tours and excursions – Travel Manager

July 23, 2008 – 4:47 am

We have a new article published on how to increase your online presence.

The eighthTop Tip: SEO / Search Engine Marketing states:-

“One of the best ways to grow your online presence is to track and retain visitors. Having a way to easily capture contact information from visitors to add them to your contact list is vital. Writing a regularly newsletter (2-4 times per month) to communicate directly with your clients/customers about recent news, events, and to stay in front of your audience helps with growth. Newsletter distribution with links back to your site can also lead directly to increased traffic from recipients.”

Lets elaborate.

You’ve spent a lot of time and money ensuring that your online presence is good and you are getting some decent traffic – now you need to ensure that people continue to come to your site.

Writing a regular newsletter about what you are doing and when you are doing is newsworthy to your customers. They want to know about the latest tour or the latest service offering. They want to know that you have recieved an award for excellent service from somewhere. They want to know how they can communicate with you in the future and they want to know what other products and services that may be interested in.

Your newsletter doesnt have to be long or have been written by a professional writer – but it does need to look and sound professional.

You dont have to be a big business to take advantage of this either – small one man bands can just as easily use this type of marketing effort quickly and cheaply if they have the inclination and the right tools. Done right – it will only take an hour or two of your time each month and over time can reap dividends.

Include photo’s if you have any, include links so they can get to the detailed information quickly and effortlessly.

Keep a log of all of the newsletters you have sent, post them on your website so that new customers can see previous informaiton and the search engines can pick up on “what you are saying”. Remember, the Internet is a conversation and you need to be in the conversation in order to maximise the benefit from it.

If you would like more information on how to get a newsletter off the ground for your business then contact me for more information or guidance on where to start.

Regards

Mike

July 21, 2008 – 6:47 am

We have a new article published on how to increase your online presence.

The first Top Tip: SEO / Search Engine Marketing states:-

“Having a brilliant website does not always lead to traffic and conversion success. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a collection of techniques that help sites achieve strong search engine rankings through Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. The difference in traffic count from one site to another is multiplied tremendously by attaining first page position in common Google searches, and preferably a top 5 position. New research suggests nearly half of online consumers use search engine to search for products.”

Let me elaborate.

Search Engines only show ‘relevant‘ results for the text that the user entered. So if you have spent a lot of time and money getting a website built which has no ‘real world’ text on it then it is unlikely to be well presented in the results. For Example:

If you offer coach tours in the lake district then make sure that all of the city / place names are somewhere in your site and that they sit well with the terms that people are most likely to search for. eg. Tours in the Lake District, Coach Tours around Windemere, Coach Tours around the beautiful lakes etc.. and make sure that those terms are used fairly liberally.

Also make sure the titles of the webpage reflects those terms – Don’t have the title on every page the same when they obviously try to convey different information. Make sure the titles are unique and relevant.

Then make sure your keywords on the page reflect the content.

Also make sure you have at least oone page for every search term you want to ensure a good listing for. This could be as little as one or two and grow over time.

Effort placed in doing this well will pay dividends in the future – and you are in the business for the long haul aren’t you?

If you would like more information on how to maximise your web ranking in the search engines – call us and we will be glad to provide you with more information / resources.

Regards

Mike

July 3, 2008 – 3:56 am

We are now in testing for the online tours booking widget. We have also developed the US version of the aggregator site (www.coachtoursamerica.com) and will be testing it for the next couple of days. We will be launching the UK & European versions within the next couple of weeks – so if your interested get your tours into TravelManager – its all included in your subscription

We know your interested in seeing what it looks like so here are a couple of screenshots

As always – click on the images to see a full screen version.

The tours can be searched on by numerous different search terms. ie. A user can search by date, location, type of tour (Day Trip, Weekend Break etc.) and by Price – so the site is easily accessible and allows you to get maximum exposure for your tours.

The Tour Details Page can include photographs and videos

You can also include tour highlights and a full itinerary of the tour.

The user can pre-book seats based on availability and the information pops straight into your TravelManager account. It couldnt be easier.

We already have a number of operators in the USA trialling the solution and look forward to driving sales to their tours very soon

Oh and we have some “really” interesting features turning up in a couple of weeks time – but I’ll keep you guessing as to what they might be

Regards

Mike

June 28, 2008 – 4:01 am

As mentioned previously, we are currently in the development phase of the online tours booking facility. We are looking to launch this functionality on 5th July 2008. This will enable you to publish your tours not only your own website but also on our website and on any other website through our unique widget.

We will also start advertising your tours on your behalf through our aggregator site during July at no additional cost.

We anticipate that this site will be the largest online coach tours aggregator site by the end of the year – if you want to be one of the first operatorsto take advantage of this unique opportunity of free advertising and increase customer traffic from Google etc.. then we recommend that you enter your tour information into the tours module before 5th July.

Regards

Mike

June 19, 2008 – 4:41 am

The tours widget is now in development. This is similar to the online qouting widget or the customer feedback in that you can put the widget on your own company website with no technical knowledge in less than 5 minutes.

The widget opens up all sorts of possibilties for you to increase revenue.

You will be able to publish your complete tours list online from within your website and allow customers to see full tour details including but not limited to:-

Tour itinary
Tour photos
Tour pricing and availability

You will be able to categorise your tours. eg. Day Trips, Weekend Breaks, Eurpoean Travel etc.. and choose whether you would like the tour published or not.

We will then be working on additional features such as allowing you to show tour feedback from previous customers etc..

Any operator taking advantage of this widget will also be listed in the independent site www.coachtourstoday.com for FREE which will be launched during July 2008.

If you are interested in taking advantage of the tours online widget then contact me Mike Sadler on 01452 417 567 to discuss further.

Regards

Mike

December 28, 2007 – 9:15 am

We pride our selves on being a transparent business. So here are some statistics from the Travel Manager platform.

In the last 3 months of 2007 we have had :-

1894 customer accounts created
264 employees detailed entered
165 vehicles entered
61 MOT’s / services scheduled
735 private hire quotes generated
1019 defect sheets created
263 bus services activated
107 tours created
819 updates (change of quote details, customer details etc.) on the above within this period.

If each of these pieces of work simply save 3 minutes of time (in looking up details, making changes, making sure jobs are covered etc.) for operators then we have helped them collectively save over 730 hours of their precious time.

Personally I think 3 minutes is on the conservative side for many operators moving from paper based systems to a fully automated computerised on. Therefore, I think we can do considerably better over the next 3 months

Regards

Mike

November 6, 2007 – 12:13 pm

We are currently developing the functionality to create your own website automatically from the TravelManager solution. What does this mean?

Imagine only having to enter your information once and be able to use it many many times for different purposes.

For example:-

You could enter in the company contact information which gets included on your company quotes and invoices as well as published automatically on your website. So if you add a new telephone line to cope with demand you only have to enter in the information once and all the relevant areas are updated in real-time.

Imagine being able to upload all of the information about a tour (including photo’s) and have that information including the availability and prices published on the website.

Easy! Click a button and its live!

All of this functionality will be available over the coming weeks and months. We expect the first phase to be in place within 2 weeks from today which will enable you to have a simple business card website which is high up in the search engines.

Watch this space!

Mike

March 12, 2007 – 12:05 pm

We really excited about the next module for Travel Manager. The Tours and Excursions module promises to be a valuable piece of functionality for many bus and coach operators out there. So here are a couple of screenshots for a sneak preview of what you can expect.

Click on the thumbnail images below for the full screen versions.

The main section of the Tours and Excursions module shows you the main tour details.

You can see the itinerary.

and then click on a location to find out further information about that place.

You can see photographs of the tour and allow your customers to see where they will be staying and what the local attractions are.

You can see who is booked onto the tour and the state of their booking (including but not limited to payment status, catalogues sent etc..)

We hope you like the look of the new Tours and Excursions module as much as we do. We are looking to get this functionality out in BETA (limited trial) in May 2007 and a full launch in June 2007.

Remember, this functionality is included FREE with your monthly subscription of Travel Manager.

If you have any comments on this topic – please let us know – your feedback is important to us as we use it to create the product and services that you want.

Regards

Mike
(www.travel-manager.co.uk)

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