The holidays are peak travel season. Thanksgiving air travel increased between 2016 and 2017 to a record 28.5 million passengers. As a result, offering travel perks is an increasingly-favored marketing tactic. Credit card companies offer travel rewards, elite airline status, hotel and dining rewards, trip cancellation insurance, lost luggage reimbursement, and auto rental collision damage waivers, among other perks. Companies such as Airbnb offer travel stipends to employees as a recruiting tactic.
Savvy hospitality professionals also offer travel benefits as a way to win over customers. Taking steps to ensure customers have an enjoyable, stress-free travel experience will help boost repeat business. It also generates favorable word-of-mouth publicity on review sites and social media posts.
Here are three easy ways to help improve your customers’ travel experience.
Offer Tourism Information
A traveler must select where to go, stay, eat as well as what sights to see on their vacations. Make customers’ trips easier by having destination information accessible to them. One popular way to do this is to stock travel and hospitality brochures providing information about local restaurants and sightseeing. State and local tourism departments typically supply these types of brochures, and often offer them free of charge to distributors in the hospitality industry.
Another easy way to make tourism information available to customers is to recommend tourism sites and apps that provide travel and hospitality information. For instance, Fodor’s, long-time publisher of popular travel guides, provides travel tips, news, recommendations, and forum discussions on their website. They also feature a City Guides app with information on 22 top city destinations for tourists.
Arrange Partnerships
Another simple strategy is to arrange partnership discounts at local restaurants and tourism venues. Forming promotional partnerships with local businesses is a win/win. For instance, you can contact owners of popular local restaurants and ask them to offer your customers a discount in exchange for you printing coupons and/or promoting their restaurants to customers.
Another way to help your customers find discounts is to recommend apps and sites that supply information on local happenings and savings. For instance, RetailMeNot features coupons for restaurants on their site, and offers an app for download.
Provide Security Support
Security can be another concern for travelers. Many hotels and restaurants offer free Wi-Fi services. However, these public Wi-Fi hotspots are insecure and susceptible to hacking. Using an encrypted VPN network and letting your customers know your connection is safe can reassure them that you take their security seriously.
Through Wi-Fi hacking and other methods, travelers can be targets for identity theft. Offering an identity theft protection service to customers is another way to protect them and let them know you prioritize their security.
Travelers appreciate anything that saves them time and stress. Offering tourism information, arranging discounts, and providing security support are three simple steps to help customers enjoy their trips.