Become a Home Based Travel Agent

Top 7 Mistakes Travel Agents Make on Their Websites
By Tom Ogg

I get invited to review a bunch of new travel agent websites and thought that I would share my thoughts on common mistakes that I see. Some of these are so obvious that I wonder why they keep reoccurring on new sites. Here are the top  mistakes that I see travel agents making.

1. Contact Information: This one drives me nuts. If your objective is to make sure that you are not going to sell anything, then have an Internet form be the only way that your clients can contact you. Also, be sure to ask 1,000 personal questions before they can submit it too.

Clients want to know that they are dealing with someone that is for real. To encourage clients to book, you should provide all of your contact information so that the client can communicate with you the way that they want to, not how you think they should. This in itself is a unique value proposition that will put you a leg up on your competition. You should include your full name, address, telephone number, cell number, SKYPE contact info, email address, Google Voice number and any other contact info you can offer. Offering a live chat option even goes further and can be a deal sealer.

2. What is Your Website’s Objective? Your website should shout your unique value proposition loudly and clearly from the very first moment a potential client arrives at it. Just having a website so that you can send clients to it is probably costing you business, rather than generating revenue. Long before you start building your website, you should have a clearly defined objective for it. For the sake of using an example throughout this article, let’s say that your site is designed to offer fishing trips to Puerto Vallarta to serious fishermen.

The home page of your site should SHOUT that you are an expert when it comes to fishing Puerto Vallarta’s inner and outer banks and not much else. Your website’s objective might be to find serious fishermen searching for in-depth information about fishing in Puerto Vallarta. Once stated, your objective can easily be achieved by continuing to ask “does this information or element contribute to my stated objective?” If the answer is yes, then it should, if the answer is no, then it shouldn’t.

3. Flash Home Pages: No one wants to sit around and wait while some obscure flash webpage loads. Even Flash pages that offer a bypass link waste your client’s time and will increase your bounce rate dramatically. If you want a catchy graphic, try using an animated banner instead. But, understand that the graphics that you use on your home page should be essential to evolving your unique value proposition. As an example, if you specialize in selling fishing trips to Puerto Vallarta to serious fisherman, an animated graphic showing you next to the various fish that you have caught will add to your personal credibility and your websites value proposition. But, making fishermen wait while you load a Flash animation of a tuna swimming around on your portal page will absolutely turn your desired clients off.

4. Basic Design Elements: Pick a font and stick with it! Pick a color and stick with it. Nothing is more difficult to absorb than using a thousand different fonts and colors. Using serif and sans-serif fonts confuses the eye and makes the content much less readable. Using every color in the rainbow may be fun, but is also confusing for people to try and absorb. Be sure to stay away from reds, beiges, pinks and other colors from a magenta sale. Folks with even a little bit of color blindness can’t see them and will give up trying quickly.

5. Optimize all Graphics: A picture taken with a 12-megapixel camera can easily be 2 megabytes and take a good amount of time to load. A simple .jpeg optimizer like found in Photoshop and many other places can compress that picture into a much small size with no loss of quality. Simply gabbing the corners of a huge picture and pulling it to the size you want does not decease the image’s overall size. Slow loading behemoth pictures will cause potential clients to leave your site and dramatically increase your bounce rate.

6. Only Use Original Content: One of the most important elements of a successful website is unique and original content. Search engines love this element more than anything else. But, they hate it when your site features duplicate content that exists on several other sites and will penalize you severly for it. Sites that offer “content” to travel agents for free are likely to get you extremely low search engine rankings should you use it on your site. Only use original and unique content that is compatible with your specific value proposition and search engines will love you.

To find out if content is already being used on websites just visit www.CopyScape.com and enter it into the “search” box. It will develop a report with links to pages on the Internet where the content is being used. Best of all, it’s free to use.

7. Use Social Media to Create Traffic to Your Website, Not the Other Way Around: Having links to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media so that you visitors can follow you is like putting the horse before the cart. Social media is a great way to find new potential clients, but you will then need to introduce them to your website, which shouts your specific value proposition with no competition from other content.