How To Increase
Hawaii Family Sales

Sales Tips and Tactics
Travel retailers who are experts in selling family travel to Hawaii have accumulated a priceless understanding of the destination and the market. Here are a few practical insights from colleagues and marketing experts to help you increase your sales of family travel to Hawaii.

• Learn to strategically position your Web site. Type in “family travel specialist” on Google, a popular search engine, and you’ll find 552,000 responses — a daunting number of sites for any consumer to scroll through. One of the first agencies to pop up, Fun Time Family Travel in Concord, Calif., obviously has a distinct advantage in generating customer leads.

How did the agency get such a good position on Google? Though some search engines have you paying for prime placement, Jessica Marx, the agency’s owner/operator, took a different route. Her husband, Rick, who designed and maintains her Web site, “discovered some useful tutorials that explained how to get placed on Internet search engines,” he says. He recommends www.webdiner.com — a primer on how to build Web pages — as well as www.nightcats.com/promote.html.

From these tutorials, Rick Marx learned to check out “several other high-standing travel Web sites and select a few keywords that would identify and distinguish my wife’s site from the others,” he says. Also, when applying to a search engine, “when a title and/or description was requested, I used a consistent, short description for the Web site,” he says.

Rick Marx also discovered that placement on Google could be improved by using reciprocal linking, that is, adding links to other sites on Fun Time’s Web pages, and having other sites link back to its own Web site.

Also key to e-retailing, according to Jessica Marx: Never give away the farm.

“The resort locations listed on my Web site do not indicate the resort names,” she says. “This information is not revealed until clients are ready to book travel with me. I do this to maintain the propriety of the research I have done in finding these family-friendly resorts.”

• Add value with premiums. Some resorts provide a package of kids-oriented goodies at check-in; you might offer your own package of extras to create “a value-added product,” suggests Janet Granger-Happ, a Fairfield, Conn.-based marketing consultant.

Especially useful for East Coast agents, who have to sell Hawaii travelers on long flights: products that help alleviate the stress of traveling with children. Put several products — including toys or games — in a special travel bag of goodies for flying.

Granger-Happ
suggests that the goodies included are a well-known brand of family product.

Another great giveaway for families is a package of products for use at the destination. “In Hawaii, these might range from sunglasses to bathing accessories to snorkel equipment,” she says.

• Don’t forget the benefits of personalized service. Ric Rodman, director of marketing at Seattle-based travel retailer Hawaii Source, credits the agency’s Web site with “helping us pick up a tremendous amount of business from the East Coast.”

But, he adds, the site is deliberately set up without a booking engine, so the first contact between potential client and agent is by phone rather than
e-mail.

While “we do plenty of e-mailing later, we want to immediately make a personal connection and try to share our knowledge and service ethic,” he says. “Lots of people who book on line typically go to a site like Expedia first, where they’re not getting personal attention.”

His agency, a division of Seattle-based Travel Source Group American Express, wants to differentiate itself with the fact that “we can custom-design their trip, and our counselors know Hawaii like the back of their hands.”

• Know your market. “When I advise customers on family travel to Hawaii, my main concern is the age of their children,” according to Jessica Marx, of Fun Time Family Travel. In Marx’s experience, the destination is not ideal for families with very young children, but it is “a wonderful destination for families with kids age six and older,” she says.

“Parents are usually looking for some time away from their children, and so a good children’s program is very important to them,” Marx says.

“The family-friendly resorts I have researched offer this type of break for parents as well as combined activities where both parents and children can participate.”