To successfully run a travel business today, you need the right online business tools.
Luckily, there are loads of amazing platforms, applications, and software specially designed to match the needs of savvy businesses. The right tools make everyday tasks that much easier, optimizing the way you run your travel company.
Check out our complete list of online business tools for tour operators. We’ve included several categories, including social media management, bookings and payments processors, website builders, marketing automation, SEO, and communication platforms.
Walking in with a strong social media marketing strategy is vital to growing your brand's online presence. The right online tools will help you automate and schedule posts and keep on top of mentions and conversations.
Hootsuite offers a complete solution to social media management. This online tool integrates with more than 20 social networks, allowing you to manage all of your different accounts from a single platform.
Some things that you can do with Hootsuite include scheduling and reviewing posts, gaining personalized analytics insights, and tracking all of your social media mentions.
The Buffer application acts as a social media toolkit that allows you to schedule posts for your different profiles from one dashboard. A helpful browser extension makes it easier for you to queue posts from any web page without needing to access your dashboard.
Buffer has a great free version, and three paid versions which are all relatively affordable. Note that if you want to access Buffer analytics, you will need to use their separate Buffer Analyze tool.
The Sprout Social platform is an all-in-one social media management solution. You can use it to schedule and publish posts, create custom workflows, stay on top of any social media mentions, and track your analytics.
Sprout Social offers helpful customized reports created for each social media channel. This gives you excellent insights to help you improve your social media marketing efforts.
A great customer experience rests heavily on your ability to accept real-time bookings and online payments. Many travelers want control throughout the booking process. If you don’t offer this functionality, they may turn to someone who does.
WeTravel is the ultimate booking and payment solution for companies and providers in the travel industry.
In just minutes, you can create beautiful booking pages to embed in your website or send directly to clients via a link.
Your clients are able to make effortless and secure online payments. They can choose the payment method that is most convenient to them, be it via direct payment, virtual, or credit card. Trip organizers can also set payment plans and allow external trip contributions.
You can customize the traveler and trip information you collect while allowing the team to collaborate from an easy-to-use account dashboard.
A great travel business starts with a great website. Here are some of the best online business tools for website creation.
When it comes to website builders, WordPress has the market share. The platform is easy to use and easy to expand on, offering all sorts of great plugins that add features to your website. It also has a vast library of free and paid templates and themes, which give you flexibility in your website design.
Wix is a simple, no-fuss solution to website building. It offers plenty of helpful features and functions for building your site, including a logo maker, an SEO toolset, and over 800 designer-made templates.
Marketing can take up a lot of your time as a business owner. With the right online business tools, you can automate actions and measure your success to be more intention-driven with your efforts.
Active Campaign offers a powerful marketing automation solution for travel companies. You can use the platform to target specific leads and customers with personalized content. This helps your brand to build up a better reputation, retain customers, and increase conversions.
Active Campaign’s main product features include email marketing, marketing automation, CRM, and sales automation.
Hubspot is everybody’s favorite CRM platform. It offers a comprehensive marketing solution for business owners, including a powerful CRM, CMS, marketing automation software, customer service software, and operations software.
All of Hubspot's tools can be integrated for a complete solution to managing your marketing, sales, customer service, and more.
You can always get started with the free Hubspot CRM that offers plenty of valuable marketing tools and functions. For more advanced functionality and software, there are various paid options available.
Feedly is one of the best online business tools to keep you up-to-date with any travel industry news. The tool is an AI-driven news aggregator that finds you all of the most relevant news from a range of sources based on your domain inputs and keywords.
Everything that Feedly gathers for you is put into a single dashboard. It’s content that you can share with your community or read to stay up to date with the latest trends and news.
If you want to run successful marketing campaigns, you need to stay on top of your analytics. Google Analytics is one of the essential online tools for monitoring your website performance and understanding your customers' online activity.
You can use Google Analytics to understand where your traffic is coming from, how long visitors spend on each page, and where they're going after leaving your pages. This is all-important for optimizing your website to improve the customer journey and increase your sales.
Email marketing is a must for any travel business, and MailChimp offers a tidy marketing solution. This platform allows you to send out personalized, customized email campaigns to different leads and customers. You can use Mailchimp to build up your email list, segment your list, and automatically send the right content to the right subscribers.
Gathering leads is an essential part of running a travel business, and Mailchimp offers an effective solution to this. The tool can be used to gather contacts through landing pages, pop-ups, online forms, social media ads, and more.
If you want your travel business to attract more customers, you need to be clearly visible in the right search results. Ubersuggest is one of the best online business tools to help you get started with SEO tactics that work.
Any business owner can use it to find the right keywords to help your website rank. The tool also offers insights into which of your competitors' pages are ranking, as well as loads of valuable backlink data.
If you’re starting out small, the tool is completely free, although it does come with limited functionality. You can also try the Chrome Extension to get certain keyword insights.
Running your travel business requires you to spend a lot of time dealing with queries and communicating with customers. Here are some tools to make this a lot easier.
Travel businesses can use Calendly to easily schedule meetings and appointments with suppliers, partners, clients, and coworkers. Simply let people choose a time and date on your calendar that works for them, and your own schedule will be automatically updated.
Zendesk is a live chat solution that integrates with your website, socials, and mobile apps. You can use it to interact with customers in real-time, automate responses, and queue chats based on specific workflows. Cut down on incoming emails and phone calls by responding quickly and being more proactive in communication.
Chatbots offer many advantages to your marketing, lead generation, and customer support efforts. MobileMonkey allows you to design easy chatbots and set them up on your website. You can integrate this with WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Live Chat, and more.
You can use this platform to monitor instances when your travel business is mentioned online. This is important for keeping an eye on all of your reviews across different sites and responding to any questions or concerns that customers may have. Mention allows your brand to become more engaged with customers, which can help you to drive up sales.
The tools listed above will help your travel company to optimize a wide range of processes and time-consuming tasks. This can help you boost your business performance, customer service, team management, and give you more time to focus on what’s important.
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