As the sun sets on another exhilarating summer season, you face a valuable opportunity - the offseason. During this time, you can, and should, prepare diligently for the return of sunny days and eager adventurers. While your doors may be closed, these winter months are the ideal time to make changes that position your business for growth and success. 

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‍Reflect and Analyze

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With summer over you should take this time to learn from your previous success and pitfalls. With Peek you can access detailed data on bookings, revenue, and customer reviews from the previous summer season. This insight enables you to identify trends, peak booking times, and top-performing tours or activities. 

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With Peek Pro’s reporting tools, you can gain  valuable insights to help influence which tours and activities you’ll offer next year, as well as where to market your experiences. Check out Peek’s suggested offseason reports:

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1. Sales by Weekday - Discover your best performing days with the Sales by Weekday report. Use this report to help schedule your activities for your next year or season. You may decide you want to set aside more resources on your better performing days or use Dynamic Pricing rules to reflect the higher demand on days like weekends.‍

2. Promotions - Running discounted promotions for holidays or special events? See which promotions are generating you the most revenue so you can better plan your marketing efforts for the next busy season.

3. Mobile vs. Web Online Sales -  As a general rule, it’s important that your website is mobile-optimized. It’s even more critical if you notice a lot of your bookings are coming from mobile. 

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Top Tip: Embrace customer reviews

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Use the offseason to engage with customer reviews. Show gratitude for positive feedback, emphasizing the value of your input. Equally, respond to negative reviews with professionalism and empathy, highlighting your dedication to improvement. Customer reviews wield significant influence in shaping your online reputation, making them a crucial component of your offseason efforts.

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Prep New Marketing Tactics

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Now’s the time to revamp  your marketing strategies by creating and scheduling email campaigns to keep your audience engaged during the offseason. By highlighting your membership offerings and alerting customers once new dates are available to book, you can entice customers to plan ahead for the next summer adventure. Through using your customer database, you can keep your business relevant and generate revenue even after the season is over. 

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This is also the moment to rethink your digital brand. You can enhance your online presence and improve search engine rankings, making it easier for potential customers to discover your tours and activities. Check out our recent webinar to learn how using Google Adwords can help you drive direct bookings from Google searches

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Top Tip: Enhance your tour descriptions using AI

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Utilize AI tools to elevate your tours and activities with captivating descriptions and images of your experience. Tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney can be powerfully leveraged to save time while creating vivid descriptions of your products. Add your core information like locations, highlights and attractions before testing out different prompts to produce the perfect description or image.

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Create Your Calendar for the New Year

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While your activity calendar may be barren for the upcoming months, you should be making plans for the upcoming year. This process involves not only scheduling your tours and activities but also making strategic adjustments. Firstly, consider updating your pricing strategy. With Peek Pro’s Dynamic pricing rules, you can maximize revenue by adjusting prices based on changing demand. Consider these three factors when setting up Dynamic Pricing:

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1. Weekday vs Weekend - Optimize your pricing strategy for the increased demand on the weekends or a small discount during the week to encourage your customers to visit when demand is lower.

2. Seasonality - Make the most of the beginning and ends of your season by setting up specific pricing by time range. Operate only during the summer? Update your pricing to reflect the increased demand of June-August while incentivizing months like May and September.

3. Availability - Leave no seat unfilled by setting up minimum availability pricing rules that are implemented when there are only a few tickets left. Through this helpful tool, you incentivize customers to book and ensure your tour or activity is full and avoid lost revenue from unused tickets.
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This approach ensures that your pricing remains competitive and reflects market fluctuations. By implementing dynamic pricing, you can optimize revenue and attract more bookings.
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Additionally, don't forget to add blackout dates to your calendar if applicable. These are specific days or periods when you don't offer tours or activities due to various reasons such as maintenance, holidays, or private events. By clearly marking blackout dates in your calendar, you prevent potential booking conflicts and manage customer expectations effectively. A well-organized calendar with updated pricing and blackout dates sets the stage for a seamless booking experience in the new year.

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Top Tip: Promote early bird booking discounts

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As you prepare your calendar for the new year, consider enticing customers with early bird booking discounts through Promo Codes. By offering special rates for those who plan ahead, you can secure bookings well in advance, providing a financial boost during the offseason. This strategy not only encourages early commitment from customers, but also ensures a more stable and predictable revenue stream for your business in the upcoming year.

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Update Equipment Pools

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Prepping your calendar for the new year involves smart equipment management. With Peek Pro's equipment management features, you can keep your equipment pools up to date with correct counts and capacities. Introducing new equipment next summer? Be sure to add your new equipment to your Peek Pro account now to ensure smooth operations during the peak season.
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Moreover, you can efficiently manage various types of resources and equipment, from bicycles and boats to guides and vehicles, without hassle. This functionality helps you monitor your inventory, allocate resources effectively, and minimize human error, ensuring that you have the right equipment available when needed.

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Top Tip: Plan for seasonal changes

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Analyze historical booking data from the previously mentioned reports  to identify trends in equipment usage and bookings. Adjust your inventory accordingly, increasing the availability of equipment that experiences high demand in peak seasons and reallocating resources during slower periods. This strategic approach ensures you're well-equipped to meet customer needs while optimizing your equipment utilization throughout the year.
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As the offseason approaches, take action to ensure your tour and activity business thrives in the upcoming summer. Prepare now to guarantee your business not only survives but prospers when the warm weather returns. A well-prepared offseason is your key to a successful summer!

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In the digital age, understanding user behavior and making data-driven decisions is crucial for success. Google Analytics has been the go-to tool for measuring website performance –  think clicks, page views, bounces and many more. Google has introduced its latest iteration - Google Analytics 4 (GA4), to provide better insight into how your customers are interacting with your website. 

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In this blog, we’ll explore:

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1. What is GA4?

2. What are the key new features & benefits?

3. Why is this important for tour & activity operators?

4. How can I use Peek to track the whole customer journey?

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What is Google Analytics 4?

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Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest iteration of Google's web analytics tool, and offers an integrated view of user behavior across websites, apps, and other platforms. While the earlier Universal Analytics version centered on pageviews, GA4 focuses on user-centric event and data, giving a fuller picture of the user journey.

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Key Features and Advantages

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1. Enhanced Cross-Platform Tracking: GA4 allows seamless tracking of user interactions across multiple platforms, including websites, mobile apps, and offline data. This means you can have a unified view of how users interact with your brand regardless of the device or platform they use.

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2. Event-Driven Data Model: Unlike the traditional focus on page views, GA4 lets you track custom events like button clicks and form submissions, offering a richer understanding of user actions.

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3. AI-Driven Insights: GA4 uses machine learning to automatically deliver insights, from predicting user churn to identifying high-engagement channels.

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4. Deeper Integration with Google Ads: GA4 seamlessly integrates with Google Ads, providing a more accurate view of how your advertising efforts contribute to user engagement and conversions. This integration allows you to optimize your ad campaigns based on user behavior data, maximizing your ROI.

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5. Enhanced User Privacy: Addressing data privacy concerns, GA4 introduces features like enhanced consent mode and data deletion controls for better compliance.

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How can I use Google Analytics 4 with Peek Pro?

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The new features offer a comprehensive understanding of user interactions, giving operators a better understanding of how their customers purchase and interact with their booking flow. With Peek Pro’s Google Analytics 4 integration you can seamlessly track your conversions from your website to better understand how your site is performing and who is booking. 

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Complete the following steps to get started tracking events on your booking flow: 

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1. First, you’ll need to access your GA4 Measurement ID. Follow these steps if you need help finding your ID.

2. Add your GA4 Measurement ID by going to Configurations→Analytics in your Peek Pro account.

3. Once you’ve connected the integration, you can begin tracking events like when Add-Ons, Promo Codes or Gift Cards are used in your booking flow. 

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TOP TIP: A quick and easy way to gain better insights into your customers’ behavior is to use the new Explorations tool. Explorations can be used to dig deeper into the customer journey like purchase funnels and audience segmentation to make better business decisions. 

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If you’re an operator using Peek Pro, learn more about getting started on Google Analytics 4 in our Helpdesk article. If you’re not currently using Peek Pro, sign up here to request a free demo.

In the competitive tour and activity industry, it’s critical to implement the right customer service and marketing strategies to grow your business. This is why an increasing number of tour and activity operators are incorporating the model of offering photos and videos for their guests. 

Not only have these businesses experienced the incredible impact this has on guest satisfaction, but the outcome of gifting free photos and videos to every client has led to powerful growth. Related specifically to more repeat bookings, brand visibility and referrals on social media, and 5-star ratings on TripAdvisor, Yelp and Google Reviews.  

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What is Fotaflo?

Fotaflo is the premier photo/video delivery and marketing platform for tour and activity operators. It offers an easier way to capture and deliver memories to your guests, which delights, and turns them into repeat clients and powerful advocates for your business. This happens with email and text remarketing that offers free (or for sale) photos and videos, which reengages past guests, so they book again, and share enticing visual referrals of your tour or activity via email, social media and review websites. With Fotaflo, these referrals include photos and videos of your guests having a great time that direct potential customers to your website.

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Why is Fotaflo valuable for tour and activity operators?

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Improved guest satisfaction

By linking Peek with Fotaflo, you can significantly boost the satisfaction of your guests, by offering them photos and videos of their experience with your tour or activity. The results for your business are more repeat bookings, recommendations to family and friends, social media referrals, and 5-star ratings on the most popular review websites.

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Increased brand awareness

When you link Fotaflo with Peek there is an opportunity to dramatically increase the visibility of your business online. Whether it’s by guests sharing the photos and videos of the amazing time they had with your business on social media, or leaving very positive reviews on channels like TripAdvisor, Yelp and Google Reviews.

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Growth in revenue

Linking Peek to Fotaflo allows your tour and activity business to grow its revenue through the platform's innovative photo sharing and marketing system. By giving your guests the power to share photos and videos across social media, which link back to your website, you will begin to capture many more leads and bookings. 

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How does the integration work?

The Android or iOS apps from Fotaflo offer a fully automated experience of uploading, organizing and delivery of your guests’ photos and videos. Whether you choose to give away or sell these photos and videos, Fotaflo’s automated delivery system allows you to deliver these memories to guests through email or text.

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How can operators take advantage of this partnership?

Peek operators already using Fotaflo can request access to the integration by reaching out to support@peek.com. If you’re a Peek partner interested in using Fotaflo, we invite you to book a demo. During your demo with Fotaflo, if you mention Peek, you will receive a discounted price on your first year subscription of any annual plan. 

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