From free books to virtual wine tours, this industry is showing us the Best Part of Travel. Here are seven good things we were happy to find in our newsfeeds.
Let’s be honest. For all of us in tours, activities and attractions, this whole travel lockdown stinks. But here are seven good things we were happy to find in our newsfeeds.
1) Lyon Wine Tastings is offering free virtual wine tasting happy hours via Zoom. Right now, we like the wine part, and the free part. Check it out here. Maybe there’s a way you can deliver what you do virtually, too?
2) Context Travel, a multi-destination walking tour company, launched Context Conversations, online travel seminars with its specialist guides. These are not free (and, as a business owner, I also like not free). It will be very interesting to see how these do.
3) Food tour operator Savor Seattle has set up a gofundme campaign to enable its guides to deliver food from the city’s Pike Place Market. Since it can’t bring guests there, it’s going to bring goodies to guests. Great way to repurpose a company’s assets in a time of crisis.
4) Chris Torres of Tourism Marketing Agency, is making his excellent compendium of tours and activities marketing, Lookers into Bookers, available to all of us for free. He was offering it for $10, which we thought was a great deal to begin with, given all the work he put into it. And now he’s giving away digital copies. I guess he’s also ridiculously passionate about the Best Part of Travel. Also keep an eye out for a summary guide from Chris soon on marketing amid coronavirus.
5) Seven industry experts are stepping up to offer one-on-one, free consulting help to tour and activity operators. It’s been assembled by Alex Bainbridge, one of our industry’s deepest thinkers (he also has a big heart). Learn more here. (And we’ve asked him to consider renaming the initiative.)
6) Murmurs of a travel rebound in China may offer a glimmer of hope that a return to travel may be possible elsewhere in the world before too long. It’s still early and tough to see through all the bad news we’re getting, but this will end.
7) You. All of you. The willingness of this community to support one another online and off, in bad times as well as good, continues to inspire us. And we’re going to continue to support you through this extraordinary time.
We’re in it together. We’ll get through it together.
Here’s a bonus item:
Tours and activities on Google are ad free (mostly). It’s been a long, long time since I’ve been able to do online searching without wading through too many ads. Frankly, it’s a little weird. It won’t last long. Try it.
Companies across our sector are providing resources to help operators during this difficult time. Here are three for starters. Let us know about more:
- FareHarbor blog
- Peek blog
- Rezdy Blog
- And of course the daily brief from Tourpreneur
