I’m really grateful for all the help and advice I received during the creation and setup of my tour. However, now that it’s published, I’m unsure of the best strategies to sell the tour. I’ve been reading about different approaches on this forum and the website, but I feel like I could really use some guidance.
Should I just walk into hotels and ask if they want to buy vouchers, or is there a different approach for various types of hotels? Does Voice Map have a sales team reaching out to local hotels and businesses in the different tour locations, or is that up to the publishers?
My tour was published in mid-July, and so far I’ve sold 2 copies. Is this normal? I have no idea what to expect in terms of sales numbers. Thanks to Clive for previously sharing his sales figures, but I’m not sure if Clive is a “super seller” or if his numbers are typical.
I have a blog (ThisisAlicante.com) where I’ve been putting links to the tour, but what other options are available?
I’ll leave others to advise on the best strategies for selling tours, but in terms of expected sales, it varies a lot between seasons and tours. In inland Andalucia, July/August is pretty low season, because it’s too hot. I don’t know whether that’s the case in Alicante too. Here, in my limited experience, September and October are the best months, followed by spring.
It can also take a while for a tour to get going. We launched our first tour in December 2022 and only sold a handful until March 2023. Since then, we’ve sold hundreds of that tour. Getting ratings and reviews definitely helps.
Ben has provided some valuable insights. The time it takes to start seeing sales can vary greatly depending on the destination and seasonality. Here are a few strategies to help gain momentum for your tour. Some of these are directly relevant to your question (about hotels), and some of these are broader recommendations that could also apply for your tour, or other publishers’ tours.
Firstly, you can use your promotional credits to give friends and family access to your tour. Encourage them to leave reviews and ratings, as tours with more than 10 ratings and several comments tend to gain traction faster. I can see you’ve started with this, so keep at it.
You can approach and partner with local businesses (including, in your case, hotels), activity operators, and organisations in several ways:
Vouchers: Offer to sell voucher codes at an agreed price, which they can then sell to their customers at their own price. You can buy credits from us, sell them at a fixed price to hotels/businesses, and they can then make them available to their guests, either for free or at a cost - it’s ultimately up to you and them what arrangement you come to. This is the cleanest way of increasing distribution through your own channels without needing to negotiate commission, etc.
Promotional materials: Putting up posters, or displaying signage/flyers at local businesses can really help drive sales. We have templates that we can customise for your tour. The more eyes you can get on these promo materials, the better
Deep links and QR codes: We can create unique deep links or QR codes for you to share with local partners. Each of these can be used to track app installs and tour downloads, and we can share this data with you periodically (be that monthly or quarterly, for example). You can then pay the partner a commission based on the number of downloads attributed to their links or codes. This method requires pre-negotiating terms and paying commissions from your royalties after the downloads occur. If you want some deep links set up, let me know and I can set them up, as these are different to the tour links and QR codes.
Affiliates: We’re in the early stages of setting up an affiliate program through AWIN. Eligible partners can promote and sell tours, earning a direct commission from any resulting sales. If any of the organisations you’re in touch with are registered with AWIN, we can set this up for you.
If you have specific distribution channels or partnerships with larger activity operaters in mind, let me know. We can explore these opportunities and potentially register with relevant partners. For instance, @clive helped us connect with Shore Excursions Group, and we’ve submitted documents and are waiting to see if we’ve been approved. If there are larger organisations like this that you think would be interested in selling tours to guests, please share details with me, and I’m happy to initiate contact or to carry things forward if you have a contact at one of them.
I hope this helps answer some of your questions while also offering broader recommendations that could be of use to others. Let’s see if we can continue to gather more recommendations from the community, as plenty of other tactics have been successful for other publishers.
Thanks Brent
Both would be good.
I could laminate the A4 and ask hotel receoptionists to keep it under the counter for anyone who might be interested or for if the hotel wants to buy vouchers.
and I was thinking that the flyers could be handed out in big crowds. Or I could ask if anyone wouldn’t mind leaving them on their counter.
Hi Iain, the best advice we can give is to your social media to create awareness and establish your tour. Create a website if you dont have one, so you can link your social back to that, and post daily on favourite platforms.
We post daily on our Instagram page, and facebook, and threads, Also regularly on Tiktok. But not just about your tour, interesting stories about the area, the general day to day activities in the area or surrounds. Normal activities even the garbage collectors, just daily life. We try to do about 5 stories a day, an amongst that will be links to the tours. But not on everyone just a few. You want people interested in the area, but not such a huge sell on every post. We also run a youtube channel which generates interest. We also have a current advertising promotion campaign which is providing to be very useful to sell the tours.
Another idea is to go onto Google Maps and find every location your tour covers and add in your own personal photos to that location and comments that you found this location whilst you were using the voicemap tour. You may not be able to actually link your tour but even mentioning how you found this location through the App and the Tour will generate interest. We recently went through every tour marker and added photos and comments on every Google location that any of our tour covers.
We also added in new locations not yet in Google which were accepted. Google advises that in only three weeks we have received 10,000 views of those new locations.
From our experience asking Hotel staff to show people a card is difficult as they are not usually allowed to promote outside activities, and cards get stacked under other papers along with constant changes of staff. And of course if you can create relationships through profit sharing with other organisations that is also helpful.
It does take time and a consistent effort to get tours out there, so good luck with your tour.
Thanks very much for your response. That’s awesome.
Yeah , I do have a website (Thisisalicante.com) and I am also posting on social media and trying to use more platforms to expand the audience.
Great idea about the google locations… might give that a try.
I guess I just need to be patient
In short, I have created a business place for each of my guides in G maps and then followed the route in pretty much the same way as @baliwalkingtours editing and adding links to my websites and relevant pages… Google has accepted 90 percent of them.
Also must remember that we here in Andalusia and Alicante are really in low season due to the excessive heat and my sales (for sure in July and August) drop to worrying dramatic levels!!! All will be well from September onwards!
