Problems of touristic businesses on the internet (2023)
Problems and challenges of online promotion for small businesses working in the area of tourism and hospitality in 2023.
One can observe an obvious trend of dominant positions of online channels of promotion for touristic and hotel marketing in 2023.
Unfortunately, not everyone could keep track of updates of technologies and services. This is why we conducted research on quality of online placements of variety of travel businesses.
Main problems that we have detected are the ones that small businesses have for a long time already and they keep growing. Here is the list of the most common problems:
1. Absence of own websites or very low quality of those. This leads to losing competition with companies that have good websites.
2. Insufficiently small speed of loading of websites or absence of mobile versions of websites. This results in low organic traffic as search engines put such websites lowers in the search results.
3. Low quality, not valid and not interesting content on the websites. As a result, such websites are not useful for tourists and get low positions in search results.
4. Absence of content in English language. This dramatically harms companies that offer services to foreign tourists.
5. Not enough placement in electronic maps and geo-services, or not placement at all. Some companies ignore reviews from tourists on variety of platforms. This leads to significant harm to trust from potential and existing customers, damage to online reputation and lower sales.
6. Not using web analytics and not knowing how to use it. As a result, online promotion is done intuitively without any plan or aim. This leads to overspending the budget and time on online marketing.
7. Skewness towards choosing too few “popular” channels of promotion and social networks. Having all advertising in just one place leads to many problems. The most common mistake observed is choosing one channel of advertising (e.g. Instagram), which leads to overwhelming such channel, making spending of the budget less effective and increase the price for advertising and leads there.
Globally, the research has shown that all mentioned problems for small touristic businesses are related to either not having unite system of internet marketing or not having enough knowledge and skills of internet marketing.
Center Smart Tourism has set a mission to improve presence of touristic businesses on the internet, which will help both companies and tourists. Companies working in tourism would then get their desired clients, while tourists would gain full clear information and freedom to choose touristic products and services on the internet. The latter could be considered the main aim of smart tourism in general.
For this reason, we recommend owners and managers of businesses working in tourism to download our report under the link below. Try to look at this report to detect what weaknesses matches you and your business. It would then be obvious how to fix them.
From the side of Center Smart Tourism, it helps to solve these and other problems with the help of self-study book on Basics of Digital travel marketing, which could be purchased here.