The 5 digital challenges in tourism: effective tools serving quality

The digital and development activity often seems far removed from business concerns in the daily lives of entrepreneurs. And yet, the goal of the digital tools we develop is precisely to simplify the lives of companies!

In order to better understand the stakes of digital in the business world, what better than concrete examples? And since it's back-to-school season, we're going to talk to you a little about tourism by visualizing the complete journey of visitors: leisure and theme parks, museums, natural or historical sites... All sites receiving visitors are potentially concerned! 😎

Digital and communication: getting known

No big surprise for this 1st challenge, because these days, digital presence is an undeniable asset to be visible to as many potential customers or visitors as possible.

Websites to be visible

A website has seemed a must for a few years now! However, there is still a lot of confusion on this subject: it's not because you have a website that you are visible... That would be too easy!

While the site is a central entry point, you have to think about SEO: organic, paid, local, etc... Otherwise, it will be useless, or in any case, it won't generate new customers who don't know you! It's a very common confusion that we want to highlight, and in the face of which it is essential to properly set the stakes and objectives before getting started (alone or with a provider) in the creation or redesign of a website.

Presence on social networks

In digital communication, presence on the right social networks is also a strategy increasingly used to get known by potential visitors. As with websites, nothing is a given and it requires work over the long term: very regular and high-quality posts, paid and targeted advertising to plan for... You have to create and nurture a community to see results!

In short, on paper, everyone knows digital communication, but beware! In practice, it requires several complementary and technical skills to work well: marketing strategy, design, copywriting, development, community management... And it works in principle by planning a network of several channels to attract visitors toward a very specific objective: booking a spot!

Online ticketing: a key tool to facilitate conversions

Once your customers are on your website, it would be a shame to lose them due to underperforming tools! Yes, it seems basic, but you must never forget the fundamentals... Ticketing is one of them! Their interfaces often lack ergonomics: unclear calendars and pricing, adult and child tickets to be purchased separately, mandatory back-navigation to finalize the order, not to mention those that are almost illegible on mobile... If all this rings true from experience, it's not just an impression 😉 When a customer arrives on the booking interface, it must be perfectly ergonomic and simple in order to facilitate the purchase!

We can't say it enough: the user experience is paramount! And this experience starts well before the visitor's arrival, from their very first contact with the company on the web!

Taking care of the customer experience

Here we're going to focus on the moment when visitors are on site: how to make them experience something unforgettable, in complete safety? Even if they don't do everything, high-performing digital tools can greatly contribute to it!

Reducing visitor wait times

Once on site, the ideal is to reduce negative factors as much as possible for your visitors. There's no need to specify how much waiting is experienced negatively... From their arrival, your visitors should wait as little as possible.

Creating priority lines

To start, a priority line at the entrance for those who bought their ticket online may seem basic, but it's a big plus for improving the impression upon arrival and for streamlining your teams' work! It's a great example of complementarity between digital and very concrete on-site organization: it's not because we're talking about digital that it only concerns geeks and e-commerce 😉

Capacity management

Waiting inside the site must also be controlled: capacity limits also make it possible to ensure that visitors will have a pleasant experience allowing them to access the various on-site entertainments. This is valid of course for leisure parks, but also for museums, natural sites, etc... And we'll see a little further down that other digital tools can help improve the on-site visitor experience, and optimize their time! ⏱️

Thinking about on-site safety

Limiting the number of simultaneous visitors

Beyond visitor comfort, capacity management is an aspect that also concerns the safety of sites and people.

More and more natural sites or historical monuments are using applications to inform their potential visitors of access conditions in real time.

The Calanques of Marseille thus have their application which allows real-time tracking of access availability: very touristy sites can thus regulate flows and preserve natural spaces.

Informing in real time

Access to venues is therefore better controlled, and visitors better informed! What's worse than arriving during your vacation in front of a closed access or a site already full for the day? Visitor comfort is thus improved, as are the possibilities of anticipation, which creates a virtuous circle with the increase in on-site safety as well as capacity control!

Another, more recent, example on the Atlantic coast: the Mes plages océanes system makes it possible to inform the public in real time about weather conditions, parking fill levels, etc... GIP Littoral (alyce.fr)

We can easily schematize all of these measures and good information management as a virtuous circle:

Combined and properly implemented, these measures are genuine assets to enhance your visitors' experience, increase their satisfaction, while taking care of the places visited.

Boosting revenue and profitability

Of course, satisfied visitors inevitably have beneficial consequences for the place visited in terms of profitability!

We can however go a little further in the tools for even more impressive results.

Customer applications to extend the experience

This is about offering visitors an application, usually free, in order to give them more information in real time: registrations for themed workshops, on-site restaurant bookings, real-time queue visualization, current promotions at gift shops, etc...

There are many ideas, particularly for places such as amusement parks!

And the benefits are multiple: optimization of waiting times, facilitated additional sales, increase in visitor satisfaction, etc... The investment is consequently very quickly recouped, but as with everything, you have to ask the right questions upstream: to help you make the right choice during your mobile application creation endeavors, don't hesitate to consult our advice over here!

Dynamic pricing serving profitability

Dynamic pricing, or "tarification dynamique" for purists of the French language, is the fact of automatically setting different rates according to the moment of booking.

We all know how it works with airlines, but also when booking trains or hotels: to explain everything to you in detail about pricing strategies and dynamic pricing, we have prepared a complete article !

It involves setting up a predictive artificial intelligence tool, which will generate rates automatically, according to strategic criteria: seasonality, weather, school holidays, price elasticity... The more past data you have on your site, the more effective the tool created will be, because it will allow optimal filling of the venue: so as to satisfy on-site visitors, and to generate the right revenue according to your expenses.

That is to say, fill more, with for example more attractive rates in "off-peak" periods, and fill better in busier periods!

From the beginning to the end of a sales cycle, well-designed digital tools make it possible to facilitate sales, improve the customer experience, and consequently their satisfaction, boost profitability... Whatever the business sector, we consider that a well-designed and well-thought-out digital tool should make it possible:

• to automate tasks for which humans have no added value,
• to focus on real skills in order to differentiate oneself from the competition,
• to better communicate internally and externally,
• to improve the profitability of the company...

In any case, our objective is to enhance the quality of service that companies can bring to their customers: the possibilities are multiple, because the cases are all different, and that's what makes the power of custom-made tools! 😉