How to Improve Your Tours and Increase Business with 3 Key Tips

In this article, we’re going to share with you how to improve your tours and increase business. The problem is that despite having immaculate vehicles and vessels, friendly staff, and well organized and focused management teams, you aren’t getting the business or results that you want (or need). Today we’re going to cover three topics: how to improve consistency in your business, how to increase business, and how to improve your tours.

How To Improve Sightseeing Tour Consistency

How do you address consistency issues? Traditional wisdom says spend more money on training and emphasize the importance of fun and entertaining experiences, and monitor customer satisfaction by creating feedback loops. While this may work for some, this isn’t always the easiest answer. So how do you create consistency of experience?

• Involve your best drivers in the process of either rewriting or editing your tour scripts and ask for their opinions on what works and what doesn’t.
• Have a clear plan of action and ask drivers to be accountable to each other for providing the best possible passenger experiences, including safe driving and sticking to the script and predefined route.
• Focus on results – put measurements in place (reduction of complaints for example) and track the effectiveness of your team. Openly discuss the difficult issues that you’re facing and work together to overcome them.
• Step into the front lines. Experience your tours as a customer. And do this often. It’s not easy to break away from your busy schedule to experience your tours first hand. But making this a regular part of your schedule, even if it’s once a month during your busy tour season, will provide you with invaluable insights on where you can make improvements.

How To Increase Business

One of the opportunities for creating new revenue streams is through the discreet placement of short infotainment advertorials. This is accomplished by evaluating who in your network of tourism partners would benefit from a location specific mention of their business, as well as which businesses your passengers would benefit from.

• Note: We do not recommend the placement of blatant advertising within the context of providing visitors with exceptional sightseeing tours. But we do suggest that there are ways for you to create new revenue by including tourism partners as part of your tour experience. This of course solely depends on the quality of the experience your partners are providing.
• The commentary provides placement of complimentary experiences, including the opportunity to discover other tourism products in the area. If people are interested in booking a tour, making reservations or getting information, they are directed to speak with their driver. This is unlike blatant advertising, such as radio or TV advertising and is offered as a value added service for on-board passengers.

How To Improve Tours

The best sightseeing operators have alternative strategies for unforeseen traffic and construction, planned and unplanned city events, and emergencies. When it comes to providing GPS triggered audio commentaries on vehicles, the challenges of the road are often the hardest to adapt to. If you have construction or traffic jams, what’s your backup plan?

• To address these potential issues, create bail-out routes for your tour. Bail-out routes are additional points of interest tied to audio commentary on streets used when your buses are forced to go off route. You can play existing audio from your tour or include fresh content written and produced to fit seamlessly into your sightseeing experience. If there is a road closure due to construction that forces your drivers to miss a Point of Interest on your tour, bail-out routes solve this problem.

While we’ve shares some of the ways you can improve you tours and businesses, check out our other posts for more suggestions.