Reviews are a vital part of a customers booking journey. In results from a Phocuswright study prepared for TripAdvisor, 53% of participants revealed that they would not commit to booking until they had read customer reviews, and 80% said that they would read between 6-12 reviews each time.

In February 2018, TripAdvisor changed the algorithm for their popularity ranking. This has been met with mixed reviews from the tourism industry, as the ranking now takes into account the quality, quantity and recency of reviews on a business page. So, not only do you need excellent quality customer reviews, but you also require more reviews that are frequently posted throughout the year.

Editor's note: this post is an excerpt from our Travel Trends Report 2018, which you can access now. 

Nicole Kow interviews Wouter Geerts, Senior Travel Analyst at Euromonitor International on the future of sustainable travel, and how this impacts the tour and activities industry.   

Your guides are your biggest asset. It is usually this person who represents your company during an hour-long walking tour, a canyoning tour, a night dive or even a 3-day, 2-night excursion. They're the ones who can make or break your company so you want to make sure that you're keeping your staff motivated throughout the season.

Recently, we were having a conversation in the marketing team. A friend of mine had been enjoying the beautiful sights of Valencia, Spain, but he and his wife didn't know where they would be going on their holiday until they arrived at the airport. It was a surprise vacation!

I began thinking of creative ways that companies have taken less popular products or last-minute stock, and transformed them into cash cows.

How have they been so successful? They created a product their defined target market would want to buy. 

When we are busy, the time flies away, and it feels like our work is never finished. We start the day with a plan, but rarely complete those things we set out to do, which can become frustrating as deadlines begin to loom. 

During high season, the usual priorities shift as the high volume of customers and tours running today come first. This is completely understandable, but, if you only focus on the present, then you aren't proactive. We have to be planning for the months when we will need more business.

At WTM London 2017, we caught up with Kristian Jørgensen, Director of Tourism for Fjord Norway, the western region of Norway. Kristian participated in our panel discussion, Learn how tours & activities are the core of guest experience, and shared some great insights.

Here's our pick of some of the best quotes from the panel, covering Fjord Norway's growth as a region, their decision to go with TrekkSoft as their region's standardised booking system, and his approach to sustainably growing the region's tourism sector.

This is a guest blog written by Anastasia Sviridenko, content marketer at TextMagic.

We use our smartphones and other mobile devices a lot. An average user can spend anywhere from 2.5 hours to over 5 hours out of the day on their phone. That’s almost a third of the time a person is awake.

A majority of this time, as high as 90% is spent using mobile applications known as 'apps'. The most popular are messaging and social media apps such as Facebook Messenger, WeChat, WhatsApp, Kik and traditional SMS.

Messaging apps are increasingly becoming the fastest and most convenient way to reach potential customers. In 2018, businesses across many spaces, especially the tourism industry, should use these apps to communicate with their customers.  

As an established tour and activity operator with a large presence online, direct bookings via your website can be crucial to your business.  If you're spending time and energy driving traffic to your website, you also need to make sure your website is prepped and primed for bookings.

Here are some ways to optimise your site: You can improve your site's layout to help visitors quickly find what they need. You can improve your product pages and product descriptions to give site visitors a taste of the experiences you offer. You can add a few lines of code to your website to display great reviews from TripAdvisor or Facebook. You can even install an online booking system that displays real-time availabilities so that customers can book and pay you on the spot.

In June 2018, Instagram announced that they had reached 1 billion active users. This figure is almost triple of those on Twitter, who in Q1 2018 reached 336 million, and 10 times the amount of Snapchat who currently have 100 million active users.

The social platform reported that there were 15 million active business profiles on Instagram in July 2017. By November of the same year, this figure had leaped to 25 million active accounts. 

According to TechCrunch, Instagram claims the majority of these accounts are owned by small businesses, and one in three say they have built their businesses using the platform. Vishal Shah, Director of Product for Instagram Business, added: "businesses that are natively born on Instagram often do the best on the platform." 

For tour & activity operators, it can be challenging to find out what the current travel statistics and insights are, without having to look at hundreds of articles across the web.

At TrekkSoft, we know how valuable travel statistics can be to our customers, so every six months we do all the research and collate our findings in one place.

Each December we release the highly anticipated annual travel trends report filled with survey results and expert opinion, and then in July we publish our travel statistics to know report which is an update of what has changed and what to expect in the year ahead.