Running a business is no piece of cake, and being a travel business owner, you know that could not be more true. From managing customers and keeping up with the market to managing human resources and budgets, running a business can surely be overwhelming.
Now one sure can help you with suggestions to ease your stress a little, but does that make your business management any easier? Absolutely not.
As a travel agency owner, your responsibilities include planning, evaluating, budgeting, directing, hiring, and controlling daily operations while ensuring your business grows at each step. Now, what if we told you that there could be something that can help streamline all these processes?
Emerging new tools for different business operations have made managing a business cost-effective and efficient. All you have to do is know your business needs and choose whichever tools you will need. Keep scrolling to read more about some of the most useful tools to grow your travel business.
Tools To Grow Your Travel Business
With rapid technological developments, there are always new softwares coming up to help with a new aspect of running a business. Let us find some of the most helpful tools to grow your travel business.
1. Social Media Schedulers
Firstly let’s talk about the tool that can help you upgrade your social media marketing strategies- social media schedulers. But before we explain their functions, answer this. Do you ever plan an Instagram or Facebook post on your official travel agency page but somehow get caught up in other works and forget about it?
If the answer is yes, social media schedulers are here to save the day. So, what do these tools do? As the name suggests, social media schedulers are tools that help you schedule a post that would go live at the exact time you want it to without having to do it yourself every day. All you have to do is link your social media account, select the post, add your captions, set a date and time, and voila!
Social media schedulers are very helpful in making your social media marketing a success. With these tools, you can easily ensure that you stay consistent on social media to help boost your sales.
2. Task Management
Wouldn’t it be great if you could have one such software that would help you track your to-do list digitally? What if we told you that certain tools can help you achieve that? Yes. You heard that right. Task management tools are here to help run your travel business easily by tracking the progress of all tasks and ensuring that you use your time productively.
There are many task management tools out there for you to choose from. You can also find many tools that enable you to set a reminder and updates to get notified about the next task without wasting your time checking everything manually.
Task management tools can also help you connect with teammates and share task progress to make your business operations time-efficient.
3. Meeting Schedulers
Did you ever spend hours going back and forth on emails negotiating meeting timings? Does Tuesday work for you? No? Wednesday might be a busy day for me. How about the next day? Well, say goodbye to such awkward time-wasters and greet hello to meeting schedulers.
So, what are these? In simple terms, meeting schedulers are tools that help you schedule the time and location of meetings by letting your customers (or whoever you are meeting) select a time slot based on your availability.
These tools can be linked with your calendar to keep your time slots updated and create meeting links on different apps like Zoom.
4. Email Marketing
The good ol’ email marketing. No matter how much the marketing games keep evolving, email marketing will forever have its special place in a marketer’s heart. But we would understand if you told us that it is not easy, which is why we are here to introduce you to email marketing tools!
Although as cool and effective as email marketing sounds, it also requires a lot of hard work to create a whole new email from scratch every time. Email marketing tools can help ease this hard work by providing email templates you can choose from and customize.
5. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Sure, gaining new customers is pretty much everything that businesses ever dream of. Still, a successful business knows that a healthy relationship with its existing customers is the key. But how do we do that? Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, is your answer.
Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, is a software system that helps business owners and marketers manage and nurture the relationships they have with their leads and clients. It replaces the myriad spreadsheets, databases, and apps on which most businesses waste their precious time tracking client information.
With a CRM platform, you can access all your sales leads and customers’ data in one place without creating any mess or confusion.
6. Graphic Designer Tool
Do you want to improve your social media posts but don’t want to hire a graphic designer? Sit back and relax because we are here to introduce you to the current social media marketing superstars – graphic designing tools.
Graphic designing tools have provided social media marketers an affordable option to upgrade their social media content. Emerging designing tools have empowered business owners with easy access to quality designs without having to take up a whole course on graphic design. There are tons of graphic designing tools out there. Still, one such tool that you must have come across is ‘Canva’, the designing app that has changed the world of social media marketing.
7. Project Management
Every business requires good project management to ensure proper organization of each step of a project. Although hiring a project manager can be an option for your travel agency, you can also do so by using a project management tool instead.
Project management tools are softwares that are designed to facilitate the planning, tracking, and management of a project to accomplish the goals within a specified time frame. Additionally, it facilitates team collaboration and helps to meet specified deadlines by accelerating the projects. Using project management tools can be very useful for your travel business to improve productivity and track each step of the project efficiently.
8. Team Communication
Communication is the key to building any relationship, and the same goes for your travel business as well. It is very important to stay connected with your team constantly and know about the progress of your day-to-day operations.
Gone are the days when business owners would have to wait for hours to get a reply to their email. Today, there are a number of communication tools in the market to choose from to make communication quicker and easier.
9. E-Signature
A year-long lockdown has surely turned businesses stronger than ever. It has also taught us that nearly nothing is impossible in the digital world that we live in today. Want to schedule a meeting with about 100-500 people at once? Check. Need to close a deal but can’t physically visit the person or organization for signatures? Check.
With e-signature tools, it is now possible to sign a digital document with an electronic signature in just a few minutes. Businesses can use e-signature software to automate processes that require signatures, including sales contracts, purchase orders, and legal documents.
10. Website Builder
Of course, how could it be a list of the top ‘tools to grow travel business’ if we don’t mention a tool to help you with your website? Websites are one of the first steps in starting a business, and if you have not created one yet, it is high time to consider launching one. Now, of course, you must be thinking of how you might have to find people with coding knowledge to get it done. But what if we told you that you could do it yourself?
Web builders are tools that enable users to create websites quickly and easily without manual coding. Using a good website builder like Pathfndr, you can easily create web pages, and structure featured layouts using drag-and-drop functionality.
Tools to Boost Your Travel Business
With rapid technological advancements colliding with the COVID era, people have begun to understand the importance of a digital workplace. This has led people to adapt to a new skill in demand constantly. It might have been just yesterday that you were complaining about starting a Zoom call. The next day, you somehow have even learned how to schedule a Zoom meeting using a professional tool.
These knights in shining armor, in the form of business tools, have surely made surviving lockdowns a lot easier for business owners. We hope that our chosen tools to grow your travel business have helped you sort out your priorities for your travel business’s growth.
If you wish to start or grow your travel business, make sure to check out Pathfndr, an AI-engineered travel platform that helps you launch your website, stay updated on fresh deals and availability, and much more.