As though it were a new toy, you may have become hyper focused on social media, banishing other marketing efforts to the dusty corner of the shelf. One that you've likely been neglecting: email. But direct email marketing can be a powerful tool. Experian Marketing Services reports that, for the travel industry, "email provides a means for ongoing conversations with travelers across all travel categories." Another recent study from Silverpop finds that email open rates for the lodging and travel industry are almost 57 percent, the highest rate among all 17 industries reviewed in this study. What does that mean for you? That you have a better than 50-percent chance of engaging a potential customer.So it's high time for you to begin nurturing and maintaining an email list. Here are some of the most effective ways for tour and activity businesses to grow their email list:

1. Run a social media contest.

If you have a strong social media presence or are just starting to build a following on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, consider running a contest where entrants have to subscribe to your newsletter or join your email list as part of the entry. Whether you're running a giveaway of free tickets or extending a deep discount to new subscribers, take full advantage of social media platforms you use regularly to spread the word.

What You Can Do:

Implement an email subscription widget on your Facebook Page and direct fans to the subscription area at every opportunity. For instance, Hillarys Boat Harbour's Facebook page features a clean and simple newsletter signup widget that takes seconds to fill out. If you have a dedicated page on your website with a simple subscription form, drop links on your Facebook page, Twitter stream, and post about it on Instagram to encourage people to sign up immediately.

2. Ask for emails upon check-in.

Customers that may have booked over the phone or walk-in customers may not have had a chance to share all of their contact information, including an email address.

You will want guests to share their email address as part of the check-in process

You will want guests to share their email address as part of the check-in process, which will help you populate your database.

What You Can Do:

Place a tablet computer at the check-in desk and train staff to capture emails at every opportunity. If you prefer to use a paper method, make sure someone is encouraging guests to sign in with their email address when they check in so you can add them to the database later.

3. Confirm emails at checkout.

Take full advantage of the online booking process by including the recipient's email as one of the requirements for completing the reservation. The customer would simply need to include their email address alongside other contact information, such as their full name, address, and method of payment. You can send a transaction receipt to this email address and automatically add this customer to the database.

What You Can Do:

Invest in an online booking software program that requires the guest to provide their email address upon checkout. Create email or database lists to organize all incoming emails based on where they are with the sale — just registering as a user, already booked a tour or activity, or are coming back for another visit. This enables you to create customized and targeted emails to send out to each group.

4. Send a monthly or biweekly newsletter.

Even though email can be a valuable marketing channel for small business owners, you don't have to use it solely to share news about special offers and promotions. Consider sending out a newsletter with interesting information an avid traveler or adventure enthusiast might find useful.For example, a zip line tour operator can send a newsletter that includes highlights of a recent excursion, educational information about the rainforest, or rainforest preservation efforts in the area. A boat tour operator can share some insights from the captain, details about a new boat in the fleet, or provide a summary of a recent boating adventure. A real-life example comes from Reef Rainforest Dive & Adventure Travel, which posts newsletter content directly on its website in its "Brief from the Reef" series and also has a newsletter signup form at the bottom of its website. The goal is to share interesting stories and insights from the company's perspective to keep the subscriber engaged.

What You Can Do:

Pull together stories from tour guides, captains, and other key employees, or research interesting content about the area in which you operate to use in your newsletter. Consider seasonal themes, such as how colder or warmer temperatures affect your business and how travelers can still enjoy the experience.

5. Add social sharing buttons.

If you are investing time and resources into creating compelling content for your email marketing efforts, make sure you get the maximum exposure you deserve by giving subscribers the option to share the message with a friend. According to SocialTimes, emails embedded with social sharing buttons could boost click-through rates more than 150 percent. For example, if you're running a fall discount on boating tours or running a bring-a-friend promotion on ghost tours for a few weeks, encourage the recipient to share the news by posting the offer on social media. Placing social sharing buttons for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram within the email make it easy for the reader to click and share without much effort.

What You Can Do:

Embed social sharing buttons within the email or post them at the bottom of the email near the recipient's name. Include a simple message, such as: 'Share this!' to prompt a click through to the social media site. You can use free tools like AddThis to insert buttons in the body of an email without any HTML or complicated programming.

6. Prevent unsubscribes.

Getting a site visitor to subscribe to your email newsletter or submit their email address for updates is only the first step of an effective email marketing campaign. You need to keep that subscriber engaged for a long enough period of time until they book — and possibly even afterwards for future bookings to prevent unsubscribes. TripIt has had great success with this strategy, focusing on engagement activities for the first 30 days. The company keeps the subscriber updated when new features are rolled out and after a year of joining, sends an anniversary email thanking them for being a member.

What You Can Do:

Implement a series of welcome emails that consist of sending the subscriber a series of introductory emails about your business, latest specials and offers available, and exclusive offers for first-time bookers. Include high-quality photos or even a video link as a teaser within the email so that first-time visitors can get a taste of your tours and activities with little effort. The goal is to keep subscribers engaged and interested enough so they don't unsubscribe.Growing and maintaining your email list is a high priority as a tour and activity operator since email continues to be a preferred method of communication for many of your guests. Use these tips and strategies to grow your email list and maintain a large list of happy subscribers.

Attention spans online have never been shorter. In fact, only 4 percent of website page views lasted more than 10 seconds, according to the Static Brain Research Institute. So when a potential customer lands on your tour website, you need to make sure you're grabbing them and not letting go until they buy.The first place they'll arrive is on a landing page, so that's where you need to be most captivating. Landing page optimization is something of a dark art—and some people are paid big bucks to make sure landing pages on the world's biggest websites are converting as many visitors as possible. But you can easily optimize your landing pages without earning a masters degree in digital marketing. Here are five tips to keep in mind when building your tour landing pages to grab visitors' fleeting attention.

What action do you want visitors to take?

This is the simplest of questions to ask about your landing page, but still one that's frequently overlooked. A landing page might be asking visitors to do too many different things. “Follow us on Twitter!" “Subscribe to Our Newsletter!" "Book Now!"All of this only serves to confuse visitors. If they land on a page about a river cruise, they want to find out more about your cruise, and to possibly book it. So make it easy for them—focus on the action you want the visitor to take, and ditch everything else. Email subscribers and Twitter followers are nice, but you make money when somebody clicks the “Book Now" button.

Focus on the action you want the visitor to take, and ditch everything else

Are you speaking their language?

The text of calls to action on websites are frequently agonized over—what words, and in what order, will make people click?A good rule of thumb to get you started is the WYLTIWLT test. Make sure you're anticipating what your customer wants, not asking them to do something. WYLTIWLT means “Would You Like To" / “I Would Like To", the idea being your buttons should reflect what the visitor is trying to do, not what you're asking them to do.For instance, imagine your site has a page where visitors can search for trips. Your button for the page might say “Trip search." But a more effective call to action might be “Search for trips." Your visitor is thinking “I would like to search for trips," so your call to action is literally finishing their sentence.

How are your visitors viewing your site?

It's no good designing a beautiful landing page for desktop if the majority of your users are on smartphones.In a perfect world, you'll have a responsive site that looks great on all screen sizes. But at the very least you should be looking at which screen sizes are most popular in your website analytics and making sure your site works well on as many as possible. Run your website through Google's mobile-friendliness tester to see how it fares on smaller devices, and think about revising your buttons and links to be easier to hit with large fingers on tiny screens.

Benefits, not features

Humans are emotional beings, and we always respond better to feelings and emotions than bland feature lists. It's the reason Apple ads focus on people having a great time using iPhones, rather than talking about screen resolutions and gigahertz.Are you showing the benefits people will get from your tours and activities, or just listing features? Show them how they'll get to experience a once-in-a-lifetime tour of an unspoiled paradise, or get an insider's view of their favorite breweries. Full-width images and immersive videos are a great way to get your message across, and many big companies have found that making their landing pages more image-heavy increases conversions significantly—by around 40% in some cases.

The first click is the first step

You've got people clicking on your call to action. But your job isn't done yet—that first click is just the beginning. Make sure your customer's journey from first click to final confirmation is as easy as possible.All good website analytics packages will let you identify dropoff rates for each page in your purchasing process—see which pages are performing badly and get to optimizing them. Smooth out any bumps and you'll soon have new customers flying through your checkout.

The Internet isn't just a place to peruse social media and complete BuzzFeed quizzes; it's a wealth of business tools- and resources-gold just waiting for you to mine. So whether you're on a tight budget or just looking to trim some fat, small business owners can find dozens upon dozens of free tools and resources available that can help their business grow. There are free apps that can help to streamline business operations. There are free apps that can manage administrative tasks. There are even apps to help strengthen your writing for email and website content.But, with the web being such a jam-packed and confusing place to roam, it can be hard to find those resources. So, just consider us your prospector: Here are 21 free tools tour, activity, and recreation businesses can take advantage of.

1. Free Accounting Software: Wave

If you're just getting your business up and running or working with a tight budget, take care of invoices and basic accounting activities with this free accounting software program. The company behind this program offers free, unlimited invoicing to make billing suppliers and vendors a breeze. Make use of the free accounting tools to manage expenses and few financial snapshots.

2. Free Legal Docs: KISS

Approaching investors for seed funding? Then you'll want to make use of Keep It Simple Security (KISS) docs—a set of free legal documents that small business owners can customize without missing out on key legal details and terminology, while also outlining investor rights. The company behind the open-source documents, 500 Startups, consulted a number of law firms to design the documents—so they contain all the necessary legal features, while also keeping it fairly customizable. Just add a few prompted figures and information, and you'll be on your way to getting funding—without the cost of lawyers.

3. Create and Sign Legally Binding Docs: Shake

If you need to create legally binding agreements for a vendor, employee, or contractor, you don't have to pay high fees for a lawyer to put together your documents. Make use of Shake to create legally binding documents within minutes and send it to the recipient for a digital signature. The free version allows you to create, sign, and send unlimited agreements from any device with a set of starter forms.

4. Create Stunning Graphics: Canva

It can cost a pretty penny to buy graphics and fonts (or to pay someone to create them for you), create attractive blog posts and content to share on social networks with the Canva design tool. The tool contains dozens of designs, shapes, illustrations, icons, and charts. And everything is drag-and-drop, which means you can create stunning graphics, Facebook covers, posters, and other visual media within minutes.

5. Image Editing Tool: Pixlr Editor

Since you practically need a PhD to use Adobe Photoshop these days, use Pixlr to edit and enhance existing images for your blog posts, social media sites, and website. This free online editing and image re-sizing tool has almost all the features of Adobe Photoshop—but is easy to learn and use. Tour, activity, and recreation businesses that want to post high-quality images can make use of this tool to edit and enhance all types of professional and candid shots within minutes.

6. Content Editing and Grammar Check: Hemingway Editor

Why does everyone love Ernest Hemingway so much? He wrote clearly and to the point. And that's a lot harder than it sounds—until now. So whether you're publishing blog posts or tour descriptions, make sure your content is free of grammar errors and has good, easy-to-read sentence structure. This cuts the cost of hiring a freelance editor or blogger, while also making your content clear and more relatable for potential customers.

7. Advanced Grammar Checker: Grammarly

Don't rely solely on your word processor or personal editing skills to catch grammar mistakes. This tool is downloaded on your web browser to help you write without mistakes no matter what you're doing. It corrects mistakes on everything from Facebook posts to email messages. Your text is checked automatically as you type and the program monitors activity in an editor panel. You can also upload documents for a quick check.

8. Marketing Lessons: Primer

If you don't have much experience running your small business and navigating the digital world to coordinate a marketing strategy, read up on the basics with this free online learning program. The mobile app features five-minute lessons with practical advice about marketing basics. Use it as a guide or refresher to put together your marketing strategy for your tour, activity, and recreation business.

9. Blogging Guide: FirstSiteGuide.com

Blogging takes a good deal of effort and know-how to make the most of it. So if you're just about to launch a blog to compliment your business website or are completely new to blogging, use this free guide to learn how to launch, maintain, and grow the blog. The guide serves as a blueprint with step-by-step guidelines from expert bloggers, covering everything from customizing and designing the blog to adding content and blog promotion tactics.

10. Schedule Instagram Posts: Latergramme

Promoting your business via Instagram with a series of candid shots, behind-the-scenes images of tours and activities, or even professional shots to give viewers a glimpse of what you offer? Well, you no longer need to worry about posting to Instagram in real-time. Use Latergramme to schedule and manage your Instagram posts so you simply upload a collection of images, add captions, and let those posts get released on a certain date.

Use Latergramme to schedule and manage your Instagram posts, saving you time

11. Automated Social Media Posts: Buffer

Instead of worrying about the best time to schedule your Facebook posts and Twitter updates, just upload all of your content into the Buffer queue and let the program release those Facebook updates and tweets at the best time of the day. The posts are spaced out and posted at optimal times based on Buffer's algorithms, so you can free up administrative time on social media and just update the Buffer queue with fresh content whenever it's convenient for you.

12. Create Surveys: Free Survey Creator

Free Survey Creator makes it a breeze to collect customer feedback. Use this free tool to create a free survey to learn more about your guests and customers. You can post the survey form right on your website or embed it within a blog post to start collecting feedback from visitors. Creating the survey only takes a few minutes and the survey can be placed virtually anywhere on your site.

13. Free Stock Photos: Stock Up

If you need some high-quality images for a blog post or website page but don't want to pay a premium for them, check out the collection at Stock UP. The company adds 28 new photos each week and you can choose from 26 free photos on the site at any time.

14. License-Free Images: AllTheFreeStock.com

This is another free resource for a library of images, videos, music, and icons in one place. Use the free search tool in the left sidebar to search by keyword across multiple sites, including Finda.Photo and Unsplash Search—all in one place. Use keywords like "adventure", "travel," and "trips" to open up a library of high-quality images you can use free of charge.

15. Organize Projects: Trello

Create boards of information to share with employees and team members so that everyone is on the same page about a project or upcoming event. This program makes it easy to organize projects with visual materials and notes. You can also add members to each board so that everyone has access to it and can contribute on their own time. This can eliminate a lot of back-and-forth emailing and also makes it easy to create a to-do list for various projects.

16. Keep Track of Notes: Evernote Basic

If you currently email yourself random things you've found or ideas you think of on the go, make use of this app to store everything in one place to view and organize later. Evernote is designed with virtual "Notebooks" and "Notes" where you can capture screenshots, text, and links with ease. The free version allows you to use all of the basic features to improve productivity and stay organized. There's also a built-in chat feature to invite colleagues or employees to view a note you've created.

17. Synced Cloud Storage: Dropbox

Keep track of files, video clips, and other important documents by uploading everything to Dropbox and organizing it into folders. You can access all of these files from the cloud and authorize other users access to certain documents when you need to share them. Dropbox has a free and paid version depending on how much storage you need. The free version includes 2GB of space and simple file sharing features.

18. Organize Online Search Findings: Pocket

Capture everything from articles, video clips, photos, and anything else you find on your web search with Pocket. You can save directly from your browser or favorite apps to view or read later. This can make it easier to research something or just keep track of notes and ideas when you're exploring and brainstorming ideas for a project.

19. Small Business Templates and Tools: SCORE

Whether you want to measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, put together a marketing budget, or read up on tax tips for running your small business, you'll find a wealth of free resources and guides available from the SCORE Association. Download free templates to create important business documents with little effort.

20. Expense Reporting: Expensify

Take the guesswork out of tracking and recording expenses with this app that makes it easy to categorize expenses based on different expense accounts you set up, while also linking card transactions with cash expense reports for accuracy. Make use of the SmartScan tool to upload and store a receipt to link it to each reported expense.

21. Back Up Your Files: Google Drive

If you currently use a variety of Google apps and want to keep track of documents, images, and other types of content in one place, make use of the Google Drive. The free version gives you 15GB of free Google online storage to store all types of media and files. You can pull up the files from any smartphone, tablet, or computer and also share files and folders with others via email.

No-shows are an unfortunate—and sometimes a too-often—occurrence that can have a negative impact on your tour or activity business, especially if you're counting on a certain number of attendees in order to properly coordinate an experience. And while no-shows are unavoidable to a degree, you can (and should) take precautionary measures to help prevent last-minute cancellations and no-shows to help mitigate their negative impacts.Whether you lead brewery tours or zip-line adventures, our complete guide to reducing no-show rates for your tour and activity business can help increase revenue, maintain good customer relations and boost employee morale.

How No-Shows Affect Company Operations

First, it's important to look at the negative effects no-shows can have on your business. Sure, as part of the booking agreement you may end up collecting a customer's deposit—or even their complete payment—when they fail to make their scheduled visit. But while you may have "earned" this revenue, consider this: No-shows also serve as an inconvenience to other guests if the entire trip has to be cancelled due to lac of enough participants. You might also lose revenue because other customers were previously turned away, or wait-listed because of no availability.

Here are some of the most significant ways no-shows affect company operations:

• Changes in employee schedules: If you're in the business of booking one-on-one tours or smaller group tours with a certain tour guide or expert, having to cancel the trip means the employee or contractor has to change their schedule to accommodate the next set of guests. This can be a significant disruption in the employee's schedule, and also creates more administrative work for your company when scheduling an employee's hours.
• Lost income for employees: If employees conducting a tour or activity earn a commission for each tour (along with a portion of any purchases the guests makes after their visit), they miss out on income opportunities when the guest doesn't show up.
• Lost employees or low morale: If no-shows start becoming a trend and occur frequently throughout the season, employees contracted to earn a commission or earn a base rate for each tour booked may become disgruntled and look for opportunities elsewhere.
• Lost revenue for your business: When you're counting on filling a certain number of slots in the calendar week after week to meet your revenue goals, you'll fall short at the end of the quarter when you run into no-shows. Even if the customer agrees to forfeit a deposit or pay a no-show fee, you'll still need to take care of other costs associated with the cancellation, such as paying for supplies or fees for tour guides. If you rent any type of equipment, such as kayaks, boats, bikes, or sailing gear, and have a limited number of units available, you may lose revenue when you turn away guests because all units are reserved, but the original guests fails to show up.

“Karen McLaughlin, owner of Karen’s Kayaks, says it costs her company $1,000 in revenue, on average, when someone cancels her trip. She reports a no-show rate of 15 to 20 per year, which equates to a significant loss in revenue without a firm cancellation policy.”

• Increased administrative expenses: When a customer cancels a reservation at the last minute or fails to show up, one of your staff members has to take care of administrative duties related to following up with the customer, re-booking the tour, and other tasks. This can increase administrative time and expenses that may or may not be covered by the deposit the customer has already paid.
• Disgruntled customers: If you're hosting a smaller group outing, such as a winery or food tour, for which you need a minimum number of guests to coordinate the tour, you may have to cancel and re-book the entire experience when a guest fails to show. Customers who were prepared to show up may be turned off by this and be less inclined to book again—even if they're granted a refund.

Reduce no-show rates, increase revenue, maintain good customer relations and boost employee morale with our world-class online booking software:

Confirming appointments and setting up a system of reservation reminders is one way to keep guests on track for their visit and, in some cases, reduce the risk of last-minute cancellations.

Here are some of the most effective ways to reduce no-shows:

• Charge a no-show fee or require a deposit. This may be just the incentive for guests to follow through on their booking. For example, Southwest Airlines has a straightforward no-show policy: customers who do not cancel or change their reservation within 10 minutes of departure forfeit their entire reservation. As a tour and activity operator, your time frame may be much longer. You could implement a policy where guests who fail to make changes to their reservation within 48 to 72 hours may be subject to your on show policy. Some companies also tack on a handling fee to all penalties, which helps deter no-shows and also takes care of extra expenses incurred as a result of the cancellation.
• Be clear in your terms and conditions. Make sure any fees or charges you impose for last-minute cancellations and no-shows are clearly listed on your Terms and Conditions page, and guests agree to comply with your guidelines when they check out to complete the reservation.
• Phone reminders: If you have an administrative or sales team available to handle phone call reminders, consider setting up a system where every booked guest receives a friendly phone call one or two days before their visit to confirm their appointment. Medical practices do this consistently to reduce no-show rates. Statistics from Televox show that approximately 47 percent of practices who do not send appointment reminders had an average no-show rate of 10 percent, while just under 28 percent of practices who deliver appointment reminders to patients had no-show rates of over 10 percent. Interestingly, more than one-third of practices surveyed received actual complaints from patients who were not reminded of an upcoming appointment.
• Text reminders: This is another option, especially if you don't have a large administrative team that can call each guest with a phone call leading up to their visit. Craft a simple but impactful text message that communicates your excitement to see the guest soon, and provides details about their reservation. If you use text messages, you must state in your Terms and Conditions policy that guests can expect to receive text alerts, unless they notify you otherwise.

Keeping guests engaged up until their visit is a simple and effective way to encourage them to follow through

• Email reminders: Email reminders can be expected when a guest books online. Continue communicating with the guest in this way up until their visit, and also to follow up with them shortly after their experience. You can use an online booking software program to ensure every guest receives a detailed reservation confirmation immediately after booking, plus a series of automated emails leading up to the event. Provide details such as where to park, tips for dressing for the weather or trip, and any other relevant details to ensure guests are fully prepared for their visit—these messages also show you care that they make the most of their experience.
• Use an online booking system: Whether you want to send out automated email reminders, or ensure a streamlined checkout process that clearly outlines your cancellation and no-show policies, using a robust online booking software program like Peek Pro makes all these administrative tasks that much easier. Automating almost all of your customer contact tasks can eliminate administrative time and expenses related to following up with each guest that registers on the site or completes a reservation. Peek Pro even lets you completely personalize and customize automated emails with your logo, and include links to your social media pages if guests wish to stay in touch.

“Automating almost all of your customer contact tasks can eliminate administrative time and expenses related to following up with each guest that registers on the site or completes a reservation.”High no-show rates can negatively impact business operations and also affect your employees. If you want to continue meeting your revenue goals and maintain a loyal following of happy customers, make sure you are taking steps to implement a no-show policy and staying in touch with guests in a timely manner leading up to their visit. Reducing no-show rates will not only increase revenue but will also help you maintain good customer relations and boost employee morale—two areas of business operations that are essential for keeping you in business season after season.

Like it or not, online reviews can make or break your business. Hidden travel gems have been propelled to must-visit status on the back of a few effusive 5-star reviews, while lackluster destinations can suffer, or even go bankrupt entirely, if they start racking up 1-star feedback.As a tour and activity operator, it's important to do all you can to encourage travelers to review you. A Cornell University study found that there is a direct correlation between positive visitor reviews online and increasing revenue. In fact, a one-star increase in average review translates to nearly a 2-percent increase in revenue. (Read our tips on how to get more reviews here.)Asking isn't enough, though—you have to be smart about it. We've all had automated “Please review us" emails after buying something online or going to a restaurant, but how many times have you acted on them? Probably not very often.The key to getting a glowing review from a customer is to trigger an emotional response —called a “moment of truth" in marketing circles. If you can recreate the feeling they had on the tour they took with you, they're much more likely to give you a good review. This is why those “review your product" emails from Amazon always arrive just after you've taken delivery. You've just received a new toy and Amazon wants to capitalize on that feeling.

The key to a glowing review from a customer is to trigger an emotional response

Tour and activity operators are already in a great position to make this happen. The experience a lifetime—be it discovering decadent foods in a new city, or kayaking for the first time—is a much bigger occasion than buying some new headphones, and people are likely to have much stronger positive feelings about their first scuba dive, a guided hike, or skydiving.Your options for creating your own moment of truth are limited only by your imagination, and the more creative you are the bigger the potential for amazing results.Take a lesson from theme parks: They'll email on-ride photos to their visitors, and the smart ones include a request for a review. What could bring back the memories of an amazing day better than a photo of you having an amazing time?Activity operators are perfectly set up to use a similar tactic. Make sure your guides are taking photos (or even better, video) of your guests having a great time skiing, surfing, jumping out of a plane, or whatever types of activities you offer. Send the photos and videos to the guest shortly after they return from their trip (so your email isn't buried in their post-holiday inbox avalanche, and they have a reliable connection over which to view the video) and watch the memories come flooding back, and the reviews rolling in.For smaller or boutique operators, the best option can often be simply to ask guests. If your personality and customer service are big selling points for your business, it makes sense to ask for a review personally. Explain the value of those five stars to the visitor, and often they'll happily review you. Stephen Peters, director of the Pacific Sands Resort, reports that since he started proactively asking for reviews, their volume has tripled.Finding your moment of truth is as simple as looking at your current reviews—which part of their trip do your reviewers rave about? Find a way to bring back those memories when you ask for a review and both the number and star ratings will go through the roof.

There's a huge pool of potential customers that just keeps getting deeper. So how do you keep your head above water, and prepare yourself for a new wave of customers? Here are some tips on how to best handle an increase in customers.

1. Increase the manpower and implement necessary systems

To make sure you are well equipped to handle more customers, hire new, experienced staffers, while also rearranging current teams to maximize capacity, performance, and overall service. That includes implementing an online booking system and tour management software, and assigning supervisors to double check all forms to ensure smooth operations.Another aspect to maintaining a great customer experience with rising demand: renegotiating with suppliers. Work with suppliers to offer more possible destinations, activities, or pieces of equipment so that customers have more options (and existing tours won't be over-crowded).

2. Focus on your core customers

HVM Consulting, a Belgium-based tour agency, owes much of its 25 years of success to the relationships it builds with customers. “The success of HVM Consulting is founded on its personalized relationship with clients and suppliers—we simply build rapport with them in person, listen to their specific needs and requests, and ensure that their trip arrangements correspond to their expectations," says Hans Vanmaele, managing director of HVM Consulting. "Because of this, our best sales people are actually our satisfied clients." A core of their business practices: the Pareto Principle, in which they prioritize and recognize their clients' potential and productivity. "We maintain focus on the 20% of our clients who produce 80% of our sales," says Vanmaele.

Your best sales people are your most sastisfied clients

3. Match customer requests with complimentary offerings

To increase your revenue per customer, you need an efficient system, in which you offer personalized experiences alongside complementary offerings that will dramatically enhance the over-all experience for the customer.During the booking process, it's important to learn about each customer as much as possible to provide them their ultimate dream vacation, so ask if they have any specific requests to best prepare prior to their arrival. To achieve this, incorporate segmented email marketing campaigns on each of your website's landing pages, segmenting these visitors based on their previous travel history and upcoming trips. For example, a couple who recently booked a trip to Italy will get a complimentary quick guide to the city they're looking to visit. If your company has local partners in the area, include in special packages and discounts from those partners to sweeten the deal.While no business would complain about a new influx of customers, it could cause problems if you're not properly prepared. But if you reinforce the systems you have in place, you'll free yourself up to build and maintain relationships with your customers that will keep them coming back.