General

Building customer loyalty for your online travel agency

Selling to a customer for the first time is the most difficult and expensive of all sales. It is among the key goals of every agency to build customer loyalty and make repeat sales to a customer. Loyalty can be created both through the relationships of an agency with its customers and its marketing competency.

A customer who had a good experience will keep this option in his mind. The first thing an online agency should do is to keep this opportunity alive all the time and increase the possibility of repetitive bookings.

E-mail and social media are among the effective channels to build and maintain customer loyalty. In addition, you can increase your chance in this subject by using digital marketing and offline marketing tools together.

Building customer loyalty requires a long-term strategy. Here are the stages of building customer loyalty in an effective way and the methods you need to follow.

Preliminary preparation

The first thing you should do is to collect information about your customers as much as possible to determine the best travel plans and the most suitable property options for them. It is critical for you to learn details like their birthdays, anniversaries, previous travels and the places they plan to visit and when they generally travel.

The beginning of their travel

Once they book through your channel for the first time, you can thank them and submit a confirmation message to get started with the communication.

Providing them with advice about the places they will be visiting before they travel will help them and strengthen your brand image. For instance, high quality photos and short descriptions about the touristic attractions located around can be useful.

Post-traveling

Sending a “Welcome Home” message to your customers within 40 days after they return home is one of the common methods. Adding a brochure or a survey to the message can also be effective. Therefore, you can receive more information about them and provide more ideas for their next travel.
Following that, sending a mailing for marketing purposes after 30-45 days will be effective as a reminder.
The effect of the holiday will completely be lost on your customers month or two later. At this point, you should share reminders and interesting details from their travel so that they can recall their travels.
A year after their travel, you can send them a note related to their future travels or a short survey to figure out if they will prefer the same destination or a different place for their next travel.

These messages and mailings you will send throughout this process, which is about one year, will help you remain in your consumers minds, so they can recall your agency when planning their next travels. At this point, it is critical for you to be reasonable with the frequencies of your messages by avoiding sending too many.

In these messages, you should direct your customers to your website whenever possible, so you can increase the number of repetitive sales. You can easily achieve this if your website’s infrastructure is strong for sure. The award-winning HotelRunner platform designed by an expert team well-acquainted with all needs of the industry can help you with this. Create your HotelRunner account to carry your agency to the Internet and see how it can support you for building top-level customer loyalty and start earning immediately.

Cihan Coşkuntuncel

Director of Sales and Business Development

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