurant. Even the family home for a coffee if both parties are comfortable with that.
2. Give the client a small but personal gift. Be creative and it does not have to cost much e.g. a card, a local fruit/veg to try etc
3. Funny stories on the venues included in the tour the client could not easily read about.

As a private tour guide you need to stand out to get the top ratings and comments from your clients. This will then propel you to more and more bookings....

Cheers
Dave C