Marketing Strategies for Travel Booking Website
Advertising for a travel booking website is not the only tool to promote your business. Travel agents are almost out of picture because people prefer to do their own research and comparisons. The only way to grab the attention of the potential customer is to be everywhere on the Web according to the relevant requests. That’s why you shouldn’t confine yourself to a certain platform like the blog or Facebook.
First, stay on top in SERP to increase traffic for travel booking websites because 75% of tourists use search engines to find the best offers. Therefore, SEO for a travel booking website can hardly be optimized quickly – the first page of SERP is overcrowded with ads. Advertise your travel website via several search engines to be competitive.
In addition, you should create a competitive presence on all of the advanced social media and such platforms as Trip Adviser. Your main site’s analytics will help you see the audience’s preferences and choose the most effective websites and social networks. Also, don’t forget about remarketing to advertise booking websites.
Develop a Multilingual Platform
It is obviously natural to design your travel booking website first and foremost in your native language. Then, to increase your audience, you can add more languages. For $5 you can hire a specialist, on freelance sites like Fiverr.com, who will take care of your translation issues.
My own experience: I started with French as it’s my mother tongue. I used the Travelpayouts guide — How to create good content, in order to structure text, ideas and affiliated widgets. Once all the content was ready, I extracted and classified it in a word document I had translated from French into English and Spanish (around 2400 words for $10 on Fiverr.com).
My reasonable fluency in both those languages allows me to comfortably communicate with customers.
Use Fee-Charging Tagging (Google Ads and Facebook)
This option is a reliable investment that can provide you with a significant ROI. Create a well-targeted advertising campaign closely related to your niche (the heart of your customers), and you will be able to run additional, stable traffic daily on your website.
With five dollars per day invested, you should generate some traffic. But with good targeting at the right audience, you could convert a significant proportion of this traffic to sales and, thus make money from your website. You can refer visitors to your website via the Travelpayouts White Label, as transferring traffic directly from your ads to Aviasales is prohibited by the program rules.
Run a Blog on Your Website
This is a great idea to retain your audience while, at the same time, attracting new prospects to your website. Whether weekly or daily, the important thing is to continually feed your blog with well-written, relevant content, and to refine it regularly in order to optimize the visits of your readers. I would suggest a minimum content addition of one article per week.
By tackling complementary subjects related to travelers, you become the master of your domain and supply important information to your visitors. They, in turn, will come to trust you and will, all the more easily, become your customers.
Provide High-Quality Customer Service
“He who pays the piper calls the tune!” Be aware that this expression applies in all areas of commerce, especially when booking online travel. So you really do have to put yourself at the service of your customer.
More precisely, you must respond to all your emails as quickly as possible; transmit clear, accurate and correct information; make the experience of your potential customer as pleasurable as possible; and you must remain professional. In short, be pleasant and efficient!
Set up an Instant Chat Window on Your Website
To provide the best customer service, here’s some good advice: Chat with your visitor live. This simple tool allows your customers to feel supported and confident they are talking to an expert.
If you aren’t immediately responsive, you leave room for competitors. In fact, Internet users often visit many sites in search of the fastest, most accurate information.
Sometimes I find it hard to be available in front of a computer screen all day long. What I suggest you do is set up a chat notification via the application on your smartphone. Thus, you won’t ever miss a customer, and you won’t be forced to stay in your office for hours.
Over time, I also realized that chatting with customers improved customer satisfaction and boosted company credibility. Both those parameters being ingredients to promote higher sales. My current conversion rate is around one sale for every 16 interactions.
Create Informative Content on Your Bookings
There’s nothing to stop you from providing more satisfaction to your customers by adding bonus information and good travel tips to your site; for example, articles on ‘Luggage in Plane’, ‘Traveler’s Guide’, and ‘Departure checklist’.
All ideas are good, as long as they’re beneficial to your visitors. Don’t hesitate to share the stories and experiences of globetrotters who have already visited the destinations you offer!
Offer Complementary Booking Services (Hotels, Bikes, Taxi, Etc.)
What could be better than being able to book your flight, hotel and rental car, or taxi, on a single platform? This is an unbeatable facility! So get to work!
Make sure your future customer can plan their trip from A to Z, without having to search for information somewhere else. Make sure they can get it all on your website.
Diversify your offers. You can do this courtesy of the complementary offers of Travelpayouts:
- Transfers;
- Bus tickets;
- Excursions;
- And more.
You can find all current offers in the brands directory. In addition, the WayAway partner program is only available in the Travelpayouts partnership platform. The major advantage of the brand is the WayAway Plus Membership Plan, which travelers can use to receive real cash back up to 10% for booking different travel services, such as hotels, cars, insurance, excursions, and many others. For every sale of this useful membership plan, you’ll receive a $10 reward.
Join the WayAway partner program now to work with this brand on special terms. That is, within 180 days, all purchases of the WayAway Plus Membership Plan will be attributed to you and you’ll receive 50% revenue share for all purchases made by your WayAway Plus users.
Strengthen Your SEO With Google Tools
This is where the statistical tools of Travelpayouts, Google Analytics, Search Console, and even Tag Manager, and many others come in. These very useful platforms provide you with effective tools to consolidate your referencing, and the analysis of your audience — one of the key factors to your success.
The best practices of successful Booking.com affiliates prove this statement, learn it!
Build-up Your Brand
Your brand is also a determining factor in the success of your online booking site. To get your business off the ground, you need to develop a solid, sound marketing strategy.
Your goal: Occupy first position in the mind of the customer, as much as possible, when they think of making a purchase.
Stay in Touch With Your Customers via Social Networks
Creating, and then maintaining, a relationship with your customers is crucial. Use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Post and share relevant content on behalf of your website. Your customers will be able to follow you and feel a closer connection with your booking agency.
I generally use Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis to relay or promote travel discounts, new offers or articles from my blog. When it comes to increasing the presence of my travel website on the WEB, I like to publish photos and videos on Instagram and YouTube, every week.
Share your ideas, how to boost Travelpayouts affiliated travel booking website, in comments. If you have more ideas to share, please write to us about your cases. The best ones will be encouraged! Find out more here.
Kpis/Okp for Travel Booking Website
Promotion for booking websites should be controlled via KPI. Key Performance Indicators should be established and observed. KPI is crucial because you will be spending money to advance PPC for travel booking websites and other tools. Therefore, you must take measurements so that you don’t suffer losses. Note that you should set goals before proceeding with marketing for travel booking startups and further measuring. There are some common marketing KPIs:
- Conversion rate – the number of leads who made a purchase.
- Number of qualified leads – the visitors who are most likely to buy.
- Awareness – the number of visitors who already know you.
- Sales conversion rate.
- The time that the lead needs to be converted.
- The average value of each order.
- Customers’ satisfaction, which can be measured via reviews or surveys.
Best Strategies for Travel Booking Website
To start a travel-booking website, you should understand that some special KPIs depend on the business specs. For example, the level of booking visibility can be clarified by dividing the ticketed and booked spend by the total travel spend. In the travel niche, you should also consider the data on travel spend, process, online adoption, re-booking rate, and many others.