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If you love travelling and would not mind the meticulous planning that comes with it, you might be interested in starting a luxury travel business. But putting up a business in the travel sector does not come easy. There are so many factors to consider and travelling is just a small part of it. You also need to have an entrepreneurial spirit, knowledge of the travel industry, a robust sales approach, and so much more!
The travel industry is a fiercely competitive market, and your success lies mainly in finding the right niche. If you want to be successful, you should focus your efforts on branding and marketing. You need to know who needs your services the most and how much they are willing to pay to avail your services.
Here are some tips for starting a luxury travel business.
1. Be Diverse
To start your business on the right track, think about the values that you want your company to have and make sure that diversity and inclusion are part of it. Nowadays, businesses around the world are affirming their commitment to diversity. Yet, many companies still struggle to deliver. Since tech giants have been issuing diversity reports, progress has been slow.
Diversity should start from hiring and retaining a diverse pool of talents. When you start posting jobs to hire people, you should highlight your goal of having a diverse work environment. You must also highlight diversity on your website’s career page and mention your current initiatives in maintaining workplace diversity. Make it a point to choose people with different races, cultural backgrounds, religions, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation.
Remember that your goal is to establish a company with a culture that respects and accepts individual differences. All employees must receive the same opportunities and be treated fairly regardless of their race, cultural background, gender, etc. Having a diverse workplace can improve your company’s reputation, making it easier to attract clients to your new business.
2. Don’t Greenwash
As travel is slowly returning to normal, it’s time for travel companies to highlight the importance of sustainability. Sustainability is not merely about caring for the environment. It’s also about balancing profit with the need to protect the people and the environment. According to luxury travel and lifestyle recruitment agency, Lightning Travel Recruitment, a lot of companies are taking advantage of the trend and are merely “greenwashing”. Greenwashing is the act of conveying a false impression about being environmentally friendly just to persuade the public into patronising their products and services.
So, if you want your luxury travel business to be eco-friendly, avoid greenwashing. If you say you will be eco-friendly, sustainable, and carbon-neutral, make sure you demonstrate it and take the necessary steps to do it. Do not mislead people into believing that your company cares for the environment when you are not taking any steps to be eco-friendly.
3. Luxury Company Needs Luxury Marketing
Since you are trying to tap into the luxury niche, your marketing efforts should be able to show this. Understanding your target audience is an important part of any kind of marketing strategy. When using social media marketing, you should be more specific. Get to know the people who are following you on your social media platforms and identify the personas that make up these groups of people.
Advertising for luxury brands focuses on luxury and quality. When marketing your products and services, photographs are your best medium to evoke aspirational emotions that can connect with travelling to luxury destinations. Build a website that combines user experience, functionality, and style. As a luxury travel company, your website should be something classy. But don’t sacrifice user-friendliness when trying to create a stylish website. Aside from being visually stunning, your website should be highly functional and easy to use.
You can take advantage of Facebook ads to reach luxury travellers. These are some of the most effective forms of online advertising these days, thanks to the high level of targeting and segmentation that it’s capable of doing. For instance, you can set the ads to target retirees who are more likely to travel in comfort, luxury, and style. You can even go a step further by targeting people according to their job title and the type of places they usually go to.
4. Recruit Luxury Travel People
When opening a luxury travel business, you need to make sure that the people you will hire know the nature of your business and the kind of people you are trying to target. Therefore, you need to recruit people in the luxury travel segment. These are people who know how it is to travel in luxury.
During the interview process, it’s important to be transparent about the salary, working environment, and other things the candidate need to expect. Otherwise, you won’t be able to attract top candidates. You can also use the interview process to showcase the value of your company and engage the candidates.
5. Don’t Neglect SEO
Travel is a very competitive industry, so if your business is in the travel sector, establishing a digital footprint becomes increasingly important, especially in this day and age. Search engines play an important role in the overall success of some of the biggest players in the travel industry today. As a matter of fact, organic search contributes to more traffic for those websites that have successfully implemented SEO strategies.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is, no doubt, one of the most effective digital marketing strategies. The reason is that SEO is an inbound marketing technique. Search engine sites like Google strive hard to present users with only the most relevant information to their query. As a result, more and more users have relied on search engines to find products and services online.
So, how do you successfully implement SEO? First, you need to identify the keywords you are trying to target. Next, optimise your website to compete for that keyword. In SEO, such a process is called on-site optimisation. It is like telling search engines what your website is all about. Finally, you have to give search engines an idea that you are the most authoritative source of information for certain keywords through a process known as off-site optimisation.
