Yesterday, “Auberge Hatley suffered a major fire”. Rapidly this canadian hotel updated their website with contact information for those who had future reservations. Clearly, this is a good example of a company who understands that Internet could be a fast and cheap way to communicate.
A few weeks ago, I’ve been to Costa Rica. And obviously I had some pretty interesting ideas regarding the help I could give to tourism companies there. I will publish some of them in this website. Here is the first one.
Pablo - The nature tour guide
When we arrived to our hotel in Manuel Antonio, we asked to the girl at the front desk if she had some tours to suggest to us. She showed us some interesting things. We took a guess and went on a park tour “con Pablo”. Wow! Pablo was incredible. We learned a lot and had a lot of fun.
Now, I realize that we could have chose another company instead of Pablo’s. How could this company attract more customers? Simple, be in their mind before they get in Costa Rica. If Pablo’s company had a website (well indexed in search engines), there is a lot of chance that I would have find it in my research. As soon as I’m on Pablo’s website, it’s up to Pablo’s text and pictures to convince me that I must book with him. At this time, Pablo is on the top of the list. Good for him.
Do you know blogs? A blog is a website that is updated via a easy-to-use content management system. It is updated via “posts” (texts) that the author publishes. Moreover, readers can comment each post (ask questions, react, etc.). In Pablo’s situation, a blog would particularly be a good idea because it would help establishing a human relation between the potential customer and Pablo’s company. Via his blog, he could update his site with daily good experiences with customers, pictures and anything that could interest the potential customer.
You probably know Google, Yahoo, Altavista, (we could keep on…), but how do they work and, more important, what are the main differences between all of them?
First of all, we split them in 2 categories : The crawler-based search engines and the directories.
Crawler-Based Search Engines
A crawler-based search engine crawls website, “reads” the content, stores it and, accordingly to some criterias, ranks the website. For example, Google gives importance to titles, files names, labels of links, the ranking and the number of sites that link to the website, etc. Once upon a time (depending on the frequency at which you update your site), it will “re-crawl” your site to update its database.
Human-Powered Directories
If crawler-based search engines are totally controlled by computers, robots and spiders, human-powered directories are build by humans. In this case, the website is classified in directories depending on what you request when you fill the submission form and on the editor who’s gonna had your site in the directory. Obviously, there is not much consideration about the content of the site.
Now, how can you take the maximum out of search engines? There is a lot of simple things to do. You’ll have to wait for another lesson… or contact us so we can help you directly.
In this article, The Tourism Network explains its point of view on Internet Marketing. It probably looks obvious for some of you but it’s an interesting text for newbie.
There is a point on which I would like to comment.
[…] the changing role of sales people.
Sales people are increasingly seen as purchase facilitators rather than advisors
[…] This is totally right. This is how most of the people see the sales people… but hey! The Internet is still moving. Do you know what Web 2.0 is? Read that, it will give you some hints. In this new beginning of the Internet, participation takes over publication… proactivity takes over reactivity. While Internet has been considered like an unidirectional way to communicate for a long time, it is now turning bidirectional. Here comes a new way of doing marketing. Instead of using your website as a front page, sales people could you use it as continuous “travel and tourism show”… a place where you can show what you offer, update people with new customers experience and share with your potential customers. Everybody told you that with Internet, there is no middlemen. Most of you kept their distance but it’s time to get closer.
For many years, I’ve been working in the Internet industry. During these years, I’ve also had the chance to travel a couple of times. One of my source of info (for hotels, plane tickets, tours, etc.) was the Internet and each time I saw a lot of business opportunities from little tricks to improve traffic on website to deep changes in tourism related companies websites to reach a totally new kind of clients.
I don’t really know what will be written on this site, but here I am.
Welcome in here.
I hope you’ll find some interesting info helping your travel and tourism related business to get the maximum out of the Internet.
And by the way, the name and address of the site are subject to change as soon as I find better ones.