Your convention & visitors bureau (CVB) or destination marketing organization (DMO) marketing plan will thank you for this! The most effective advocates for your product & destination are those who know your "why." Why do tourists and travellers love your destination? Why does your product help travel companies sell more trips that are more profitable? Why should your destination marketing partners, employees, customers and prospects be singing your praises?
Digital tourism marketing is more than promoting and selling; it's is about providing travel agents, tour operators, and online travel companies with the knowledge they need. Therefore they can promote your destination, hotel, resort, cruise or activity with confidence and an infectious enthusiasm. That is your destination specialist. Traditional methods of travel product training, tourism sales calls, and tourism trade shows are time consuming, costly and inefficient.
RELATED: Tourism Ambassador Training & Certification
Imagine - you pay your sales person to travel halfway around the world to conduct a destination training program. To fill that room, you sent invitations to dozens of companies. Only one or two people at each company will even see the invitation. The overwhelming majority of their employees may never know you're in town and are likely to miss out on the most valuable parts of your training. To get those one or two contacts in the training meeting or workshop, you've got to offer a good reason (incentives) and, more importantly, they've got to be available on the day, at the time and in the place where you'll be. Your possible audience may be in the tens of thousands but you're lucky to get 20 people in the room.
Those days are gone! Online Destination Training is here!
Let's get right to generating leads from travel agents and meeting planners - a better tourism promotion and online destination training plan. Taking your tourism product knowledge and training to the virtual world is more effective, efficient and meaningful. Online product training (OPT) and online destination training (ODT) with The Tourism Academy can keep your product at top of mind and empower your staff, customers and advocates with the tools they need to increase your sales, passenger counts and profitability. Here are just a few of the benefits...
ONLINE DESTINATION TRAINING BENEFITS
Accessibility
With online destination training, your team can access continuing education about your company’s new features and product updates whenever and wherever they are! It’s as simple as logging into The Tourism Academy’s online training portal, selecting their training course/module and beginning the path to new skills and understandings. This level of accessibility means they have the knowledge they need to help your clients make informed choices and land sales.
More Efficient and Less Costly
Gone are the days of shelling out thousands to trot your team into a conference room for a dreaded day or two of lengthy PowerPoints and a multitude of printed workbooks. Before teaching online courses, you would deal with the cost of hiring a instructor, managing the hand-outs and booklets, providing refreshments (because we all know you'll look like a stooge if you don't) and even possibly renting a meeting space. With online destination training, all your company must do is upload your knowledge resources onto The Tourism Academy training platform and ask your team to login into their new destination course. Event with a small team, creating your destination course is as easy as using dropbox and the copy/paste tool so you can keep up with your tourism marketing plan.
Engaging and Exciting
Traditional training is often seen as a chore - tedious, boring and usually the very last thing people want to do. It doesn’t have to be this way: by activating your online destination courses at The Tourism Academy, we'll show you how to make training fun, rewarding, engaging and entertaining for everyone! Simulations, gamification, and interactive storytelling can transform a dull brochure guide to an exciting and memorable product experience.
RELATED: 3 Steps To More Engaging Travel Agent Training (and More Leads)
Tracking is Simple
Training with The Tourism Academy is exceptionally easy to track and record. With our online data systems and intuitive dashboards, you can quickly see who on your team has taken their training, how they performed on any assessments, and who still needs to complete them.
Lead Generation
A member of your team is assigned as the instructor to your online product training course. As the instructor they'll be notified whenever a travel professional signs up for your course. That's a hot lead! You can even build interaction points into your lessons and turn on the comment notifications, giving your students (product managers, travel planners, agents & operators) a reason to contact you. Fill your sales funnel with inbound tourism leads!
Make Updates Quickly & Easily
If you often add new features, benefits and products, The Tourism Academy makes updating your content fast and easy. Our learning management system allows for stress-free additions with a point & click. Bringing your content current within just minutes. Looking to highlight a specific benefit? Make sure it stands out with online training! Your employees, prospects and advocates now have data at their fingertips for use anytime, anywhere.
Precise Targeting & Promotion
Speak to the direct needs of each market segment. The Tourism Academy offers incredible promotion tools like dedicated, hyper-targeted email campaigns, widely read e-newsletter placements, prime positions and customer incentives. Our network includes over 150,000 travel professionals at 12,000+ organizations. We keep track of more than 130 characteristics of each travel company in our network; each of these fields or combination thereof can be activated to find your customers.
Customization
Any course can be translated into (and promoted to) your ideal customers' language. Your course can also be directed to buyers within a certain segment. Imagine - a course just for meeting & convention planners, leisure operators, online travel agents, student group operators, F.I.T. buyers, etc. The power is at your fingertips.
Want to learn more? Call 954.289.4585 to speak with a member of our sponsorship team or click on the chat icon on the lower right to connect with us right now.
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