TourRadar, the Australian based aggregation platform designed solely for organised group tour operators, has launched a global search to find ‘The World’s Most Amazing Tour’. With the campaign comes the opportunity for Australian tour operators to sign up free of charge to trial its services for up to two months and have their own tours entered into the campaign.
TourRadar will combine statistics from the suite of online and mobile apps it offers to tour operators including Facebook, online reviews, wishlists, ‘liked’ tours and other social messages to give an unbiased result. The platform currently has 500+ tour operators worldwide signed up, with 141 based in Australia (including Intrepid Travel and Peregrine Adventures), and is looking to increase this number significantly with this latest campaign.
“This campaign is a way of showcasing our services to the industry, at the same time as collating some really interesting statistics from the global tour market which we can feed back to our customers,” commented Travis Pitman, co-founder and CEO of TourRadar.
“We want to show Australian operators how we can help them interact with their customers better online. Instead of reinventing the wheel they can tap into TourRadar's pre-built online and mobile apps for as little as $49 a month which will increase engagement, SEO footprint, loyalty and almost certainly revenues. So many operators are still not using social tools such as Facebook to the full advantage.”
The services which will be offered as part of their free trial represents TourRadar’s subscription packages and includes individual tour listings on www.tourradar.com itself as well Facebook apps such as ‘meet others’, for group travel pre and post departure discussions, tour reviews and product search all of which are deeply integrated to Facebook’s timeline and open graph.
“Operators should take advantage of this free sign up offer to be part of our campaign from the start when it launches on 6th August. We are not relying on a so called ‘expert panel’ or Oscar-like marketing spin to name a winner. The competition will be judged on actual statistics using an algorithm where size doesn’t matter where small and large tour companies are judged on a level playing field. The results will truly reflect what consumers think of the tour products themselves,” added Pittman.
TourRadar is currently scanning information with a combined global audience of 2 million Facebook fans and over 26,000 tours. Operators can sign up from now and throughout the duration of the campaign (which runs from 6th August and 5th September 2012) free of charge. The data from this period will be analysed from which the competition results will be judged.
Winners will be announced by the 10th September and the tour operator who runs the top voted tour will win a year’s worth of TourRadar’s social and mobile Apps, valued at nearly $17,000. Badges will also be awarded for 12 Regional and Specialist Top Tours categories including Africa / Asia / Oceania / Europe / North America / South America / Adventure / Cruising / Day / Luxury / Nature and Youth.
The campaign coincides with an extensive redesign of TourRadar's website to include improved usability, enhanced features, and the unique introduction of a Social Radar Feed. This shows real time updates of what tours are being discussed, compared, liked and reviewed.