If 2020 was the year that travellers had to put their wanderlust on hold, 2021 is the year of new, safe, and exciting travel destinations and activities.

The COVID-19 pandemic left many avid travellers missing the excitement of discovering a new place, but at the same time created new travel opportunities and shifted the expectations for the tourism industry. Just as consumers favoured online shopping, small private gatherings, and even home work-out, the focus on tourism also changed from hot crowded, tourist spots and party cruisers to isolated, deep-in-nature destinations and small, private experiences.

Getting to know these trends early and adapting your region and business to the post-pandemic traveller can help you attract more visitors – and encourage locals too!

That’s why we gathered the top 6 travel trends for 2021 especially for you. Are you aware of them all?

1. Rural and nature destinations will thrive.

Urban tourism is so 2019! Rural tourism, also known as community-based tourism, is here to stay. Small communities as the main destination, activities that let people emerge into the lifestyle of the region, such as being a dairy farmer for a day or getting to know up close a wool mill, and disconnecting from the city life will become popular travel options this year.

Nature destinations are also on the list of many travellers that aren’t really professional adventurers. Climbing a mountain might not be exactly what some travellers are looking for, but offering an immersive experience into a calm camp side, exploring beginner trails, and sleeping under the stars, with little human contact, traffic, or nuisance is a priority for these visitors!

2. People will seek medical and wellness destinations and activities.

If 2020 taught us something, is that we need to pay more attention to our health. Medical and wellness tourism was already a trend that the pandemic only accelerated. 2021 will certainly see an increase in the number of travellers looking for holistic, stress-free experiences.

The wellness and medical tourism potential of your region should be explored! Thermal springs, spa resorts, yoga retreats, esthetic procedures, plastic surgeries, and holistic trips will be popular in the new year, always focusing on safe practices and guidelines.

3. Travellers will focus on family gatherings and reunions.

4. Tourists will seek private and contact-less experiences.

That’s the definition of bubble travel: imagine renting accommodation and a car (or even combine both and rent an RV for an amazing road trip) without bursting your intimate circle and keeping you and your travel companions safe? Technology makes it all possible, and the pandemic only showed is that this is perfectly doable.

Contact-free technology will also be crucial whenever possible, such as online check-in, phones as room keys, disposable menus, and contactless payments. From host communication, renting a car, ordering local food, or paying for your stay, everything can be done remotely and contact-less. Nothing is more private than this!

5. Remote work and school-cations – no need to wait until vacations to travel!.

Undeniably, working from home is here to stay. But people are taking this to the next level. Have you heard of “Always OOO” – always out-of-office? Yes, working remotely with your feet under the sand overlooking the sea is a great opportunity for a lot of travellers in 2021. These visitors will seek a calm, but an exciting destination – with great internet connectivity, of course!

And what about school-cations? Have you heard of them? It seems natural that, as parents will be able to work from anywhere, children won’t be stuck in school as well. Homeschooling was a popular option in 2020, and remote learning also became a thing. What best than sitting through a biology class while standing in the middle of nature and not limited by a four-wall classroom? 

This trend also means that the need to take a trip only during vacation months will not exist either. Maybe what we see as tourist season might happen all year!

6. Tourists will need more connection & communication than ever.

With so many guidelines and restrictions changing every day and sometimes so specific to a region, travellers will choose destinations and operators that keep them informed in a timely manner, or that at least makes the information always accessible.

Alerting your visitors through email or text about mask rules, curfews, safety guidelines, or even a new lockdown in place will assure them that everything is under control during their trip, and allow them to make decisions without compromising the peace of their visit.

What will really happen in the new year is still unknown, but these trends are here to stay– and it’s always great to be prepared! We hope some of these 2021 trends may help you get prepared to rebuild your region and attract tourists while still providing a safe and incredible experience. With the Experience Specialist Program, you can help your region thrive! The program will guide you step by step through creating and marketing workshops for locals and front line workers to ensure they are selling your region to its full potential. Make every visit and every dollar count!

Want more tips on how the post-pandemic tourism industry can keep to the expectations of travellers? Read our article on how the pandemic will change (and has already changed) local tourism!

Get to know more about the Experience Specialist Program and request your free marketing information package!

Forget the big billboards and radio jingles–it’s time to rely on your tourists’ words.

In a world full of digital ads–that we so eagerly skip–we sometimes forget that word-of-mouth marketing is still a crucial tool to promote our destination. But, when we think about word-of-mouth, we first picture someone talking directly to another person; talking about their experiences and recommendations on a close, personal basis. We rarely picture it as an online and amplified way, but that’s exactly how word-of-mouth marketing works in our digital world. We just don’t give it that exact name anymore.

But how does word-of-mouth happen nowadays?

In the era of online social interaction, everyone can be connected–no matter how distant they physically are. This fact was proven during the 2020 worldwide pandemic, when meetings, family reunions, birthdays, weddings and even funerals featured online attendance. Now, word-of-mouth can happen between people a thousand miles away from each other and still maintain the same level of trustworthiness.

Online reviews. Influencer campaigns. User-generated contents. Compliments and complaints posted on a social media feed. We give it another name, but deep down, these are nothing but word-of-mouth marketing techniques. And, as a tourism operator or a destination marketer, you need to take advantage of it. Now more than ever.

With so many advanced marketing tools out there, why word-of-mouth still works?

According to research conducted by Nielsen, 92 percent of consumers say they trust recommendations from friends and family above all other forms of advertising. Consumer reviews on online platforms, such as TripAdvisor, Yelp and Foursquare ranked as the second most trusted source, with 70 percent indicating they trust the online reviews. Social media ads, website banners, and search engine advertising ranked in the lowest levels of confidence from consumers–not surprisingly. 

When it comes to tourism, consumers search for recommendations for almost every activity or plan they have. What restaurant serves the best food for an affordable price? What hotel has the best reviews? What activity is the most popular and safe for children? And this search for online opinions from fellow travellers occurs in the early stages of planning a trip–and most of the time it can influence the destination chosen for the travel.

That’s why we gathered in this article important factors to consider about this new model of word-of-mouth marketing, including why invest in it and how you can apply it to your destination marketing plan.

It makes your marketing more personal, no matter the distance.

For most consumers, word-of-mouth is a more reliable marketing process than unsolicited advertising. This happens because they are shown real experiences of people who have been in a destination rather than just reading a promotional message in an advertisement or simply looking at a wonderful brochure with great pictures.

It gets more personal when the traveller can identify themselves with other visitors who have been in a place they are planning to visit, and the message is coming from fellow consumers instead of a company or agency, whose main goal is to sell them a package or a trip. And with technology, the personal touch, shifted away from the blunt commercial message, is easily reached, no matter the distance. Using influencers to deliver a conversational message, including their self-made pictures and videos of the activity or destination, is way more convincing to the potential traveller than posed photographs with models at a beautiful scenery.

An exceptional experience can lead to an exceptional recommendation.

A 2019 survey found that 82% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses, with 52% of 18-54-year-olds saying they ‘always’ read reviews. But relying on traveller’s reviews online also means relying on the quality of your destination’s experiences.

Did you know? A visitor who has a negative experience is highly likely to share that experience by leaving a bad review, sometimes as a warning to fellow tourists considering that destination, operator or activity. A visitor who has a positive experience, on the other hand, is unlikely to leave a good review. Researches show only one in 10 happy customers writes a good review. 

An unfavourable review can have a bigger impact than a positive one. Marketing data indicates that negative reviews dramatically influence our buying behaviours, and since there are significantly less negative reviews than positive ones online, the negative ones catch our attention more.

We also look at negative reviews and project that into our future experiences: we instantly fear that might happen to us too.

It helps build a community and a more powerful brand.

Encourage customers to share their travel experiences as your guest on social media and refer your business to their friends and family. For each new traveller they bring in, give them a reward, such as a free night’s stay or 10% off their next booking.

Offering referral programs with incentives is an ideal way to get customers talking about your brand, therefore growing your credibility and reputation.

Offer ‘surprisingly great’ customer service to all customers will also to get them talking about it. Keep in mind research says happy customers will tell at least 10 friends and family good things about your business, dissatisfied customers will tell many times that if they had a poor experience.

How can you invest in this new kind of word-of-mouth marketing?

There are several effective and simple ways to take advantage of this kind of promotion.

1. Show visitors’ testimonials on your website

Testimonials from previous guests and visitors are a great way to build credibility and promote your business or destination taking advantage of past experiences provided. The best testimonials are real, genuine, helpful, and include the name of the customer.

That’s why it’s so important to maintain contact with your guests and consumers even after the travel or experience has ended. Collecting their information and asking for reviews and testimonials is not time-costly and it can improve both your relationship with the visitor and your future marketing.

2. Don’t forget to encourage reviews

If you want to use this kind of marketing, good reviews are essential. Reviews have a great impact on tourism businesses by generating exposure to the destination and operators, increasing credibility, and giving customers an idea of what they’ll get when they book with you.

Encourage and collect reviews from travellers who’ve booked with you to increase your social proof–defined as “the tendency to see an action as more appropriate when others are doing it.” Ask customers to leave feedback on your website, on TripAdvisor, on your Facebook page, and relevant industry sites.

3. Offer an incentive or referral program

As we talked previously, offering referral programs with incentives is an ideal way to get customers talking about your business or destination. You can encourage customers to share their travel experiences as your guest on social media and refer your business to their friends and family. For each new guest or customer they bring in, you can offer a reward, such as 10% off their next booking.

4. Provide great–not just good–experiences

Providing quality service should always be your goal, but an over-the-top experience will get your guests talking about it. Satisfied customers–whose expectations were met–don’t necessarily leave reviews, but dissatisfied customers will tell many times that if they had a poor experience. Attention to detail, a friendly but comfortable service, and personalized experience can lead a guest or visitor to reverberate the great experience they had!

Learn 4 tips to provide a great tourist experience here!

5. Train your locals and front-line workers 

If getting real recommendations from fellow visitors can make a huge impact on deciding where to go, what to do and enjoying a trip to the fullest, imagine the impact of getting good advice from people who live all year in the region! Training your locals on how to deliver a good customer service and empowering them with knowledge about all that your region has to offer for every kind of tourist is essential.

Our program was designed especially to help you with that–we created a workshop-in-a-box that provides everything you need to train your locals and front-line workers on everything your region has to offer!

Get to know more about the Experience Specialist Program and request your free marketing information package!

No tourist is the same. Do you know how to identify them?

They might look similar, with their impressed, curious gaze, the smartphones in their hands trying to find a free wi-fi spot and always ready to take a selfie. But not every traveller is the same, and no, they don’t really want to see or do the same things as every tourist.

Getting to know travellers’ wants and needs is essential for every tourism region. There are so many types of travel for many different travel types. But what are they? And how to make sure you’re providing a catered experience to the right type of people?

In this article, we’ll show you the most common type of travellers and how to identify their party and their expectations.

1. The Adventurer

This kind of traveller has only one plan: to have an adventure. They might be budget travellers: they will stay at cheap AirBnBs or hostels, run from fancy restaurants and just experience street food, have a huge backpack instead of suitcases, and will be part of outdoor experiences and walking tours that don’t cost much. But they could also be thrill-seekers, the ones that don’t care much about the budget if it means they will have their adrenaline levels high. Mountain bike, jet skis, jumping from waterfalls, helicopter rides, hiking or bungee-jumping… They want to live on the edge.

This kind of traveller usually looks for outdoor, nature-related activities. Mind their budget and suggest activities that will fit what they are looking for. Providing them with everything they need for a safe and comfortable experience, even if it seems dangerous and wild, is key.

2. The Great Escapers

This group is on holiday to escape their ordinary life. They might be escaping their stressful jobs, they might be escaping a city life so their children experience nature, or they might be a couple looking for some alone time from their kids (we know it’s necessary sometimes).

They are looking for something different from their ordinary stressful routine–and want to relax and have fun while at it. Don’t fuss around these customers, but be sure to provide them with everything they might need. It would be good to offer them something extra, for example, a spa day, drinks served by the pool, or supervised activities to keep the children busy while the parents relax.

3. The Curious and Reflective Type

Cultural travel is an immersive kind of activity. This kind of traveller is curious about local heritage, art, culture, and history. They want to know the customs of the locals and how the place became what it is. Getting the details and paying attention to the real aspects of the culture they’re witnessing and not just standing on the sidelines with a camera is a goal to this traveller!

For them, it’s about the museums, the art, the music, the food and just relinquishing all aspects of home and embracing the new culture whilst you are there. They want to become locals–even if for just a few days. To cater to this type of visitor, suggest authentic experiences, workshops, musicals and theatre, local markets, and historic walking tours. It’s all about a story–they want to know how and why, and want to be immersed in a culture that is new to them.

4. The Business Travellers

With working remotely becoming popular due to the pandemic, the business travellers type might see a spike during the next few years. These people might travel purely for business reasons or they might work while also enjoying a holiday. It’s important to provide everything they need for a comfortable and efficient remote work: a good and fast wi-fi connection, a desk and an ergonomic chair, fast and hassle-free transport, and quick (but tasty) bite at specific times.

If they are also looking to relax half of the time, keep in mind that time and connection is a big concern for these travellers. Keeping the experiences within the city is the best way to make sure this kind of traveller doesn’t end up missing an important call while on a boat in the middle of the ocean.

5. The Passionate Ones

This group is visiting because of a certain passion–could be food, drinks, music, local nature, art, sports, literature, or even travelling. Their main reason to travel is their passion. For example, a group of young people that travelled to see a concert by their favourite band that is playing in your region, or another group travelling to watch a special soccer match.

This tourist type often plans their travelling very well, so you might be informed about their activities before they arrive–but that doesn’t mean you can’t suggest other activities based on their passion. So it’s good to stay informed about events near your destination and interests in your location.

6. The Social Energizer Kind

Usually composed of young people with no family responsibilities, this type of traveller usually has a bit of spare cash and is always happy to jump on a plane and grab a weekend away in a nearby city. A good hotel is a must but they won’t spend much time there, as they will be trying out the cafes, restaurants, pubs, and clubs wherever they find themselves. They are looking to meet new people and have lots of fun so they’re always on the lookout for gigs, festivals, and events that can be a great opportunity to socialize and feel energized–and they are always ready for another busy day in the morning!

They are usually in groups of young and loud friends, so it’s not difficult to identify them. Your region might be bursting with nightlife (or else they wouldn’t be there), so offer them possibilities for transport after a night of drinks or even a special offer in partnership with a club. They will feel VIP–and that is crucial for this kind of traveller.

Did you know it’s important to train your locals and front-line workers to identify these and more kinds of travellers and provide them with the next travelling experience? We created a program that will guide you step-by-step into transforming them into Experience Specialists!

Get to know more about the Experience Specialist Program and request your free marketing information package!

Everyone can have a tourism experience, but how to make sure it’s a great one?

A good tourism experience is more than just a good holiday spent somewhere. In fact, a good experience can happen anywhere–but when it happens in a place miles away from home, tourists will always look back to that specific region with kind eyes, will share it with their friends and family (and even online), and will always want to come back.

That’s the main goal of providing a great tourist experience: making them count the days for their next trip to the same destination.

But what makes an experience a great tourism experience?

First, tourism is an experience-based industry: it’s the business of creating memories. And to create incredible memories, a great experience is needed: something that the visitor will remember, that creates an emotional attachment by making the traveller belong to somewhere other than their home.

A three-part method:

Experiences can be broken down into three main aspects: product, service, and environment. Product is the physical, commercial good being sold: an accommodation, a rental car, or food at a local restaurant. The service involves delivering the product. When it comes to tourism, the expectations are higher. How the consumer will be treated, how he or she will feel while receiving what was purchased? The third aspect is the environment, in this case, your destination.

A great experience involves a great product, a great service, and a great environment. By combining these three things, tourism operators and professionals add value to customers and create the perfect opportunity for an unmissable and memorable time. It’s simple, but we know that if any of these aspects don’t meet the expectations of tourists, the whole experience can fail–and visitors will remember the bad things way more vividly than the good ones.

That’s why we gathered four tips to help you excel in the tourist experience you deliver:

1. Train your locals and staff on all your region has to offer

Have you ever asked a hotel employee for recommendations on what to do in a place and their answer was not good enough? How did that make you feel? If locals aren’t enthusiastic about the place they live in, why should a tourist?

Training your locals and front-line workers to provide a great experience to visitors and answer their questions with enthusiasm and even suggest a few good things only locals know is essential! Not every traveller will go to a visitor information centre or will search things to do online, sometimes they just want the opinion of someone who lives in the region. You need to make sure they get an authentic and inspiring experience every time they ask for recommendations on things to do and see, that’s why we created the Experience Specialist Program, a personalized step-by-step program so that you can deliver this training to your locals and staff!

2. Create experience-based itineraries

Focus on the experience. What does your visitor want? You can create experience-based itineraries on various themes: family fun, food & drinks, art and culture, adventure… It depends on what your region offers. A family fun itinerary could include a visit to a local park with a huge playground during the morning, lunch on a restaurant with an extensive kid’s menu, and maybe a trip to the aquarium in the afternoon, followed by a delicious ice cream cone on a dairy bar. The experiences don’t need to be fancy or complicated: they just need to create a good memory for the type of traveller they intend to reach.

After you find experiences that fit your theme, it’s time to gather them all in a one-day, two-day or even weekly itinerary. But try to be realistic: it’s hard to suggest a one-day itinerary full of experiences that might take the whole day to do. This will only make the visitor get more confused about what to do. And don’t forget to make a mix of paid and free activities in one day. Most travellers have a budget while travelling and they might not want to spend it all in one day!

3. Focus on simple, local and authentic activities

Modern tourists aren’t too interested in attractions catered to visitors, simply because they might not reflect the real life of the region. Travellers want to hang where the locals do, so let your visitors in on a few of the region’s favourite secret spots, those that might not be so popular between tourists.

As a local, you might overlook these attractions thinking tourists will be disappointed, simply because you’re used to it and see it every day–so there’s no spark for you. If you can’t figure out what would be a good, authentic experience to show visitors, ask the opinion of previous visitors, read reviews online. Maybe you know someone that was a visitor once before becoming a resident of your region: ask them what drew them to your place, what they thought was interesting when they visit the place for the first time.

4. Show you care, even when they are back home

The tourist experience doesn’t stop after they catch a flight back home. Take an interest, keep them up to date with what’s going on. If they provide you with their email address, you can send them packages and special returning discounts for the next season, provide them with interesting social media accounts for your region, or kindly ask them for a review online. Encouraging travellers to write reviews is not only good for your region’s online reputation but also good for visitors to remember all the great things they did in your region and help them keep the experience in mind.

“A tourism product is what you buy; a tourism experience is what you remember.” Canadian Tourism Commission

Don’t know where to start? We can help you with the first step to turn your region’s experiences into excellent ones! The Experience Specialist Program is your workshop in a box, a step-by-step program that will guide you through creating and marketing workshops for locals and front-line workers to ensure they are selling your region to its full potential.

Get to know more about the Experience Specialist Program and request your free marketing information package!

Are you already doing all five of them? Or do you need to step up your game?

During these uncertain times, an extra effort to attract travellers to your region is needed. Maybe in previous years your region’s beauty and attractions were already a magnet to visitors with little marketing, but now, with travelling restrictions and safety concerns, marketing what you have to offer to travellers is essential!

We gathered below 5 things you should be doing to attract travellers. You might be already doing some of these things, so we also included some insights to improve your strategy and keep your region in the visitor’s mind, even if they’re not planning on travelling right.

1. Promoting not only tourist attractions, but showing the local lifestyle

More and more, tourists want to get to know the real thing. They’re running away from tourist catered attractions and activities and searching for authentic experiences in the destination. That’s why AirBnBs, workshops, and private activities became so popular in the past years: it’s a way to connect with the local culture and people.

2. You should be selling experiences

The majority of travellers are motivated by experiences. Instead of showing them attractions, use your marketing material to show how people experience them. One way to do this is to encourage the sharing of user-generated content so that people share their own moments and experiences on your website and on social media. 

When you achieve this, you turn your own locals and visitors into ambassadors for your destination. Training front-line workers and tourism operators to understand and share these experiences with visitors is also an amazing way to market your region and boost your hospitality. Word of mouth promotion can be extremely successful! That’s because it is considered more trustworthy than hearing from an organisation with a clear motive. (P.S.: Did you know that the Experience Specialist Program was designed to help you achieve that? Check us out later!)

3. Using Pinterest as a marketing tool

Did you know travel is more popular on Pinterest than on other platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter? And still a lot of tourism associations are not using it. Pinterest might be famous between art-crafters, DIYers, and brides-to-be, but thousands of users go to the social media platform everyday to plan for their vacation and get holiday travel inspiration.

Travel and tourism are visual experiences, and in the era of the selfie, people want to visit beautiful places and capture them in memorable photos–and they usually plan on going to a specific region because of pictures they saw online! For this reason, Pinterest holds a huge advantage when it comes to the travel industry: it is designed especially for visual discovery. You should invest some time upfront to compile a lot of imagery and categorize them into boards, and add an image at the end of articles inviting people to pin it on their accounts. You can even advertise your pins to gather more attention!

4. Partnering with Influencers

We, as internet users, learned to have a natural distrust for direct virtual advertising, since it’s always interrupting our feeds, videos, and online newspaper, not to talk about all the scams practiced through sketchy advertising online. However, your target market might be able to be reached indirectly, through influencers: people with an established following on social media platforms, such as Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook or their own blog.

Their followers tend to be loyal and tend to trust the influencer’s opinions more than they would trust an organisation–or an ad that just interrupted their preferred content. By partnering with influencers, especially local ones that can show all your region has to offer, you can promote your destination across different platforms and get people to react more positively to the message that is being promoted since it’s being published by a real person, someone they trust and already follow.

5. Sharing drone footage and 360º virtual tours

Drone footage can show your destination from a privileged view. If your region has a lot of natural beauty or particular landscapes and attractions, hiring a specialized drone professional to shoot pictures and videos from up above is an investment that can attract a lot of attention–both to locals that might not realize how beautiful their region is and to tourists who would dwell into visiting it.

Especially important in pandemic times of travel bans and social isolation, virtual reality marketing goes a step further and provides ways for your target audience to actually experience aspects of your destination from the comfort of their own home. A virtual tour of a local hotel, a virtual travel experience of a boat ride, or 360 degree tours of attractions or landmarks can attract people to keep in mind to visit your region once it’s possible so they can experience all you offer upclose.

Ok, I attracted visitors. What now?

Now it’s the time to make them feel like home–and provide a great experience so they will tell their friends and family and come back another time! And we offer a license package special to help you your region thrive when it comes to visitor experience!

The Experience Specialist Program is your workshop in a box, a step-by-step program that will guide you through creating and marketing workshops for locals and front-line workers to ensure they are selling your region to its full potential. Make every visit and every dollar count. Discover all we offer and turn your locals into Experience Specialists!

Get to know more about the Experience Specialist Program and request your free marketing information package!