Are you struggling with getting press releases together or finding a newsworthy topic?  Well, don’t make what be one of the most common mistakes small businesses make when trying to craft a good press release:  don’t make it boring.

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It’s time for this month’s episode of TOP Radio, our monthly travel and technology podcast.  This month we’re talking with Alex Bainbridge from TourCMS about a question that seems to come up over and over again:  does your travel website need online reservations?

Listen Now

You can listen to call now by using the widget available below; the call is just under an hour.

If you’d like to download the call as an MP3 to listen on your iPhone or iPod later, you can get the MP3 here (be sure to right click and choose Save As in your browser as it’s a fairly large file).

Notes from the Call

Here are a few key takeaways from today’s session.  Note that this is not a transcript and has been heavily edited for brevity, so be sure to listen to the call so you don’t miss anything.

Introductory Comment

• The concepts and suggestions in today’s call are generics.  That means they are suggestions, ideas, and examples of how things have or haven’t worked for other people.  But your business is special, so you can’t take any of this advice for face value.  You should consider the content and align it to your own business goals.
• Things to know before even considering this topic for your business:
  • Online Reservations are not a panacea for poor conversions.  In fact they might make them worse.
  • Online Reservations are not a “set it and forget it” technology.
  • You cannot put in online reservations and then remove all other ways for the customer to access you. You must have a way for people get in touch with you.  What if the booking tool is broken?

What ‘Online Reservations’ Is and What It Isn’t

• A booking system is not a replace for removing other ways to take bookings.
• A booking system is not a way to remove all contact with the customer.  You need to make sure that the booking engine you use still has a human in the booking process.
• The booking engine is there to make your business more efficient, not to make your business more automated.
• Depending on the tool and how you’re using analytics, you can glean useful information about where a customer has come from and how they found you.
• Don’t worry too much about booking engines.  If you have a terrible booking engine, but still have a high quality product, then customers will just book with you via phone or email.  (Note how this is very different than major hotel websites, for example, where there are other websites where a customer can book.).
• You don’t have to have a “booking engine” — a transaction or contact for a specific product on a specific day or specific time.  You can just have a “quote request system” or “inquiry system” where the customer is just making contact to express an interest in your product or service.
• Payment processing:  there are multiple options, from taking payment up front to holding the credit card details and then charging the customer only when agreeing to a contract.
• Remove complexity but remember: consider the customer.
• Suggestion is to start with an off the shelf system, as you aren’t having to rebuild the wheel.

Reasons Why Online Availability is Bad (or, Things To Keep In Mind)

• We’re not saying online reservations are bad, just remember a few key things.
• Online booking tools add a cost of doing business; it’s normally not expensive but it is something to remember, depending on what tool a choose.
• A tool changes the adds steps or changes steps or removes steps – remember the customer and make sure you know what you need to be doing.
• If you have a very small booking pool (e.g. very small hotel, or a solo walking tour leader), a booking “wall” might prevent customers from getting to you who others you might be able to satisfy with alternative options that you can’t easily display in your booking tool.  So be mindful of this if you’re very small but nimble.
• If you offer a seasonal offering, make sure that customers know when you’re available.  Don’t let them get all the way into your booking tool to realise you are only open in the summer!
• You need to make sure that the reservation tool is the ‘master’ source of availability information.
• Remember the information required to market a product (what is it, why do you want it) is not the same as what is needed to sell (exact details, timings, rates, etc).  Ask yourself:  what is your website for, marketing or sales or both?
• With a booking tool there is a tendency to act like a “factory” – don’t remove all human interaction!  Keep it positive, simple and understandable.
• Consider your customers arriving to your tool in three states:
  • the busy, harried buyer who just needs to know right now who you are and what you offer
  • the information lover, who wants to know all the details and will linger over everythign
  • and of course, the person who already knows they’re buying with you and are just coming to make the final arrangements
• If you’re sort of a “commodity tour” provider where you just process high volume products with a similar setup every day, then you probably want  a very robust tool.

What is the Value of Having a Suitable Booking Tool or Online Reservations

• For people who have a high volume of bookings, especially when you get lots of bookings that you can’t even service, a tool does provide a way to filter these out.
• A tool can provide a way to remove friction from the process; when they’ve made a decision they’re ready to book, they can!
• You want to aim for 50%+ of bookings taken online; keeps your staff focussed on more value-added activities.  Software can help you double or triple bookings without massive increases in staff.

How To Choose?

• Always start off small, near the simple end of functionality (e.g. ‘enquiry form’).  Get in and get trading.
• Phases of implementation:
  • Just using the tool to manage bookings once you’ve received them
  • Integrate a tool into your contact form or enquiry form so a customer record is created when they get in touch
  • Taking online bookings but only “quote requests”
  • Lastly, fully functional system with transaction requests taken online
• If you sell a lot of different types of tours, you probably need a more complex support tool.  If you just have one or two options, you don’t need all the bells and whistles.
• It’s not usually about turnover, nor about staff – it’s mostly about the number of bookings where you fall in the complexity scale.
• Buy a system that permits you to continue to work with your agents and partners and suppliers, and make sure your system allows you to just make quotes.
• Again, it all comes back to your customer:  who are they and what are their needs?  Be sure your online presence meets that.

Parting thought:  If you build it, they won’t come.  Regardless of whether you do or don’t take online reservations, if you don’t have enough sales, it isn’t because of our website, it’s because of your marketing.

Thanks to Alex for joining us!  Learn more about Alex by visiting the TourCMS website or their free online forum, Small Fish Big Ocean.

Google Buzz – a new social networking product integrated into Google’s GMail email software – was released to the general public a couple of weeks ago.  My GMail has only recently been ‘buzzed’ so I’ve sort of been watching to see what others have had to say.  After the major disappointment of Google wave, it seems Google has tried a little harder this time.  But maybe not hard enough.

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I’ve looked at a lot of email newsletter signup forms in my lifetime – and oh my, I’ve seen way too many this month with our recent Stop Annoying Your Customers newsletter check-in promotion. (By the way, you do know that ends this week, right?  Click here if you missed it and want to give your newsletter a bit of a tune up.)

So, I’ve noticed a common thread with most email newsletter signup forms.  There’s one piece of information that 90% (or more) of them lack.  Are you making this common mistake that’s putting a barrier between you and your potential readers?

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You can never have enough data about your small businesses’ keywords – the phrases that people type into a search engine to find you.  As you probably know already, either through experience or reading through our resources like the bestseller DIY SEO guide, you can get a lot of this knowledge for free with a little sleuthing and hard work.

But many companies overlook one key way to find their perfect keywords…

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I’d like to ask you what might be a difficult question:  are you really managing your small business?

Managing Your Business

Life can be pretty hectic as a small business owner, right? You spend all day out with your clients and “doing your thing” and then only have a few hours in the evenings to catch up on emails, do a little marketing, and check in on your accounts. Maybe you work an extra day here and there to do special projects. The process repeats itself each week, so there just isn’t a way to squeeze in much more, or to evaluate and change course where appropriate.

Only about 40% of small businesses manage to be profitable in the long term; most fail with in the first 2-3 years. What will your statistics be?

Manage Your Business Better

Making your business more effective isn’t about spending hours and hours in meetings or paying by-the-hour rates to consultants for months to come up with your latest business strategy. All you need is here in our TOP Travel Business Toolkit:

Inside you’ll find both our TOP Business Guide, a short guide to help you understand the principles of a forward thinking, holistic approach to your business.  Alongside that, there’s the TOP Business Dashboard: an organised set of worksheets you can use to make effective business decisions.

Entrepreneur Rachael Acklin said “It’s kind of a no-brainer – I believe your long-term business perspective, as well as your explanation of SWOT and how to create a SWOT analysis, was DEFINITELY worth the price and more. Seriously.”

Click here to check out the details and download your copy today.

Photo by stuartpilbrow

So, let’s talk about remarkable travel marketing again.  The new tourism is about offering products and services that are so amazing customers can’t get enough.  Solving problems in ways your consumer couldn’t even imagine.  If you’re struggling to find out how to do that, here’s a fantastic example:  Mountain Threads.

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We already know what old school marketing can teach you about social media. But hey – let’s have some fun. My good pal Alex Fayle likes to use pop music as a source for inspiration. I say it can also teach us about business (as Seth Godin would say, look at the edges of the box). One of my favourite songs that we can use to learn a bit about good social media practice is the New Radicals, You Only Get What You Give: Read the rest of this article »

We’re very excited to present the first edition of TOP Radio, our new podcast series.  Every month we’ll feature guests and discussions on relevant industry topics and technology news.  We thought it would be fitting to start off the first radio podcast of the year talking about The State of Tourism: an hour of frank discussion about the big picture on travel and technology.

Why is it called TOP Radio?

Well, the reason we call it a radio show is to illustrate the fact that while the delivery means and mechanisms have changed entirely, the principles are the same, just like in many forms of social networking.  Sure, it isn’t available to listen in live – yet! – but at the end of the day, it kind of is just like a radio programme.  So, listen in and enjoy!

Today’s TOP Radio Guests

Joining your host Andy Hayes from Travel Online Partners we have two guest who are well versed in the latest and greatest of tourism technology:

• Ian Cleary from RazorCoast
• Rene Looper from Tuminds

Be sure to follow these guys on Twitter, just click their name and you’ll get their Twitter profiles. Read the rest of this article »

So, you’ve downloaded and read Twitter is Just a Personality Contest.  You get the lingo, you’ve got in and started playing around.  You linked your blog up to Twitter with Twitterfeed and you’re making some great conversations with your followers.  But you want a shortcut to save you some time, because you’re having a hard time updating Twitter while on the road our out with your paying customers.

Introducing HootSuite

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