You’re relying more and more on OTAs to drive tourist traffic, shrinking your margins and spiking your stress levels. Stabilize your revenue and work smarter by shifting your business model toward corporate tours.
- Higher profit margins
- Foster more referrals and repeat groups
- Easier to coordinate and more fun
Opening more corporate availability can help you price your tours to earn the healthy margins you deserve. Know days or weeks ahead of running your event exactly how much money you have coming in, and be able to plan for the needs of each guest to increase the value of your product.
Key Takeaways
One week after the Arival 360 Conference in Las Vegas we met with Bruce Rosard, co-founder of Arival and our tourism community to talk about new opportunities with corporate groups.
- Torin Kexel of Flying Bike Tours in Asheville, NC is finding that the lifetime value of a local corporate tour client far exceeds that of a single tourist group.
- Lisa Lavelle of Catalina Tours is excited about creating an outreach program to boost off-season revenue by bringing back past corporate clients. She wants to focus on marketing to remote teams and offering them a unique and fun way to come together.
- Jessica Patterson of Mac Sports Travel has seen an increase in teams booking her events as mean of bringing together remote teams who need face time to connect. Her sports packages also serve as incentives for teams to earn spots on the trip.
- Bruce Rosard, co-founder of Arival, agrees the focus on group sales is a crucial path forward for operators looking to drive revenue.
- Bruce believes that the pandemic has opened up new opportunities for corporate group sales with a new need to bring remote teams together.
- “If you’re in the tour business, you gotta have groups,” says Bruce, “and you gotta treat them separately” from your public tour business.
- Adam Boles of UpLevel Tourism believes there is pressing opportunity now to flip corporate group tours from a minor revenue stream into one that eclipses the more difficult to execute public tours and reinvents the tour operator business model to drive more direct sales at a higher margin.
Simplify Your Tour with Corporate Groups
The pandemic showed us the resiliency of tours to expand their offering. Whether it’s a cookbook, a local gift book, or a pizza making class — innovation erupted as tours looked for new ways to deliver value.
As a researcher of workplace & productivity habits over the past 6 years, I’ve found an interesting connection between these two worlds. And it stems from the following 3 numbers.
- 35% Can work from home full-time. Source: McKinsey’s American Opportunity Survey Spring 2022
- 23% 1—4 days per week from home. Source: McKinsey’s American Opportunity Survey Spring 2022
- 21% Workplace isolation can derail productivity. Source: Gallup Panel 2019
The last one is the most striking because it’s where I believe we’ll see more investments from companies. As budgets shift away from office spaces, it’s going to be more important that businesses bring their people together in unique creative ways that encourage team building.
- Tour operators spend too much time chasing tourists.
- Chasing individual ticket sales.
- Fight for each tour to hit its numbers.
- Relying more and more on OTAs.
- Shrinking your margins.
- Spiking your stress levels.
Enter — The Experience Coordinator
A new way for tour operators to position themselves for corporate business. Be ready to talk about the experience they need to create. Solve their problem of needing to get their team together, not forcing them into your specific tour’s structure.
These experiences can yield higher returns.
The $400 guest buys four tickets, doesn’t live in the area, and never comes back to your tour.
The $9,000 guest buys 30 tickets, books a 2nd experience next year, and refers a colleague.
When you look at the investment put towards sales & marketing — is it worth to invest more in winning the $400 client or $9,000.
Make it easy to get started.
Group sales for Catalina Tours are up to 20% of their overall revenue. A streamlined, low-friction submission form gets corporate clients into the sales funnel and on the way to receiving a standardized Proposify proposal.
By opening up your business to corporate groups, you can stabilize your revenue, make more money on each tour, and reduce the amount of time you need to spend coordinating logistics. Not only that, but a well-executed corporate group tour is more fun for everyone involved!
