Tourism has been negatively impacted by Covid 19 and it's time for tourism businesses to rebound in the year 2021.  Few useful, easy to follow tips have been mentioned in order to strengthen tourism websites so that you can win over customers and achieve your business goals.

The new year is around the corner and by now many of you have plans for 2021. As a tourism business owner, you definitely have solid plans in place to grow and achieve your business goals.

We have identified a few practical and simple tips that will make your 2021 awesome and at the same time, it will provide a lending hand to achieve your goals.

People are now tired of staying at home and doing their routine work every day while feeling that they are living in a prison. Instead, now they want to travel, explore and get inspired by things that are beyond their homes at least for a few days but in reality, the thought of health and safety creep into their mind the moment they think of travelling

The answer to this question is not complicated as rocket science instead it is something that has been commonly practised by a lot of businesses during these times. 

The first thing which you need to do is contact your local/regional health authorities and get the health and safety guidelines from them. Afterwards, check out the health and safety practices used by other tourism businesses so that you can get a proper idea of the most relevant and common practices.

Based on all these health and safety guidelines and practices, now you can easily come up with your own health and safety guidelines and practices that match your business setting.

The work is not yet over, the health and safety guidelines and practices which you created needs to be communicated in your website in a simple and understandable manner without overcomplicating it. 

Also, apart from health and safety international travellers will often have these concerns circling in their head as well. These concerns are a mix of both health and travel-related questions.

1. What health checks are required in your country that is internationally accepted? Will we need extra checks to re-enter our own country? 
2. Do they follow proper sanitation procedures?
3. Will we be able to travel to areas that we like?
4. What airlines will be operating to the place where I am travelling and from where?
5. What prices will the airlines be charging?
6. Will the country I am travelling to have any extra health-related entry requirements, such as a health certificate or medical tests?
7. Did the country which I am travelling to have any major changes in accessibility, for example via airlines?

With the current global condition, travellers may wonder whether they can get any refunds as lockdowns and isolation of different areas are sudden and frequent. This is a big question mark for all the travellers throughout the world.

So the best way to provide great relief and assurance to the customer is to have a sound refund and cancellation policy in place. Just like earlier, properly communicate these policies on your website and all your social media platforms. 

Having a solid refund and cancellation policy is the perfect way for tourism businesses to score. However, these policies should be fair to the traveller and the business as well. If not, you will lose the little chance you get to score.

Many of you are busy strengthening your health guidelines, refund and cancellations policies so that you can score a 5/5 review in the traveller’s mind. But, you forget the simplest yet the most important ingredient, which is transparency. 

The key to building customer confidence depends on how transparent your business is. The more transparent you are, the more likely you are to be mapped in the ‘high trust’ category by the customer. So make sure that your business is transparent in whatever you do and continuously speak the truth in all social media platforms.

As a business owner, it is important to realise that you need to speak the truth whether it's good or bad.  Customers will often forgive you as long as you are honest but the moment you start to lie then they will stop tolerating you and move to a different brand which provides greater transparency.

If you are not getting any business then Its high time that you rethink about your overall content strategy and process. Keep in mind that in order to get more people to read your content make sure that your content is designed or written from a traveller’s point of view.

Also, always ensure that your content has a personalised touch to it regardless of whether you are posting content on your website or on your social media platforms.

Another important area when you are developing/writing content about your business is to make sure that all your content provides a source of inspiration for all your readers. So much so that they feel motivated to engage with you to inquire about the travel destination and finally go ahead with a booking. 

If you are a business that targets international travellers then things might not work out in your favour this year or possibly in the new year as well. So it is better if you can shift your focus towards approaching local travellers.

Targeting local travellers means that you have to realign your content strategy and processes to make sure that you get their undivided attention.

One more thing,  it is extremely important for you to have a proper CMS (Content Management System). It is important to have a proper CMS because it provides:

• Design flexibility and mobile support.
• Content can be edited easily.
• Compatible with third-party apps and plugins
• Multiple users can access.
• E-commerce and marketing features.

The CMS we use is known as Silverstripe and it is a system that breaks up your website pages into content blocks, which provides great flexibility for your content teams as it helps to modify content structure using the drag-and-drop function.

Apart from that, Silverstripe has many useful features that make life easier when creating your website to create content for your website.