Customer Journeys for Tourism Organizations

Tour operators often tell me: "my website doesn't work". Sometimes they combine that with my developing partner did a bad job, but often its not only the website that is a problem, but the lack of understanding where a website fits in the overall tourism customer journey.

A person doesn't just book, they research a lot, sometimes visiting dozens of pages and hours of social media scrolling. This make digital marketing difficult and if your new probably so difficult that you want to focus first on only scooping travellers that are already at the end of their journey, mostly done by price, but with a good story value for money or a being a niche expert can also do the trick.

Successful tourism organisations, understand that a travelers doesn't just go to their website and book an experience. They know that a traveler takes a journey, from discovery, to planning to booking.

And in each phase the traveller needs different information to be guided to the next phase. On different platforms and with different types of media. But how do you do that, and how do you know what kind of information a traveler needs when. To make this insightful many tourism companies use a form of Customer Journey mapping to plot the information needs of their target audiences.

In a customers journey they plot the information needs, to moments. A traveler gets inspired with your travel brand by an social media post of their friends that wows them, and might eventually become a loyal customer who recommends others because of a genuine communication journey both customer and tourism organisation take that is based on trust, value and more and more aligned life principles like sustainability.  

In short a customers journey helps you with reaching potential customers at the right moment, and communicate with them in a relevant way according to the situation they are in. Plotting a customers journey map or table will help your travel business to understand the information and content you need to create to guide your most important potential customers (persona's) on the path to a purchase.

Main Phases of a Travelers Customer Journey

A customers journey starts with being inspired by the best available experiences of a travel company or destination and ends with experiencing that experience and share how great it was on social media.

In General a Customer Journey will look something like:  

Getting Inspired -> Start Planning a destination -> Start Selecting Service Providers -> Start Booking Services Providers -> Go to a destination -> Enjoy the book experiences -> Share About Booked Experiences online-> Returns Home -> Shares about the experience at Home to friends.

The customer journey is like a funnel, more people are seeing your content that is made to inspire them, but if the are not inspired, they will not need to go into your planning phase. Just a few of your potential customers finish the journey most of them drop out some change destination, some drop your company during the selection process, some suddenly get back on track after seeing, hearing or experiencing something that inspires them again.

Some travelers will be returning depending on the destination, some travelers move on and will get inspired to visit other places.

The inspiration phase we call the top of the funnel.

A customer will use different devices to consume information during their journey, during breakfast they might see an inspiring travel add in a newspaper, then the search more about what they saw on their mobile in the train to work. The forget about it for a while and suddenly see an Ad on TV that reminds them after which the next they search further on a desktop at their work. Especially for multi day trips this journey can go on for months.

Especially in the travel industry people do lots of research and more then 100 hundred online searches before doing a booking is very common.

To successful guide the customer through the whole journey, your travel organization needs to be assistive and valuable during the whole customer journey. Which you can only do if you know your customers inside out.  

Creating a Customer Journey for your travel organization.

While mapping the journey your customer will take, you want to decide what you want them to do at the moments you are interacting with them. Without always trying to sell, being helpful while building on a trust relation probably guides more potential clients to a booking than being to commercial to fast.  The idea is you try to be assistive to your potential customer all the journey long and beyond. Converting your persona into a loyal brand ambassador who loves you.

But this is not an easy task, customers are well informed and educated about your destination and loose interest when offered travel information is not line with their interests, personalities, and behaviors.

Because this is so difficult i recommend to create customers journeys for max 3 persona's, maybe even max 2 if you want to do it really good, you can't please everyone.

You should know your customers very well, but also have a clear understanding of who you are. This helps to bring your message across in a brand consistent way that is aligned with the values of your company.  

Once you have created your persona's and set your vision, mission and values you can craft your customer journeys.

Select the customer journey phases that apply for your business and make a table in google docs of word so you can dump information needs of your customer per phase: you can use this customer journey template if you like.

Questions to ask to help plotting a customer journey.

It helps a lot do first define your persona's before making a customer journey, that will make it much easier.

Inspire:
What is your persona dreaming about ?

Planning:
What kind of info do they need to be comfortable about going to your destination ?
What kind of paint points do they have ? 
What kind of info do they need to select the right tour or experience ?

Booking:
What kind of info do they need to be comfortable about booking your company ?

Experience:

How can I help get travelers the most out of their experience during the experience ?
How can I help my customers share their experience, make photos and videos ?

Advocates:
How do i help / motivate with creating reviews ?
How do I help / motivate with sharing content ?
Can i help / motivate customers to refer my business to friends ?

When do they need which information ? In what kind of context ? How will they search for it ? What platforms will they visit during the different phases ?

Optimize a Customers Journey

Because the journey is also a kind of funnel not everyone who is inspired will become a client, its important you divide your attention in a smart way on the different phases, putting to much emphasizes on the last part of the journey, will make you missing out on opportunities. To much inspiration without a proper way to be helpful and have the proper sales tools in place will lead to marketing campaigns with no or little returns.

You need a smart integrated marketing plan to guide your customers step by step through multiple platforms and online through your customer journey and try to lead people back to that journey who might have got lost on the way.

A smart way of getting lost people back in your journey and or reconfirm travelers that they are on the right path, is understanding that your customer is also having journeys for related products in your destination, think about hotels, restaurants, attractions, events, other trips in your destination. Have partnerships with such related business or being visible in the journeys towards such services can be a very successful tactic.

It also works the other way around, after a customers purchased something on your website, the journeys of the paths to purchase for your partners might continue, like for a tour operator after a booking searches go further for the right clothes, vaccinations, suitcases, transport etc.

Helping your customers that trust you, with an easier journey for other related services could intensify the bond with your customer but also with partners that can help bring customers to your business.

You can think about this as up selling other services, but if you aproach this from a helpful perspective where you are a guide in your customers journey i believe the returns for all in the network will be higher.

Very few travel companies do this good, an example is Tauck who created an app that gives travelers suggestions what their customers can do during their free time while on holiday with them.

Looking at the rates in the play store (2.3 in June 2020) they didn't nail it according to their customers, which shows again how difficult it is,to create value for customers and its not only the information that needs to be right but also the usability and the presentation. Though if your read the comments in the play store Tauck seemed to have more of a technical problem.

Being able to communicate to your customers through an app, your own or a partners app can be extremly powerfull, because a mobile plays such a central role in the lives of people, and app can trigger things based on movements, location, etc you can't do yet with a website. The instant feedback, gamifcation and other possibilities are endless and really cool, but they cost money and dedication to develop and improve, just like a website a mobile app is never finished.

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