Tripadvisor can put your tours in front of millions of travelers. Create or claim your listing, connect it to online booking software for instant reservations, and use guest reviews to boost credibility and sales. Great guides do more than lead tours, they remove friction. From mastering your storytelling to using online booking software for smooth check-ins, these 13 tips will help you deliver better experiences every time. Booking confirmation emails are one of your first chances to build trust with guests. These 10 examples show how online booking software helps you personalize, automate, and streamline the entire experience. TL;DR: TikTok drives bookings, not just buzz. Win by showcasing real experiences, leaning on UGC, and running Dynamic Travel Ads that turn scrolls into sales. Social media drives bookings, not just likes. Stand out by engaging, running smart campaigns, and making it easy for travelers to choose you. Online booking software keeps everything in one place from reservations and payments to guest communication, so you can avoid overbookings and focus on delivering great experiences. This guide explains how it works, what features to look for, and how to choose the right platform in 2025. Better service = happier guests. Cut lines, reduce chaos, and boost loyalty with smart tools like online booking software. Great branding goes beyond visuals. It’s the entire guest experience. These seven travel brands show how strong branding, can help you win attention, build loyalty, and grow your tour business. Great experiential marketing sparks excitement, but pairing it with online booking software can turn that buzz into bookings. These 10 examples show how creative activations, from pop-ups to VR, can inspire tour operators to connect with audiences and convert interest into sales. A good survey response rate in 2025 is ated follow-ups, better timing, and post-visit workflows. OTAs are still a valuable booking source even for operators prioritizing direct sales. The right online booking software helps you manage availability, sync inventory, and simplify operations across multiple marketplaces. Brand activations engage visitors uniquely. Online booking software can help scale these experiences by managing reservations, personalized messaging, and event capacity. Pop-up brand activations capture attention with unique experiences. Online booking software helps you manage bookings, control capacity, and deliver seamless events. Improving your ranking on TripAdvisor isn’t as simple as “more reviews, higher rankings”. The truth is much more nuanced. Tour and activity operators who understand TripAdvisor’s Popularity Ranking Algorithm will have more success on the platform, getting higher rankings and more bookings. On Xola University, we have published extensively about the importance of TripAdvisor, Facebook, and Google+ for your zip line business. But what do you do when it comes to Twitter? Twitter can be used as an effective tool to spread your brand’s awareness, 140 characters at a time. It turns out that there is very little reliable information regarding the zip line industry available online, so you could stand a lot to gain by helping fill this void. In this article, we will be giving you interesting facts about zip lines around the world that you can take and tailor for your specific tour. Every successful challenge course or zipline marketing plan covers three phases of marketing: attract, convert, and delight. Each phase requires a different set of skills and marketing tools that help turn strangers into visitors, visitors into customers, and customers into loyal promoters. Market research helps you better understand your potential customers and competitors, and is an important first step to figuring out how to start an escape room business. Here are seven resources you can use to improve your escape room marketing research. At Xola we crunched the numbers to help escape room startups and seasoned owners better understand revenue expectations and consumer behavior. According to our research, the average escape room in the United States has 3 games per location and generates... The escape room industry is well known for having an active, welcoming and vibrant business community. Here are 38 of the most popular escape room blogs, conferences, Facebook groups, and podcasts for current and aspiring owners. If you’re thinking about starting an escape room business, you need to decide how you will price your rooms. Here are the key elements to consider when setting prices and creating a pricing structure. If you want to be the smartest marketer in the room, you need a escape room marketing strategy. Discover the 3 simple steps to developing an escape room marketing strategy and to selling more escape room games. The first step in understanding how to start an escape room business is to determine if you’re ready. Opening an escape room business is hard work! But for the right kind of person it can be incredibly rewarding. We interviewed some of the most successful escape room owners and came up with a shortlist of 8 things to consider before deciding to open an escape room. With Xola’s integration with TripAdvisor Review Express, you can simplify, automate, and track the customer review process. Whether you run an escape room, a zip line challenge course, kayak rentals or anything in-between, we’re sharing five ways that digital waivers can not only protect you but also help you grow your business. High-quality customer reviews are essential for tour and activity operators on TripAdvisor. More reviews lead to a higher ranking and more bookings. There are 9 ways to get more high-quality customer reviews on TripAdvisor... In short, a unique value proposition (UVP) explains why consumers should book with you. It is arguably the most important consideration you will make when optimizing your website. Without a compelling reason to buy from you, there is nothing to optimize. Here are 2 simple ways to write a great value proposition... What is yield management, and how can escape rooms use it to generate more bookings at a higher profit margin. Using Xola’s Capacity Utilization Report, you can see how specific tours and listings are faring over time so that you can make informed data-driven decisions to maximize your company’s revenue (and profit margin!) In this post, we’ll outline eight strategies for optimizing your website to convert more visitors into paying customers. With Xola now supporting both Apple Pay and Google Pay, this is a simple way to increase the number of mobile bookings. In this post, we’ll talk about the advantages of using Apple Pay and Google Pay on your website. Introducing Powered by Xola - you can now get a modern website that is fully optimized with conversion science, mobile, and local SEO best practices. From abandoned booking recovery and Tripadvisor Review Express to gift certificates and custom conversion tracking, check out these seven Xola growth tools that you can use to sell more experiences and grow your business. The solution is XolaBot - our new automated marketing and sales assistant. XolaBot fully integrates into your website and influences the entire customer journey from pre-purchase and customer discovery to point of purchase and post-sale. Simply put, it allows you to generate more sales on autopilot. In this post, we’re diving deep into the psychology of pricing to understand why people buy, as well as sharing tactics you can use today to sell more experiences while increasing profitability. Working with influencers can be a powerful way to get the word out about your brand and share your story: The most efficient ways to increase online bookings on your challenge course or zipline website is to increase your website conversion rate. A higher conversion rate guarantees more bookings from zipline marketing efforts. It decreases the cost of getting new customers and can dramatically increase your booking revenue. The three main things to consider when establishing your escape room business are you name, your business entity, and your brand. A good name requires... There are two main ways to grow revenue when marketing for ziplines and challenge courses: (1) get more customers, and (2) get customers to spend more. The first is complex, and requires careful investment. But the second is simpler. Here are four easy ways to get started. Getting your website to rank on Google Search is an important part of any challenge course or zipline marketing plan. Here are five ways to increase your challenge course or zipline website’s ranking on Google and increase your online bookings. Getting your website to rank on TripAdvisor is an important part of any challenge course or zipline marketing plan. Here are X ways to increase your challenge course or zipline ranking on TripAdvisor and increase your online bookings. The secret to tripling your zipline or challenge course reviews on TripAdvisor and Yelp is to use a tool you use every day... your digital waivers. If you’re thinking about starting an escape room business, you will need to secure funding to afford the startup costs including property, construction, and marketing. Here are seven ways to fund your escape room startup. How competitive is the escape room industry? Is the market saturated? To answer these questions we compare the number of escape rooms in each state with US population estimates to understand the competitive landscape, state by state. There are two approaches to escape room marketing for corporate team building programs. These are “the inbound model” and “the outbound model.” The inbound model focuses on attracting interested groups to your website and converting them into paying customers. The outbound method is all about... A successful escape room team building program provides a great additional source of revenue from corporate bookings. But not everyone can run a corporate team building program at scale. It isn’t just a matter of good rooms and great escape room marketing. Here are the five tips for selling team building programs... On average, escape room owners can generate $19,825.78 per year in recovered bookings when they add an abandoned booking email to their escape room marketing plan. But that’s just an average. Some make less, and some make more. Here is the key to beating the average and getting more revenue from your abandoned booking emails. The average escape room can generate $19,825.78 per year in recovered bookings with an abandoned booking email. Here is everything you need to know about what abandoned bookings are and how to recover them without spamming your customers. When marketing for tours, the customer experience is the product. And bad products don’t sell. On the other hand, curating better experiences can boost your brand, increase revenue, and decrease tour, activity, or event marketing costs... The key to an effective Facebook advertising strategy is smarter targeting. In other words, if you promote your challenge course or zipline to the right people, you will get more engagement and bookings for a lower cost. Here are five ways zipline and challenge course operators can improve their Facebook Ad targeting. Recent changes to Facebook and other social networks have made challenge course and zipline marketing on social media more difficult. But the fundamentals have not changed. Here are three ways to get more bookings with social media. Gift card sales are an important part of any escape room marketing plan. They are an excellent way to promote new business, generate sales, and improve cash flow. We analyzed 2017 gift card sales and redemptions to help the escape room industry understand how they can better use gift cards to grow their business. Learn how the balance of online and back office bookings have shifted in the zipline and challenge course industries between 2015 and 2017, and what it means for marketers and managers. Includes original analysis from over three years of data and nearly $100M in bookings. Clear business goals create a target for you to aim at. Well constructed goals are observable and measurable, making it easy to understand if your challenge course or zipline marketing is working or not. Setting clear goals will also help define how you market your zipline or challenge course... Spending money is stressful. The payment page of your online booking system has a crucial impact on your online bookings. Anxiety levels are already high, and it’s important that your checkout does not add to that stress or frustration. Collecting more customer information through your tour and activity online booking system can help you enhance the customer experience, improve safety, and maintain legal compliance. However, asking for too much information can increase booking abandonment... Protect your customer’s payment information by using a secure, PCI compliant online booking software like Xola. Increase online bookings with visual trust signals that alleviates anxiety and reinforces trust during the online checkout payment process. The direction is clear: it’s more important than ever to focus on your challenge course or zipline website. Similar to the activities you offer, the quality and experience of your website will have a strong impact on your online success (and ultimately your bottom line). Here are 10 simple ways to improve your website and grow your online bookings. Facebook Ads are a crucial part of any escape room marketing plan. Here are 3 simple but powerful Facebook advertising strategies for escape room marketers. The ease of your checkout process is one of the most significant factors that increases your website conversion rates. But it's often the most neglected. In part, this is because booking software providers handle the design, not you. Yet few providers have taken significant steps to understand, and improve, the online checkout experience. Here are eight common checkout usability mistakes that most booking software providers make, which frustrate your site visitors and costs you lost revenue. Planning for a group is stressful. At such an important moment in the booking process, it’s important that your online checkout process doesn’t increases that stress. Here are the 3 rules you need to know to create a stress-free checkout experience... The quality of your homepage can make all the difference whether your website attracts new business or losses online bookings. Here are five simple steps you can take to improve your tour or activity website’s homepage, and create a great first impression. Your activity page is the point in the path to booking where consumers decide if they will make a purchase. Here are 5 ways to improve your activity page to get more bookings... Metrics that aren’t revenue-driven pull focus from the things that really grow your business. Here are 8 of our favorite revenue-driven Google Analytics metrics for tour & activity companies. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the scientifically rigorous process of increasing the percentage of website visits that result in a desired action. For tour and activity providers, this usually means... A great abandoned booking email helps you do four things: 1) help frustrated buyers, 2) win back comparison shoppers, 3) get feedback, and 4) avoid spam and delight readers. Here are the key elements to a great abandoned booking recovery email... With more data than ever before it’s easy to feel overwhelmed or base decisions on the wrong piece of data. At best, the tendency to track everything can cause “analysis paralysis”. At worse, paying attention to the wrong metrics can cost you money and convince you to do things that may be bad for business. Here's how to avoid analysis paralysis and grow your bookings with Google Analytics. Abandoned bookings cost online tour and activity companies hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. These 5 myths are preventing many businesses from recovering lost revenue and increasing online bookings. Abandoned bookings cause tour and activity operators to lose approximately 70% of their bookings. Here are 3 ways to recover the lost revenue... The America Outdoors Association's annual conference brings tour operators, outfitters, and more. See who's going, what to do, and what booths to visit in the exhibit hall (hint: Visit your friends from Xola Booking & Marketing Software in Booth 431!). You're up against some stiff competition in the escape room industry. There may only be a handful of escape rooms in your city now, but it won't be long before more imitators set up shop. Your business needs smart selling strategies that will help you rise to the top. These 39 marketing tips for escape room businesses will help you get there. Almost every escape room has a Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram account. Far fewer invest in email marketing to drive sales. And the ones that do are cashing in on a great opportunity, and you can too. Here's how. Your website is the welcome mat to your business. Sour your first impression with outdated designs and it'll cost you customers. Get 11 secrets to success in this Q&A with a web design pro! Xola is offering a 24 hour turnaround during the transition. Here is what the transfer from from Zerve to Xola will look like... Building an email list of people who have never purchased is hard. Luckily, email marketing professionals have been doing it for ages. Here’s how… We get it... email marketing isn't sexy. But it also happens to be the most profitable marketing method available. Almost every tour & activity operator company... Your unique value proposition, or UVP is a make or break part of your escape room's marketing strategy. Make your business stand out with these do's and don'ts. In your fast-paced world, you hardly have enough time to eat lunch, let alone run business analytics. This post will highlight the 8 fundamental statistics that you should focus on. In turn, you'll cut costs, boost your revenue, and overall, make your job easier. This how-to guide makes basic reporting easy for tour and activity businesses. Follow these Excel instructions and our video tutorial to uncover important information about your bookings, marketing, and operations. In preparation for our online workshop with Be a Better Guide, we interviewed Kelsey Tonner on some important questions tour operators should know about TripAdvisor. Read this Q&A for great TripAdvisor marketing tips and join us on March 22nd for the live webinar! There's no silver bullet when it comes to marketing. What your tour business needs is a solid marketing strategy that will make your efforts more effective and make it easier to adapt to changing consumer habits. Join Xola University and TrainingAid for a Live Session on strategic marketing for tour professionals. Despite its complexity, AdWords can be an important sales tool. By following these easy steps, you can extract more value out of your campaigns without depleting your budget. For ziplines and aerial adventure parks to succeed in an evolving and increasingly competitive industry, they need to stay ahead of the latest marketing trends. TripAdvisor and Google stats to help your business in 2016. This is the Editor’s cut of all the best content on Xola University: the business, marketing, and technology blog for tour and activity companies. While we explored many topics in 2015, a few themes really stand out: marketing strategies, data analysis, mobile bookings, and business tools for tour and activity companies. Tour and activity companies have a lot to offer Instagram's 400 million users. But before you jump on the bandwagon, take a moment to inspect the tips and stats for businesses. User generated content are photos, videos, posts, and reviews that the public publishes online. Like it or not, these types of media are changing the face of marketing. But with the right strategy, you can harness UGC to develop your brand. SEO can be a tricky subject for many tour and activity companies. With these helpful tips you can get more out of your marketing strategy and become #1 on Google in no time. With Thanksgiving less than a week away, all of us at Xola are feeling extra grateful for the wonderful companies that we serve year round. Get to know some of the amazing people behind these businesses and hear what they’re most thankful for in their jobs. Videos are in vogue, and if your tour looks good on camera, that's good news. Learn how to market your experience on camera and avoid these common video mistakes. The Xola team gives back! We visited the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital and the made dinner for the families at the Ronald McDonald House. Read more about our team bonding antics and the lessons we took away from this special volunteering experience. Want the biggest bang for your marketing buck? Take a hard look at your website. It’s the single-biggest influencer and revenue-generator out of all of your marketing efforts. Give potential customers the best first impression by following these website tips. Join Xola and the Association for Challenge Course Technology as we host a live session for challenge course and zip line companies interested in marketing best practices. Submit your questions via the chat or jump on-camera with the hosts! In the off-season, your #1 priority is filling your tours. Coupons can be a great tactic, but a costly one if you don't plan ahead. This infographic will guide you with the right questions to consider before your next promotion. Airbnb has profoundly shifted travelers' preferences for local, authentic experiences, and boutique tour operators are perfectly positioned to benefit from Airbnb's reach in large, urban markets. But despite this seamless union, Airbnb hasn't flourished as the activities aggregator that some had once predicted. What gives? I just got back from SAM's Summer Ops Conference and have one word to share with you: Growth. But not every part of the zip line and challenge course industry is growing at the same rate. Challenge courses and zip rides are booming, while zip line and canopy tours are increasing at a more modest rate. Read more to find out why. Instagram is one of the fastest growing social media platforms in the world, and the social network provides a great opportunity to spread your tour's brand. In recent weeks, Instagram has made it easier than ever to market your product on its social network. Xola University is here to help you learn how to get the most out of the photo and video sharing giant with our extensive guide. We all know mobile design is important for tour operators, what are the differences between mobile friendly, optimized, and responsive designs? This guide will help your business learn what's important--and what's not--when it comes to offering the best experience on a mobile device. Online reviews are the perfect way to grow your marketing presence on a budget. With an all-star tour, a little reminder, and some before-and-after measurements, you can transform reviews from an afterthought to a pillar of your marketing strategy. It's a marketer's job to get the most bang for her buck--but what about for her time invested? Tour operators need to be smart about their most valuable resource--time--when it comes to crafting their marketing strategies. Pedal tavern expert, Angie Gleason, analyzes the Minneapolis PedalPub incident from an industry level. What party bikes can learn from the Minneapolis example and what this means for businesses moving forward. Excitement is every marketer's favorite emotion. With your summer season about to open, every tour operator should try to catalyze their customers' natural excitement as much as possible with these easy tips. Are you worried what Groupon deals might do to your tour's online reputation? Are Groupon buyers harder to please than others? New data to help your company answer these questions and more about Groupon's impact on your tour business. Despite how central booking software is to saving time, growing your business, and delivering top-notch customer service, most tour operators tolerate bad systems. Settling for below-average software can cost your tour business dearly. Online booking allows you to streamline your business. But to take full advantage of reservation software, it's important to funnel as many sales as possible through your website. Boost your online sales and avoid low conversion rates with our 3 tips for tour operators. Despite all the customer data we can gather, there are some buyer profiles you can't read from analytics alone. Optimize your website and your online checkout to convert your website's visitors into paying customers. Don’t let you whole high season go by without addressing your Achilles heel. We’ve talked to tour operators from all over the country with different types of businesses to assemble the four things you need to know before the high season frenzy hits. 60% of zip lines aren't fully leveraging their Google+ profiles. Yet, Google+ is crucial to your social media marketing strategy. Find out how to improve your profile while Google+ is still a relatively new frontier. High season is almost here. Use these 3 questions to decide whether your new booking software will be ready in time for the rush. Look for companies that emphasize speed and strategy when it comes to customer success and software design. Have you been looking at your advertising budget the wrong way this whole time? Could deal sites be better for advertising than for making money? Zen wisdom from Xola's tour operators. Delivering outstanding customer service has always been at the core of Xola's philosophy. That's why we sent two employees down to Mount Hermon's zip line for dedicated on-site trainings. In less than 3 minutes, get up-to-date with the state of mobile bookings and design in the world of tours and activities. Grow your business by investing in a better mobile experience. A better mobile site is the next step to enhancing your tour or activity. Our top 3 tips for improving your mobile website will help you put smiles on your customers faces. If you care about your business's SEO, then you should care about Google+. Get the best Google+ marketing tips in just 3 minutes with this video. How are you different from your competitors? Put your unique value proposition at the center of your tour and activity business to boost sales and charm customers. Facebook tells you when your fans are online. Use this information to post more effectively and reach more people with each click. The best time to post is when you say it is. Everyone knows that TripAdvisor is important, but have you tried to figure out what makes your zipline successful? Here are our 8, helpful stats for ziplines on TripAdvisor. As zip lines grow, accidents have appeared in the news. Xola University has gathered original research to help you contextualize these accidents, and communicate your tour's safety measures more effectively. Don't forget to pack any of these essential items. Get the most out of ACCT with our complete guide for what to bring. See you in Palm Springs! Facebook can make your tour more efficient. No activity provider likes half-empty tours. When trying to fill last-minute spots, broadcast deals on social media. Facebook is quickly becoming one of the most important social media marketing platforms for all kinds of businesses. Find out how you can make your marketing budget stretch further with Facebook's new fan insights. What’s the one thing that stands between you and online customers? Your call-to-action, or CTA. If you want to grow your online business, start by putting your calls-to-action to the Xola test. Learn how to segment your data in Google Analytics to help isolate the factors you care about, while also adding nuance and depth to the tool's existing reports. See who made the top 10 on TripAdvisor's U.S. and global destinations. Tour providers working in TripAdvisor's "Destinations on the Rise" need to know how to leverage this publicity to their advantage and use TripAdvisor's platform to its fullest business potential.