How to adapt your marketing to different seasons

Regardless of the nature of your tour business, destinations, or activities, you’re pretty much dependent on the nature of the seasons.  Every tour business around the world will have its high and low seasons throughout the year. The challenge is to have the right strategy in place for each season. Whether your business takes guests to the beach for surfing lessons or whale watching in summer, or offers ski lessons in winter, you will need a strategy for different seasons.   

Off-season preparations

This is the best time to prepare your marketing strategies for the high season. Since you will be spending less time providing your service or experience to guests, you will have time to focus on market research.  

Maximise your time by researching trends and finding ways to adapt to these trends for the coming season, especially with your marketing strategies.  

This is also a good opportunity to connect and partner with tour providers and online travel agents. Know what they’ll be doing to promote your business for the upcoming season.   

Pre-season promotions

This is when you will put your research and strategies into action. Apply your yield management strategy and improve your pricing strategy for the following season. Anticipate the changes in demand; you may need to offer discounts to attract more buzz and fill those seats or rooms during the low season. Similarly, you can increase the prices for the high season and take advantage of the high booking numbers.   

This is also the time to set up the campaigns and promos you’ve been planning for the past couple of weeks.  

Making the most out of the high season

This is the time when you can set your plans in motion and capitalise on the influx of guests. If you need to, you can always implement some promotions to generate more buzz around your business and attract more customers. Obviously, you need to make sure you’re only giving away what you can afford. At the end of the day, your goal is to make profit, so don’t offer discounts that are too steep for your wallet.  

Post-season assessment

Once the busy season is over and your business goes into another off-season, your job is not over (well, the job is never over when you’re running a business!) Use the post-season to test the waters; play with different prices and adjust accordingly.  

Evaluate your previous strategies and learn how to improve and better implement different management techniques. This is also a good time to try new promotions and generate hype for the upcoming season.