How to Sell Your City Tours Online
Table of Contents
Are you wondering how to sell tours online? With a properly designed and fully functional online presence for your tour agency, you can get started to sell tours online in no time.
In today’s quick guide, we’ll cover how to easily start offering your tours online by using a WordPress website and the Touriny travel agency site template. Aside from setting up and customizing it, you’ll learn about various ways of online tour booking configurations, while providing your potential customers with an easy way of purchasing tours online.
Benefits of Selling Tours Online
Before we dive into the intricacies of preparing your website for selling tours online, let’s explore how this can help your tour business. Aside from offering real-time tour availability, online tour booking provides your clients with easier tools to find the right travel offers and helps you increase revenue. Besides, it helps with online marketing and helps to establish the brand of your tour agency without investing a fortune into hiring marketing experts. Certainly, there are other benefits included with this, such as:
- Increased revenue: Online booking allows you to access new markets and customers, increasing your revenue for selling tours.
- Enhanced customer experience: Whether you use an online platform or are learning how to sell tours online with a WordPress website, both solutions improve the user experience of your potential clients and travelers.
- Cost-effective marketing: Due to being closely integrated with online marketing tools, online booking websites & platforms allow to save costs on marketing and promotion.
- Data collection: When selling tours online, you may need to track the performance of your tours as well as booking patterns, feedback, and other valuable information. If you build a travel agency website or use a separate platform for that task, either solution can help with the said task a lot.
- Broader reach: Lastly, one of the most obvious benefits of online tour sales is the global reach provided by your website. This means you can promote and sell tours to a wider audience without having to open tour agencies in other regions.
How to Sell Tours Online with WordPress
Selling tours online using WordPress is a great way to reach a global audience and streamline bookings. However, it requires a functioning website and the latest version of the CMS to ensure the best experience for your clients. Thanks to a wide variety of themes and your plugins for this platform, creating a notable website for online bookings and tour sales won’t be a problem and won’t require any detailed coding knowledge even if you don’t know how to sell tours online.
In addition to that, if you build a travel agency website with WordPress, it can be easily customized according to your ideas and preferences. This makes the #1 CMS the best choice for flexible tour agency websites with online booking features. To achieve a desired goal faster, we recommend using a ready-made theme, such as Touriny by MotoPress as it allows you to get started with online tour sales almost instantly.
Selling Tours Online with the Touriny Theme
As we mentioned above, we’ll use the Touriny travel agency website design to show how to sell tours online. Touriny is a flexible, well-designed theme for modern travel bureaus and individual tour agents. Designed for WordPress and its Gutenberg editor, the theme allows for easy customization, while also giving enough space for presenting and selling your tour packages online. Thanks to the built-in booking system and varied pre-designed pages, from blogs to galleries, made for tour businesses. As a result, with this theme, anyone can build a responsive and informative tour and travel agency website with online tour booking and payment support.
Key features:
- 9+ pre-designed pages;
- Support for group bookings and guide profiles;
- Email notifications;
- Optimized for SEO and performance;
- Over 30 Gutenberg blocks available with the Getwid plugin.
| Name | Developer | Price | Downloads |
|---|---|---|---|
| Touriny | MotoPress | From $59/year | 150+ |
Step 1: Add Tours and Excursions
Now that we’ve learned more about how WordPress can help you sell tours online, let’s explore the steps to do it with Touriny and its integrated Appointment Booking plugin. After installing and activating Touriny, you’ll need to add tour packages and excursions to your vacation tour and travel agency website. This is done using the WordPress dashboard, allowing you to add an excursion or a tour in a few clicks:
- To get started, navigate to the “Appointments – Services” tab.
- Press “Add New Service”. A new page with Gutenberg editor will open. Here you can provide the tour description and photos. Besides, you can add any blocks you need, including those of the Getwid plugin.
- Scroll lower to the “Service Settings” section. Here you can specify various tour settings. For example, feel free to set the buffer times before and after the tour is booked, set minimum capacity, and do a lot more.
- On this page, you can also choose tour guides who are responsible for providing the tour. However, before that, don’t forget to add tour guides to your website dashboard (see step 2).
- The page sidebar allows you to set various tour categories and tags for easier search.
- After you’re done with editing or creating a tour, don’t forget to save changes, by pressing the “Save” button in the upper right corner.
Step 2: Add Guides
The next step of learning how to sell tours online requires navigating to the “Employees” section of the Appointment Booking plugin.
Here you can add tour guides and their contact information before you assign them to tours and excursions. Similar to adding tours, you can provide descriptions and photos for your tour guides in this section. However, if you scroll lower, you can also add their phone numbers, emails, and social links. Note that if you want to create tour guide profiles, you’ll need to add their email address in the “WordPress User Email” field to allow your tour agency employees access their excursion schedules, booked tours, and other useful information.
Step 3: Enable Group Bookings
If you provide group tours with customizable capacity, you’ll need to enable group bookings for your tour agency offers. This can be done for each separate tour in the Services tab. Just press “Edit” under a chosen tour, scroll down to the Group Booking settings, and enable the Group Reservations option. Additionally, here you can customize the capacity of the chosen tour, multiply the price based on the number of registered travelers, and even change the bookable item name (in case you sell tickets or provide vehicles for rent).
Step 4: Configure Online Payments
No vacation tour and travel agency website is complete without payment gateways. Luckily, Touriny provides support for online payments thanks to the integrated Appointment Booking plugin. The latter offers a simple way of allowing travelers to buy tours instantly thanks to Stripe and PayPal. However, you need to configure them first, especially if you’re just discovering how to sell tours online. This is done in a few simple steps:
- Navigate to the Settings page of the Appointments plugin and select the Payments tab.
- Then choose any required payment method to configure (Stripe, for example).
- A new page will open where you can configure various options. Most importantly, you’ll need to provide keys to connect with Stripe. For more information, read this guide, which explains how to set up Stripe integration in detail.
- After setting up, don’t forget to save any made changes, using the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page.
Step 5: Customize Tour Availability
One of the final steps to enabling online tour booking on your website with the help of the Touriny theme involves customizing tour availability. This is done via the Schedules tab in the WordPress dashboard. Here you can create and edit schedules for each of your tour guides defining their work schedule. Besides, the plugin allows you to get your guides’ Google Calendar account synchronized in a few clicks. On this page, you can configure the following schedule aspects:
- Tour guide;
- Main tour location;
- Guide availability schedule;
- Custom days off for tour availability.
Top 5 Online Tour Booking Platforms for Selling Tours Online
While WordPress and its pre-designed themes are certainly great for selling tours online, there are other ways to achieve it. We are talking about online travel agencies or OTAs that allow travel agents to distribute their tours without having a dedicated tour and travel agency website with similar functionality. Below we have included some of the most popular platforms for tour booking that will help you learn how to sell tours online and push your business forward without considerable web development investments.
Expedia
One of the most popular online platforms for direct bookings and selling tour packages is Expedia. Offering easy search of hotels, B&Bs, flights, and popular destinations, it provides a variety of ways to distribute your tours and helps you discover how to sell more tours online. With over 600 million visits every month, Expedia offers lots of opportunities for tour agents, from affiliate networks to Local Expert programs allowing them to get the most out of selling tours online.
Key features:
- Travel agent affiliate program;
- Vast travel product inventory;
- Itinerary builder & booking manager;
- Real-time booking confirmation;
- Commission on total booking value.
| Name | Owned by | Founded in | Monthly visits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expedia | Expedia Group | 1996 | 675m+ |
Viator
Another popular platform that is a perfect choice for learning how to sell tours online is Viator. Supporting over 2500 destinations online, this solution helps to build a customer base quickly and track your success and sales using built-in instruments. With it, you can earn money on everything, from excursions to more complex multi-day tours. These and other features make it one of the most reliable solutions for tour agents and their customers.
Key features:
- Commission on completed bookings;
- Performance tracking;
- Affiliate program;
- Inventory of 300k+ tours, activities, and excursions;
- Global reach.
| Name | Owned by | Founded in | Monthly visits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Viator | Liberty Tripadvisor Holdings | 1997 | 30m+ |
Tripadvisor
Tripadvisor is arguably the most widely used travel agency submission site for booking tours online and sharing opinions about them using reviews and forums. Similar to Expedia, this platform offers its affiliate program allowing tour agents to earn commissions from selling their products and tour packages. Besides, its powerful search system allows you to quickly find activities, hotels, restaurants, and more to shape a traveling experience in a few clicks. As for tour agents, Tripadvisor has a rich database of listings and reviews alongside tools to market your tour services and sell tour packages online more efficiently.
Key features:
- Multi-touch attribution model;
- User-friendly interface;
- Database of reviews and listings;
- Diverse marketing tools;
- Viator integration.
| Name | Owned by | Founded in | Monthly visits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tripadvisor | Liberty Tripadvisor Holdings | 2000 | 135m+ |
Booking.com
Next on our list of suggested online tour booking platforms is Booking.com. As one of the popular platforms for selling tours and accommodations, it can provide outstanding benefits for your business. For example, its user-friendly UI is perfect for easy navigation allowing you to concentrate on generating revenue and discovering how to sell tours online. Moreover, with the variety of customizable partner tools Booking.com provides, you can enhance your customers’ experience and promote your tours more efficiently.
Key features:
- Automated confirmations;
- Flexible payment options;
- User-friendly UI;
- Customizable promotional tools;
- 24/7 customer support.
| Name | Owned by | Founded in | Monthly visits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Booking.com | Booking Holdings | 1996 | 461m+ |
TourRadar
TourRadar is one more popular platform for tour agents who want to start promoting their services online. Thanks to its global reach and multiple offered destinations, it is perfect for getting started with online sales of tours and tour packages. This travel agency submission site provides detailed reporting tools, helping you to track metrics of your tour sales while earning commission from selling tours online.
Key features:
- Extensive tour inventory;
- Unser-friendly agent portal;
- Integrated marketing & itinerary building tools;
- Tour customization for travelers;
- Various booking & payment options.
| Name | Owned by | Founded in | Monthly visits |
|---|---|---|---|
| TourRadar | TourRadar | 2010 | 1.2m+ |
Conclusion
We hope this short guide and overview of how to sell tours online helped you find the best way to boost sales of your tours. Whether you want to promote your tours using a WordPress theme and your website or utilize online platforms, selling tours online will help you reach out to more potential clients and travelers. However, if you are still unsure what to pick or are wondering how to sell more tours online, the pros and cons of each solution below will help you make the right decision.
Pros of a WordPress website vs. tour booking platforms:
- Flexibility;
- Customization;
- SEO capabilities;
- Cost-effectiveness.
Pros of tour booking platforms vs. a WordPress website:
- Ease of use;
- Specialized features;
- Security;
- Integrations.
