How do you start a tour business in the aftermath of one of the most devastating hurricanes your country has ever seen? How do you build your brand, spread the word, and find that first paying guest? How do you get to the top of your game and still manage to love what you do? In this post, Cindi Richardson takes us through her journey as a tour operator, and how her efforts resulted in her business, French Quarter Phantoms, being named the Number 1 Ghost Tour in the U.S. in 2018. Take it away, Cindi! My love for New Orleans began as a small child. The city seemed so special - it had a magic to it. I was born and raised in Baton Rouge, so New Orleans was where we went with family and friends for special occasions and family fun. When I got old enough to move out on my own, there was only one place I was headed - straight to New Orleans. I was so excited to live and thrive in my favorite place on earth.Fast forward to Hurricane Katrina: The city was devastated - it seemed like everything I had once loved about it was now gone. I heard people asking, "Why do people live there? Why should it even be rebuilt?" It broke my heart that they couldn’t see the magic and beauty of New Orleans that I had seen throughout my life. Every evening, my neighbor Mike and I would sit on our porch, waiting for the Red Cross to bring us our daily plate of hot food. The city was filled with volunteers from all over the country who had come to lend a helping hand in the wake of the destruction. Mike and I started thinking about what we could do to pay them back. How could we share with them our love for New Orleans, and show others exactly why this incredible city deserved to be rebuilt?Mike had his tour guide license and my background was in sales and marketing - we were a good fit. I also had a passion for anything scary: Hitchcock, The Twilight Zone, the Anne Rice novels. And so, the idea for French Quarter Phantoms Ghost Tours was born.Our first year “in business”, most of the tours we did were for free to the many disaster aid workers who were in the city. Every day, Mike would do two tours, while I walked around five miles back and forth across the downtown area, getting the word out and building our reputation.Eventually, word started to spread, and visitors started coming back. We took on a partner, Drew, who funded our first round of real brochures. We started charging a little for the tours and the business started to grow. This year, 12 years after we started, we were named as the #1 Ghost Tour in the country by USA Today.

The road to success

Our goals today are pretty much the same as they were in the beginning. We want to make a decent living doing something we love. It’s not about getting rich - for our team, what’s important is feeling great about what we’ve done at the end of each day. There are plenty of lessons we’ve learned along the way, and a few key things I believe are vital to our success as a business. Here are a few pieces of advice I would give to other tour operators on their own journey:

Hire people who love to tell a story

There's a quote by Theodore Roosevelt that I love and have really taken to heart: “A great manager is someone who hires the right person to do a job and has sense enough to leave them alone while they do it." I think that this applies perfectly to our hiring and employment practices. We hire educated, intelligent people with engaging personalities and allow them to craft their tour in the style that best fits their personality. We make sure we give a few guidelines, but we don't micromanage or script their tours. Instead, our tour manager, Luke, will regularly walk with each guide to pass along pointers (and compliments!) where needed. Allowing our guides this creativity gives them a sense of ownership and great job satisfaction. It also ensures all of our tours are the right balance of chills up the spine and good laughs.

The French Quarter Phantoms team - I am so proud of them all!

Our tour guides - or as we call them, our Master Story Tellers - are French Quarter Phantoms’ greatest asset. I am a great salesperson - I can get a hotel concierge or ticket seller to recommend us once. But it’s the post-tour feedback conveyed to that reseller that gets us the 2nd, 3rd and 100th recommendation. Our storytellers are the reason they’ll recommend us again and again.

Think like a customer

I’ve always believed that entertainment value needs to be better than the price of the ticket. That means that after the tour is over, I want you to think you had so much fun that really you would have paid more. It’s important to provide something that is fun no matter what the age or makeup of your group. Think about college groups, bachelorette parties, family outings - spend time crafting a tour that has something for everybody. Give a little Lagniappe - a Louisiana way of saying a little something extra. On our tours, we offer 2 for 1 Hurricanes (our famous New Orleans cocktails) for adult participants, served in a free souvenir cup that they get to take home and keep. On the rare occasion we do get a complaint, well - remember that old saying about the customer always being right? It may sound cliché, but the truth is: if someone is mad, I am probably not going to get them to change their mind. The best thing I can do is listen, learn and provide them with the best customer service possible. I always try to let customers know their voice has been heard, and try to make it right for them however I can.

Never stop learning

I read our online reviews - and those of our competitors - several times a week. It is important to understand what the customer likes and doesn't like from both our tours and those of the operators around us. I then pass pointers along to our guides or office personnel. We never stop asking ourselves what we can do to be more efficient and more entertaining. We want to be one of the reasons that people fall in love with our city as much as we all did.

There is a lot to be learned from your customers, so take time to listen to their feedback

The best advice I can give to another business owner is: never stop listening to your customers. Never stop listening to your competitors’ customers either! There is great value in "hearing" what they have to say.Plus, when those great reviews roll in, it makes the job even more worthwhile. Here are some of my favorite things that have been said about French Quarter Phantoms: "French Quarter Phantoms guides are the strangest bunch of real historians you will ever have the pleasure of spending time with.""My kids loved the tour so much they didn't even realize they were learning something!""This was the world's best tour guide and tour. I dragged my boyfriend along to this and he hates ghost stuff but by the end of this he was asking all of the questions and wanting more. I've never seen this side of this man. I think I will marry him."Our dedication, willingness to learn, and passion for what we do is what has kept us going strong more than a decade after we first began in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Mike eventually left the business to follow his calling as a Calvinist minister, leaving Drew and I with the company and my passions. Mike is still my best friend and I will always love what we started together. And I will continue to love what I do, right here in the city I love the most.

For more stories and tips from fellow tour operators, why not check out our latest post from Vantigo owner Erik Hormann, talking about how he created a profitable, popular tour! And if you’re planning a trip to New Orleans, make sure you drop in on Cindi and her team at French Quarter Phantoms Ghost Tours for an unforgettable experience - and to see a top-class tour operator in action!

In this post, serial entrepreneur and super coach Drew Renner takes us through some simple tricks to boost revenue through upselling - without putting customers off. When not writing blog posts for Peek, Drew is busy helping tour and attraction owners win customers through simplicity, authenticity and highly-leveraged systems, providing no-nonsense frameworks for business growth. Trust us, this guy knows his stuff. Hit it, Drew! If you’re anything like me, you hate the feeling of being ‘sold’ to. You have these awesome tours and activities for your guests. You may also have a few little ‘extras’ that you are offering, or want to offer, in order to bring in some additional revenue. But the last thing you want to be is that greasy salesman from the car lot. Here lies the issue: how do we avoid being aggressive while still presenting the options to guests? As a former owner and operator of an off-road adventures company, here are 3 simple things I have always kept in mind when it comes to increasing my upsells without being pushy or sleazy.

It should actually enhance their experience

Do your current upsell options make the experience better, or is it just more revenue for you? Think about what things you could offer that would make the experience way cooler. What things would it suck not to have? What things have guests mentioned they would love? Upsells can also be great when there are some things that you would like to add to the experience, but recognise not everyone might want. Whatever the reason, keep in mind the needs and wants of your guests.Here’s an example. With our off-road outfitter, one thing people were liable for was damage to the vehicles, including tire damage. This didn’t happen often, but when it did it was a real bummer for the guests. We decided to offer a “Tire Protection” option that they could purchase for $25. It wasn’t expensive, and it could potentially keep them from having to pay $200 for a tire. Really a no-brainer for most guests. The way we presented this offer helped them to see we had their interest in mind.

Don’t offer too many options

Too many options will overwhelm your guests. When they feel overwhelmed, they run away. And if they keep seeing all these options or offers they’ll feel like they are just being sold to. Select a few things you can offer to your guests during the booking process. I suggest no more than 3. Present them all at once. You want to make the check out process as simple and short as possible. If offers keep popping up, you will lose out on bookings because people will get annoyed and leave.

Offer what they want - even if they don’t know they want it

I kept hearing my guests say after the tour was over that they wished they had a GoPro to record their adventure. Hearing this consistent dialog told me people wanted it, but didn’t think about it when they booked their adventure. So as they were booking, I set up an add-on item in Peek Pro to offer to them the option to rent a GoPro. 15-20% of our guests chose to rent a GoPro during their booking process. Rad, right?!But wait - there’s more. Just because the remainder didn’t go for it when booking, that didn’t mean they wouldn’t want one. Having that add-on option was just planting an idea. As guests arrived and were checking in, we’d causally ask them if they had brought their GoPro so we could mount it for them.This was now the second time they’d heard about it, which started to cause them to wonder if they needed one for the trip. They’d most often reply that they forgot it or didn’t own one. We’d reply with something like, that’s a bummer... and proceed to tell them a story about how people would tell us how the wished they had a GoPro recording of the ride. Almost like magic, the guests would ask, “do you guys have one I could rent?”. In which we’d reply yes - would you like one? No pushy sales. They saw a need to have one and we helped them. As you think about what and how to offer upsells to your guests without being pushy, decide what would enhance their experience, keep the options simple, and offer them in a way that shows you have their best interest in mind. Share a story about it. When you do, people will be willing to open up their wallets knowing you have their best interest in mind.If you’re a tour or activity operators looking for other great ways to enhance your experience, check out Drew’s site at DrewRenner.com to see how you can grow both sales and profits!

Erik Hormann is the owner of Vantigo — San Francisco’s #1 rated tour on TripAdvisor. In this post, he shows us how the key to a tour operator’s success lies in the two Ps — profitability and popularity. Take it away Erik!

How to Make a Tour Profitable

“Show me the money!”Every business owner says the same thing to themselves. Okay, maybe they’re not always quoting a ‘90s Tom Cruise film exactly, but the point remains. At the end of the day, if you’re not making money, then what you’re doing is just a hobby.

Maybe you’re a guide who wants to strike out on their own. Maybe you have a tour company that has grown to 20 buses, but you still feel like you made more money when it was just you and one bus.After five years of scaling a business to become the top tour in San Francisco, I’ve gone through this same cycle every year. Here are some key things to consider when thinking about the real profitability of your tour:

Is your product right for the market?

First, let’s talk about your tour or rental itself. Is it in the right place? Does it have the right market? I once had a tour where we would take participants up the California coast to shuck oysters, taste cheese and drink mead. Sounds amazing, right? But while blog articles may make this seem like the most glorious tour ever, the audience was just not there. As much as I loved doing this tour, it was so much work and could not be priced high enough to make it viable. Maybe if I had amped up the marketing and found all the best Instagram-famous “influencers” and bloggers to promote it, I could have found my audience. But at the end of the day, I knew I could do two city tours in the time it would take for me to pull this tour off — and triple my profit in the process.

I loved doing this tour! But in the end, it just wasn’t profitable enough for my business

The price is right… or is it?

How much is your tour really worth? I had a good friend put it in a great frame of reference: When you are a solo operator, how much are you worth? How much do you need to make an hour? This is the question I asked myself when I started, when I hired my first guide and each time I decided to scale. It’s also something to consider when you make the leap from working as a tour guide, to managing your own company. How many guides do you need working full-time to pay for you in a management role? I’ll be the first to admit I should have really dove into the numbers in the beginning to understand this better. Ultimately, it all rolls up into how you price your tour or rental. When I started out, I also did a comparison of all nearby tour companies that were similar to me. I broke down what they charged by looking at their capacity and tour pricing, converting it into an hourly rate. What do I mean by that? Let’s say Ted’s Most Excellent Adventures tour company has a tour that costs $45 per person. And on average it has 10 people for a six-hour tour. His per hour amount would break down to $45 x 10 / 6 = $75/hour. This has nothing to do with how much it costs him to run his tour; it’s simply the hourly amount he receives. I used this calculation with similar tours and figured out that my per hour charge was below the average. Therefore, in order to be competitive in the market, I raised the price.

The cost of making money: is it raining dollars or overdraft fees?

Once I had fixed my pricing based on that of my competitors’, I then had to look at what it cost me to run a business. And there are a lot of factors that need to be considered. The easiest thing to calculate is fixed costs.Or is it? Rent, insurance, loan payments, vehicle leases — all these factors can easily be put together. The real trick is splitting them up between tours. If one of your tours accounts for 70% of your business, and two others account for just 30%, then the fixed costs should be split accordingly. You’ll be able to see pretty quickly which tours are worth putting more energy into. On top of that, you’ll then have to split out the individual fixed costs per tour itself — the rest will follow from there.To help you out with some basic costing, I’ve created a tour profitability calculator which you can download here. This should help to get you on the right track in terms of being profitable.

To employ or not to employ?

Hiring may seem like a perfectly logical idea if demand is high — but you should always consider the cost of your time and any insurance involved. In most cases — especially in the U.S. — you’ll need workers’ compensation insurance. Some companies like to treat guides as contractors to get around this. My advice — and the advice of any smart lawyer — don’t do it. If you end up in court for whatever reason, they’ll almost always find a way to be defined as an employee. There are other options out there. One of the best I have seen is offering employee ownership. Be sure to reach out to a lawyer to fully understand how this works, but in some cases it can save operators a lot of money.

Here’s our dream team — make sure you build one that’s viable for your business

Remember, when considering any part of your tour’s profitability, you should be thinking about your end game. Do you have an expansion plan for your company? Do you want to sell it? Is it worth anything? It’s important to understand that what you charge now is directly related to your prospective plans — so always keep one eye on the future.

How to Make a Tour Popular

So you’ve run the numbers, and you’re sure you’ve got a viable tour on your hands. Now the question you need to ask yourself is: what makes a good tour great?

It’s the little things

We’ve all been on good tours and bad tours. But what makes a tour so great that you not only want to buy a t-shirt, you want to straight up invest your kids’ college fund into it?All I can say is: details. While on vacation, I’m always looking at how other people do tours to see if there is anything I’m missing. And the one thing that always sticks? The details. Take the Brewseum in Hawaii. A family-run museum and brewery — how could this place not be perfect? It takes you on a journey, starting with the museum and ending up in the brewery. This could probably succeed based on the idea alone, right? But, what made this experience truly unforgettable were the details that operator Duke and his father Glenn added:The museum told a story. From the very beginning, you’re immersed in 1930s Hawaii, before the Pearl Harbor bombing. As you weave along the path, you follow all the action until you end up at a door. That door leads to a military-themed speakeasy, where Glenn, dressed in military uniform, plays the part of bartender. The bar is full of touchable relics from the era. Once we were done in the speakeasy, we moved along to the brewery. It was so well done that I had to write a review right afterwards. This is why they hit a home run. There are so many well-placed details that I didn’t have time to think or pick it apart. It’s the same reason why adults love to go to Disneyland! They’re too busy living in this new, created world, to think about anything else.So. Let’s say you’re operating a walking tour that goes down the same street every day. Along the way, you call on a shopkeeper who has a sample goodie for your folks to try. There’s a detail: a way to make people feel like this is a one-of-a-kind experience — that they are a VIP.Do you have an epic, relevant soundtrack for your tour? Maybe some antiques that are part of the local history? Maps, newspaper clippings, local delicacies — all of this adds to the magic of your tour. Be on constant lookout for details like these, and review their success on a regular basis.

Let’s talk about content

Even when I first started touring, I was encyclopedic in my knowledge of San Francisco. So much so, that people walked away from my first couple of beta tours looking like they had been in class for eight hours. The content of your tour needs to be catered to your audience. Ask questions, find out what they like, then provide information that they can connect with. A great example is when I have someone from NYC on a tour. I love to explain that the person who built Central Park is the same person who inspired and helped with the design of Golden Gate Park. This connects them with something they are familiar with and may know something about. One of my best guides told me once that people will remember 10% of what you tell them, but at the end of the day they will always remember how you made them feel. How can you make them feel great? The best thing you can do is connect with people on your tour in some way. Ask them where they are from, understand what their itinerary looks like. People always love to talk a little about themselves. If people let you know that they are a local or an expert in the field of your tour, use them. When I give beer tours and find out that someone is a homebrewer, boom — they just became a second staff member. I’ll ask them questions about how they brew at home or what type of ingredients they like to use. Honestly, the self-proclaimed expert is probably already thinking about poking holes in your tour. This is your chance to flip it on its head and have them add more flavor and dialogue to the experience!

Guests can make a great contribution to your tour — even the beer nerds! ;)

The big thing to remember when creating a great tour is that you want it to have an echo. It should leave an impression on someone: whether they walk away with a map, recommendations on where to eat, or just a song that gets stuck in their head. Make them feel special, and involve them in the experience. This will replace any negative thoughts or reflections they may have had.So as you prepare to start, scale or breathe new life into your tour or activity operation, remember the two pillars of your success — profitability and popularity.Make sure to download's Erik's tour profitability calculator by filling out the form below!

Welcome to Growvember!

What a couple of days we’ve had! Thank you to everyone who participated - we think we can all agree that our eight incredible speakers provided us with some awesome insights. In case you missed any of the sessions, this is your one stop shop for all the resources you need to catch up and start applying the information to your business!

Recordings

Below you’ll find links to all 8 recordings for you to watch at your convenience: The Essential Tour and Activity Trends for 2019 and Beyond - Douglas Quinby7 Easy Steps to an Extra $54,737 in Revenue in 2019 - Delamon RegoRecruit and Train Extraordinary Leaders - Kelsey Tonner4 Ways to Sell More Experiences Through Offline Channels - Josh OakesHow Video Boosts Your Sales - On Any Budget - Chris TorresNote: Here are the links to the videos shown in Chris' presentation:1. Gray Line Iceland, 2. Background video example, 3. Rough test advert using stock footage, 4. GoPro footage, 5. Professional video, 6. Itinerary videoAt Home vs In Destination Marketing - Jeremiah CalvinoHow to Futureproof Your Website - Andy MottIncrease Your Bookings Without Spending a Dime (With This Efficient Phone Script Outline) - Dustin Hoyman

Presentation Slide Decks

Below you can find all presentation slides from each speaker, for you to follow along with recordings, download and review!

Douglas Quinby - The Top Tour and Activity Trends for 2019 and Beyond

Delamon Rego - 7 Easy Steps to an Extra $54,787 in 2019 revenue

Kelsey Tonner - How to Recruit and Train Extraordinary Guides

Josh Oakes - 4 Ways to Sell More Experiences Through Offline Channels

Chris Torres - How Video Boosts Your Brand on Any Budget

Jeremiah Calvino - At Home vs in Destination Marketing

Andy Mott - How to Futureproof Your Website

Dustin Hoyman - Increase Your Revenue Without Spending a Dime (With This Efficient Phone Script Outline)

Did you know that people are now favoring experiences over ‘stuff’ more and more? That’s why your tour or activity is the perfect gift!It’s now time to get selling because now’s the peak time for gift card sales!

Why Selling Gift Cards Will Beat Your Low Season Blues

Here are a few more key reasons why you should be utilizing gift cards to boost your sales this season:

Supercharge Your Sales During Slow Season

Holiday season is coming up, and you know that the best gift of them all is the chance to experience your awesome tour or activity. The only problem? The holidays often coincide with an operator’s low season, with fewer or no activities offered. Enter gift cards! By offering the chance to gift your experience, you can take advantage of Black Friday madness, holiday generosity, and those last minute Christmas shoppers.Figures from Peek Pro show that last year 51% of gift card sales occurred between Black Friday and Christmas. What does that mean? On an average day during the holiday season, our partners generated 10.5x the amount of gift card sales compared to their daily average the rest of the year!Take a look at this graph showing last year’s gift card sales trends:

You can see that Black Friday is when gift card sales begin to spike, with December 22nd showing as the biggest day for gift card sales in 2017. So make sure that you kick off your big gift card push in time for Black Friday, and continue it all through December!What if you offer winter activities? Maybe the holidays overlap with your peak season? In that case, this is your opportunity to double down and maximize your sales through all possible channels. Take advantage and make December a bumper month for your business!

Rake in That Instant Cash Flow

We can probably all think of a gift card we received last Christmas (or was it two Christmases ago?) that’s tucked away in a drawer somewhere, waiting to be used. In fact, almost $1 billion worth of gift cards go unused in the U.S. each year.The good news is, when someone purchases a gift card through your website, you receive that revenue right away — not when the card is redeemed. That means you don’t need to wait for Uncle Bob to clear out his desk and book his activity before you start seeing that extra revenue. As soon as your gift card is purchased, boom💥. Instant bottom line boost!

The Perfect Present

We all want to avoid seeing that “I wonder if they kept the receipt” look wash over our loved one’s face as they open our gift. That’s why experience gifts save the panic of finding the best-smelling bath set that we definitely didn’t buy last year — right?The trouble with gifting some experiences, like concerts or events with a fixed date, is we have to cross our fingers and hope the recipient is free that day. Either that, or we ruin the surprise with scheduling questions. With your gift cards, that’s not an issue. Your customers can choose the activity, rental or cash amount they want to gift, and the recipient can book for whenever suits them! Win-win!

How to Sell Gift Cards

So you decided to get in on gift card capabilities. You’re in the game. But how can you drive those sales and really take advantage? Here are a couple of key ways:

Push the (Gift Card) Button

Just like with your online bookings, your website is going to be a key player in driving your gift card sales. So slap that gift card button on your homepage right next to your Book Now button and make it clear from the get-go that your tour, activity or rental is giftable.With gift cards available in the same style booking flow you have for your online bookings, you can make it easy for your customers to choose the activity, rental or cash amount they want, and purchase their gift card in no time.Check out how Peek Partner Sunset Ranch Hollywood is promoting their gift cards:

They have dedicated a whole chunk of their homepage to promoting gift cards and making it easy for customers to purchase them. They've also added different gift options, including specific activities or a custom cash amount, giving customers more choice. Win!

Let Your Customers Bring You New Customers

Your customers came on your tour or activity, and they had an awesome time, right? Of course they did! So why not make it easy for them to share that experience with a friend or loved one? Happy customers who had a great time with you are the perfect audience to sell gift cards to. After all, they’re the ones who know for sure what a fun time your tour or activity is!Plus, by offering guests the chance to purchase a gift card for the activity they’ve just been on, you’re giving them a ready-made gift idea. And the best part is, it doesn’t involve too much extra effort on your part! Your guests are ready and waiting for gift card marketing. So why not let them be part of bringing in more guests!The point of all this is: if you want to improve your bottom line — especially this holiday season — you need to be using gift cards. They are an easy and super successful way to give your sales a boost, and showcase your awesome tours to an even wider audience.Not using gift cards on your website? Take a look at Peek Pro’s new and improved gift cards feature and see what you’re missing out on!

This post was written by Josh Oakes as part of our Growvember series—focusing on ways to grow your business. In 2007, Josh and his wife started a day tour company in Melbourne, Australia. They had no experience in tourism, no business experience, no networks or support — and no funds. Fast forward seven years and they had grown their business to $2 million+ in annual revenue, before selling the company in 2017 for a seven figure sum. Josh recently launched www.thesunshinetribe.com— helping tour and activity operators and small tourism businesses across the globe build amazing businesses AND create awesome lives for themselves. Here he shares some of his best ways to boost sales — the “old-fashioned” way.In 2018, if you’re not selling your tours and activities online, you’re probably going to struggle to grow your business.Not exactly a ‘visionary’ statement, you may think. And you’d be right. I doubt there are many operators out there prepared to debate the importance of online channels —I’m definitely not.I’ve seen plenty of superb tour operators grow their business to high six and even seven figures by concentrating on growth via SEO, Facebook and Google Ads, Online Travel Agents, and various other online channels.As a tour operator, I knew online channels were critical to the health of our business, and we developed a strong online presence.However, at a time when we were selling more than $2 million in tours annually, approximately 70% of our revenue came via offline channels.So here’s a question for all those tour or activity operators that are currently smashing it out of the park online:How good could your business be if you were complementing those efforts with some serious success through offline channels?With that in mind, here are a few distribution channels you should consider utilizing —plus some tips on how to really make them succeed:

1. Travel Partners

Why should you consider selling your tours through carefully selected global travel agents, travel wholesalers, and inbound tour operators?The international exposure you’ll receive for your tours or activities is next level.The scope that resellers have often goes far beyond the reach of a single tour or activity operator. Good travel partners take part in multiple international trade shows, workshops and sales calls every year.When they’re out there doing deals, meeting potential partners, pitching themselves and building relationships, they’re not only talking about their business.They’re pitching the experiences they use — and they’re using their tourism expertise and experience to pitch your company to the right international travel partners that will love what you have to offer.They offer a reliable source of income.Once your relationship with the right travel partners is in full swing, you’ll discover that the ones you really connect with can deliver a super consistent and reliable revenue stream. This is something you can rely on year in, year out, and will give you the confidence to make smart business decisions.I’ll give you an idea of how this tactic impacted my business. At the time that we were generating over $2 million in annual sales, our top five travel partners were bringing us $700,000 annually. When you looked at our top 10 travel partners, they were worth over $1 million in annual revenue. This revenue had grown by between 11% and 14% for four consecutive years. The consistency in growth made it easy for us to make the decision to sell through these channels. And ultimately, it was a decision that helped propel our business forward.Let’s take a look at the figures from this time:

There it is. The real revenue generated by each of our top travel partners over a one year period. Whatever your business size, travel partners provide an awesome opportunity to make some serious additional revenue.This is the holy grail for a small tour operator.

2. Hotels and Hotel Concierges

In the very early days of our tour business, we knew that one of our long-term strategies would be a focus on travel distribution. But we also had bills to pay and we needed ‘quick wins’ that didn’t cost anything to start generating bookings, other than my time.So we came up with a short-term strategy we could put in place right away — hotels.We knew full well that generating bookings via traditional travel distribution channels was going to take time — time we didn’t have.Hotel concierges were the solution.So how did we do it? The old-fashioned way. I pounded the pavement, I got in front of concierges, I made sure they would remember me and I built awesome personal relationships across the city.Here are a few quick tips to get your phone ringing off the hook with hotel concierge enquiries and bookings:It’s all about relationships. Make life easy for a concierge. Make sure the answer you’re giving is ‘yes, yes, yes’!If you can’t provide exactly what they’re asking of you at short notice, then come up with two or three things you CAN do as an alternative. Make a concierge feel special — ‘I’m only doing this for you’. Be flexible and be resourceful. Once you’re ‘in’ the rewards will come and the bookings will flow.Every hotel is different.Find out how they work. Don’t make assumptions about the way they book tours and educate their hotel guests on tour or activity options. Learn about how they operate. Find out about their hotel guests — are they favored by more international or domestic clients? See if you can tweak what you offer to suit that market better.Be consistent and reliable with your commission payments.This one speaks for itself. Delays in payment could easily see you swapped out for another tour operator, so make sure you’re on top of all the necessary admin.Expect that every guest experience will be fed back to “the desk”.Make your guides fully aware of this. It’s often the concierge’s reputation on the line if they have pushed guests towards your tour. If there’s a problem, bring it to their attention. Don’t let them find out.I always found that it’s the manner in which an issue is handled that matters, rather than the issue itself.

3. Corporate Clients

This market offers some massive opportunities for a tour or activity operator. Team building days, hosting international visitors, pre and post meetings and conferences, reward and recognition days. Christmas parties and end of financial year activities are also a huge market to tap into.Some of the major benefits we found from selling tours and events to the corporate market were:The way it complemented our seasonal tour business.We went nuts with corporate Christmas parties every year — from December 1st right up to December 20th. This connected beautifully with our peak inbound travel season — which kicked in from December 21st right through to the end of January, meaning that December was a bumper month from start to finish.Even if major corporate events don’t line up with your peak season, they can be a great way to boost your revenue during slow periods or fill up off-peak and mid-week tour slots!They can be highly lucrative.Not only are the sales commission-free, but generally the numbers you’re seeing are larger. For us, that translated directly into more revenue and more profits.The market is massive.Consider how many businesses in and around your city potentially have a need for what you offer. In larger companies, there is also scope for multiple annual needs from multiple departments. If you get ‘in’ with, say, one of the major banks, then you could find yourself running company-wide team building days, pre and post conference tours, reward and recognition days, departmental Christmas parties, end of financial year activities and more. So put yourself out there and starting hitting up the big corporate entities in your area.

4. Other Tour Operators

When aiming to grow your business via collaborations with other tour or activity operators, I suggest you start with some basic research of your customer:Where are they coming from? Where are they going next? What are they doing/what did they do in those places? This can be done easily and informally by your tour guides and reported back to you.Start reaching out to tour or activity operators in those regions or destinations. This will allow you to build up a network of tour operators of similar size and style. Start creating a community. Then... be proactive! Take the lead and start collaborating. Create something together with one operator — an agreement, a documented referral process, a collaboration or an incentive... whatever it is, once you’ve done this successfully the first time and have results to show, others will follow and be desperate to collaborate with you.Be the one to make something happen. Hopefully I’ve given you some inspiration in terms of how you can take your tour or activity business to the next level and reach the growth you’ve been striving for.If you enjoyed this article and found it helpful, please take a moment to download our ‘15 Steps to a 7 Figure Tour Business’ HERE. We’ll give you a look 'behind the curtain' into our step-by-step process that allowed us to turn a vague idea into a multi 7 figure tour company. Enjoy!

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