Spend Less Time in the Office, and More Time Doing What You Love
Most people operating a tour and activity company are doing so because they love what they do. Making a business out of your passion is a dream for most people. But after a while the business side of things takes over and you find yourself spending more and more time behind your desk instead of enjoying the great outdoors doing what you love.
Does this sound familiar to you? Are you spending more and more time in the office and less time enjoying your business. Here are 5 tips to get you back outside and less time in the office.
1 Schedule Social Media
Do you find yourself trying to find time each day to update your social media accounts?
Time in the morning posting to facebook… Another half an hour in the afternoon uploading pictures to instagram and tweeting a couple of updates.
With free tools such as Hootsuite and Buffer you can schedule your whole weeks social media output in one go. Find an hour or so during a quiet time every week and schedule your posts to go out automatically throughout the week. This will mean its one less admin task to occupy you each day.
2 Use Your Website
Are you spending a lot of time taking phone calls and replying to emails about the same things every day?
If your customers are constantly contacting you about things like opening hours and pricing, ask yourself – is this information easily found on my website?
The chances are its not if people are picking up the phone to call you about it.
Make a list of the most common queries you deal with in the office and ensure these details are prominent on the home page of your site. You should soon see the amount of queries you have to deal with decrease.
3 Offer Payments Online
If you only take payment for your tour or activity on the day when the customer arrives this is likely resulting in more admin time for you.
How much time do you spend each week going to the bank to make lodgements? And how much in bank charges is this costing you? Are you spending too much time in the office going through bank statements trying to balance your lodgements?
If you give your customer an opportunity to pay online ahead of their visit it will mean all your payments are already accounted for which will save you time in the long run (not to mention the money saved by reducing your bank charges!)
4 Offer Bookings Online
The likelihood is, that most of your time in the office is taken up responding to booking queries and confirming bookings by phone or email.
This is not necessary with the recent advances in technology. By integrating a booking engine on your website, you allow customers to book and pay for their tour or activity in one go.
This leaves you free of those needless hours spent in the office following up on queries and contacting customers to confirm bookings
5 Get Mobile
Finally, and most obviously, use your mobile! Most people these days have phones that allow them to access their emails on the go.
Get out of the office and out in the open. Get back to enjoying what you love doing and forget about spending unnecessary hours staring at a computer screen in the office.
At Vivit we are passionate about the tour and activity industry. We provide support to tour and activity providers around Ireland helping them increase their bookings and cutting down on administration time and costs.
We provide a free, step by step demo of our booking system so you can see for yourself how easy it is to grow your business online. For more details on this demo, click the link below.
You can also see a selection of companies currently using our booking system, and read their success stories by clicking this link.