How to find out what tourists are looking for in your destination
Know your competition
Our previous article was all about how to find out which tourists are visiting your destination and how you can get information about them.
We’ve always talked about how important it is to following strategies to get information about your tourists. But do you know how to find out what they’re looking for once they get to your destination? Do you know what they’re looking for in your destination?
Remember that to build tourist loyalty, you have to get to know them first!
What are tourists looking for in a destination?🧐
Tourists may be looking for different things in a destination, depending on their interests and reasons for travelling. However, some of the things tourists usually look for in a destination include:
✨ 1. Authentic and unique experiences: Tourists are looking for experiences that they can’t have at home and that give them the opportunity to experience the culture, history and traditions of the destination in an authentic way.
🎡 2. Tourist attractions: Los turistas suelen estar interesados en visitar los sitios turísticos más populares del destino, como monumentos, museos, parques temáticos y sitios históricos.
🌳 3. Nature and scenery: Many tourists are looking to enjoy natural scenery and outdoor activities like hiking, mountain climbing, the beach, natural parks, etc.
🪔 4. Food tourism: Local cuisine is a major attraction for many tourists looking to taste new flavours and the region’s typical dishes. A clear example is visiting Logroño to tour all its wineries.
💸 5. Shopping: Tourists are often looking to buy local products and souvenirs to take home. Who hasn’t visited a special place and taken home a small souvenir?
🎨 6. Rest and relaxation: Many tourists are looking for destinations where they can rest and relax, enjoying spas, beaches, seaside resorts, etc.
🎭 7. Cultural and sports events: Tourists may be interested in attending cultural and sports events: music festivals, concerts, football matches, etc.
Offering premium, well-organised tourism services is crucial if you want to create a positive experience for tourists.
It’s also important that tourist destinations offer a diverse range of activities and experiences to attract different types of visitors.
Do you know how you can make an impact on tourists by identifying their interests?
At iUrban we use CICERONE, the first tourism platform that informs, attracts and logs tourists automatically using artificial intelligence (GPT-4).
It’s important to know what tourists are looking so that you can factor their motivations and preferences in to your offering.
There are a variety of sources of information we can use to get a complete understanding of what they want, and CICERONE para mines this information to tailor and map out the entire itinerary for the tourist.
It uses this information to tailor your services and activities to tourists’ preferences and needs to enhance their experience at your destination.
Understanding tourist trends
There are several ways to find out what tourists are looking for in a particular destination. Some of your options include:
1. Conduct market research: You can conduct market research to find out the preferences and needs of the tourists who visit your destination.
2. Look at online reviews and comments: You can check the reviews and comments that tourists post on platforms like TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Yelp, etc. to find out which places, services and activities are most popular and what visitors value the most.
3. Talk to tourists: If you have the chance, talk to the tourists visiting your destination. Ask them what places they’ve visited, what activities they’ve done, what they liked the most and what they would change to improve their experience.
This will give you first-hand information about what tourists are looking for in your destination.
⭐ Active listening will let you tap into the opinions that tourists share, follow up on specific news that may be related to tourism in your city or even identify the needs of your tourists and help them right then and there.
4. Analyse online searches: Use tools like Google Trends and the Google AdWords Keyword Planner to analyse searches related to your destination.
This will give you insight into the most popular search terms and trends in tourist searches.
Tools for getting to know your tourists
Google Trends: It provides access to a sample of actual search requests made in Google.
It is anonymous and organised into categories, according to the subject of the search queries.
It’s an incredible Google tool that will let you know exactly what our tourist are searching for.
Analyse online searches and identify your tourists’ trends!
Keyword Planner: You can use it to research the most in-demand keywords.
Use this free tool to discover new tourism-related keywords and see the estimated number of searches they receive and the cost of targeting ads using these keywords.
This will give you insight into the most popular search terms and trends in terms of destinations, activities and accommodation.
Google Alerts is an automatic system that keeps you updated on all the content of interest to you that is posted online, directly from Google’s search engine.
How to set up a Google Alert
1 . Go to Google Alerts.
2. In the box at the top, enter a topic you want to follow.
3. To change your settings, click Show options. You can change these to match your preferences.
4. Click Create Alert..
Creating this type of alert can be extremely useful if, for example, you want to learn about and keep up to date on a new subsidy for your town.
Carry out a competitive analysis and get to know your competition 💪
If you want to develop an effective strategy, knowing your competitors and having information about their products, prices, marketing strategies, strengths and weaknesses is vital.
A competitive analysis will provide you with a better understanding of the overall industry landscape and help you to improve your strategy.
By analysing what others are doing, you can learn how to avoid their mistakes, replicate their success and stay one step ahead.
To that end, conducting a solid competitive analysis will also help you define your unique value proposition, and allow you to compare yourself to your competitors to better gauge your growth.
That said, a competitive analysis doesn’t mean blindly following and directly replicating what your competitors are doing.
You don’t know what’s working and what isn’t, so you can fall into the trap of replicating the same costly mistakes, so 100% copying everything is a 100% no-no. You have to be original!
A competitive analysis lets you understand the market and use it as inspiration to make informed evaluations in your town.
And remember, if you’re doing the same thing as everyone else, you’re not doing enough. Your goal should be to improve on what others are doing so that you can do even better.
👉That’s all well and good, but… How can you make sure your analysis is a good one? Read on!
Semrush: Identify your competition📋
You need to know who your competitors are, mainly your direct competitors, before you conduct any analysis, and it may not be as obvious as you think.
A direct competitor is any town or business that can stop or influence your tourist from choosing your product or service.
You can use Semrush to identify your direct competitors. Go to the market explorer tool.
The Growth Quadrant allows you to identify your direct competitors and their market positions.
Go to the “Competitors” tab to can see traffic statistics.
To see more competitors, go to the Organic Research tool and go to the “Competitors” tab. Scroll down to see the full list of organic competitors and export the data to an Excel.
✔ To sum up, when it comes to analysing competitors, focus on their strengths and weaknesses instead of simply copying their strategies. Remember to use the information you collect to improve your own business and offer a unique and premium experience to your tourists!
Tourism CRM with GPT-4
Know who your tourists are and what they’re looking for is crucial. But all this information is useless if you don’t have a CRM or a space to store all of it.
CICERONE is a powerful tourism CRM, that features storage and safeguarding of all your tourist data.
Imagine being able to check the total number of registered tourists at any time, storing all their data pand creating campaigns that will make an impact on them and build their loyalty in the future.
Beyond loyalty-building, you’ll be able to automatically send tourists a personalised guide with their entire itinerary, or, for example, a culinary marketing campaign in six months’ time. Create campaigns easily in just 5 minutes.
Have any questions?
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