Planning tour routes
People think being a tour guide is a job that they would love. I guess they believe it easy. How wrong they are.
I have just spent a whole day planning a 9 day tour to meet a prospective client brief. I finished that then the brief changed. Partly my doing as I told them time was far too tight to do what they wanted given they wanted to travel at a slow pace. So amended and then emailed off to our overseas contact. A full days work and chances are we may not win the business.
Another enquiry this week for a 15 day tour but given the looseness of the brief I queried some points and in the end declined to quote. I think that surprised them but given how the brief kept changing then they added a component it all just became to hard. My guess is the brief went to multiple people and they were playing one off against another.
People just don’t see this side of a tour guides life. Some guides work for consultants and are doing routes they are presented with. For us we do work for some consultants but we prepare the tour agendas and sell them at a wholesale rate. They then put their margin on and sell to the prospective customer.
This off season we have done a huge marketing push into 4 different countries and have met with some success. We targeted countries we know the cultures of and know we get good reports following our tours. We have had help from Northland Tourism and Tourism New Zealand supplying the contacts. Very happy with the level of support they have given us and continue to do.
Chances are now we need visit some of the contacts that have given positive replies. We know they like our product so now we need convert talking/emails into business. And sitting here in the far north of New Zealand will not achieve that.
We have a 5 year plan and of attack to grow our business to the next stage. We know what we need achieve and now set out to do that. Sitting here on waiting on business to come to us will just keep us in cruise mode.
We are a tour company. We love our product we need sell. New Zealand. We know our product well.
Peter and Xiaoli Tours 