Best Online Tools for Tour Operators You Should Be Using Right Now

Published in

Tour and Activity Operator Knowledge Base

7 min readMar 16, 2018

Discover the best tools for tour operators and successfully promote and sell your tours, as well as save time and resources!

In this blog post, we discuss the best tools to help you with your tour business. We’ve made a list of all the tools you need.

Every tour operator should keep up with the latest gadgets, software, and marketing strategies. Such tools help you better manage your business and automate a great deal of your boring everyday tasks.

As you may have already noticed, there’s a whole variety of online tools for tour operators you will need to get your business up and running. There are marketing, management, chat and communication tools, and so on.

Here are the best online tools you can use in your day-to-day operations.

Website Builders

If you’re a tour operator or a small travel agency just starting out, you need a tool to create your own website. You also need to register a unique domain.

Let’s be honest, a dedicated site makes a business more trustworthy than a Facebook page.

Additionally, you can add a book now button to your website and sell your tours online.

This Is What the Most Effective Booking Button Looks Like

In the meantime, you can use these to create a website and get started:

Online Booking Systems

What’s THE tool for tour operators? The best tour operator tool you could possibly get is a booking engine.

How do you keep track of your bookings?
Or better yet:
How do you manage and organize your tour business in general?

And please don’t tell me it’s with an Excel sheet.

By implementing an online booking system, you can easily manage tour dates, deposits, payments, appointments, meetings, bookings, itineraries, and receipts as well as refunds.

Booking engines save you time and allow you to close bookings 24/7 with a “book now” button integrated into your website. You can also manage your offline bookings with engines like these, from your office or home.

Manage bookings and your entire tour business from a single location with Orioly.

Orioly is an easy-to-use multi-featured booking system for tour operators and small travel agencies.

Hubspot

A really cool social media marketing tool which you can use for content management, web analytics, and SEO.

It’s also a CRM, sales hub and customer service.

Wishpond

If you’re not a fan of Hubspot due to their 12-month contract and the costs of setting the whole thing up, Wishpond might be your cup of tea.

It’s a complete platform including landing page tools, lead activity tracking, and marketing automation.

Contentful

Contentful is an online content management system (CMS). It’s also a development platform that has API embedded at the core of its operating technology. If you need an easy to implement backend system for your tour operator business, this is the tool to go for.

Sumo

This tool improves your website traffic and conversion rates. It also has powerful analytics so you can see how users interact with your website.

Marketing Tools for Tour Operators

If you are any serious about your website and running your business, especially if you have a business blog, you’re going to need tools like:

These will help you determine important keywords you want to rank for, what’s the keyword volume, traffic for that keyword, as well the SERPS. However, don’t forget that good content is always the king. Keyword stuffing will get you nowhere.

7 Tips for Growing Your Tour Business through Online Marketing

Finding a good tool to help you with your content goes a long way. Quality content is always about supporting customer needs.

You also need a tool to automate your social media. The best ones are the ones that support leading social media platforms.

Now you might think you are too busy at the moment to focus on social media engagement, but here’s why it’s important — How To Use Social Media To Promote Tours.

I’ve mentioned that every tour operator needs quality content to share on their social networks. It might be best to write your original content in the form of a blog and then post it online. However, that alone will not get you the traction you need, so I advise to go with content curating as one of your strategies.

You can find great content on Feedly, the most popular RSS.

Stay organized

Have you ever had a hard time catching up with your client or your colleagues for a meeting? Use Doodle.

As a tour operator, I’m sure you have clients from all over the world and you also work with a lot of business partners across the continent. Don’t scratch your head in confusion when you have to calculate time zone differences, here’s a tool for that — World Time Buddy.

Manage email correspondence with Boomerang for Gmail.

Stay on top of your tasks and don’t leave anything out with Trello, Evernote, and Nozbe.

If you’re a small tour operator without your own legal service or a dedicated attorney, then you might find Docracy very useful for legal documents, as well as Shake.

Having a hard time remembering all your passwords? Yes? Please don’t tell me you write them down on a piece of paper next to your computer?

Or worse, have a word file with all your passwords? Secure your business environment with tools like LastPass or One Login.

Now back to collaboration tools! Here are your choices for file-sharing services for business:

Implement a Customer Service

As chatbots are becoming a norm, building and nurturing customer relationships is never been more important. If customers don’t feel like you’re giving them the answers they need or if your service isn’t satisfactory, they choose your competitors instead of you.

Also, social messaging is becoming more and more popular.

61 percent of people stated that they preferred receiving personalized business messages.

Communication with your clients over Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber, and WeChat will greatly benefit your business. There’s also a simple reason why this is so — these days, people will rather message than call.

That’s why it might also be a good idea to use chatbots for consumer interaction. Namely, because there’s a 24-hour need for customer service.

Make Team Communication Easier

Make communication in your office swift and more efficient. However, note that having too many channels can backfire.

For example, you can create different channels or groups like tours, marketing, sales, random, lunch, etc.

However, keep in mind that it can get hectic — one day you might find yourself with 9684736295 unread messages from 30 channels you’re in without a clue what’s what and who’s who.

Message wisely.

Photo Editing & Stock Photo

In the tour business, promoting your tours is crucial. Well now, how can you promote your tours without amazing pictures?

If you’re a hobbyist photographer and a tour guide as well, then you probably have a lot of your own photos. They probably need editing.

And no, you don’t have to be a Photoshop wizard for that one.

If you are just looking for photos to enrich your social media and promo materials, you need stock photos.

Here is the best free photo editing software and applications for tour operators:

Best free stock photo sites to get the best pictures to promote your tours:

These were the online tools for tour operators I’ve been able to gather. Are you using certain tools I haven’t mentioned? If so, leave a comment below.

And remember, a worker is only as good as his tools!

More About Orioly

Having mentioned that every tour operator needs an online booking software, Orioly offers a quality solution.

Orioly is an easy-to-use multi-featured booking system for developed specially for tour operators and small travel agencies. It helps you manage your bookings from a central location.

Use Orioly to create new tours, edit the existing ones, organize your itinerary, manage payments, promo codes, coupons and vouchers.

Apart from being a booking engine (both offline and online), Orioly is much more than that.

Orioly is also a:

business administration engine,
sales and distribution platform,
marketing tool integrated with the leading tour and travel marketplaces.

Free Trial

Orioly has a free 30-day trial period in which you can test our booking software to see if it fits your business. Start your free trial and contact us if you have any additional questions. We’d be more than happy to help you find the best solution.

Originally published at www.orioly.com on March 16, 2018.