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You’re a marketer in one of the most competitive industries.
You may be tired of trying, over and over, to use the same marketing strategies that you read about online or learned about in school - but is that really going to move the needle?
We all know the big brands - Booking.com, American Airlines, The Points Guy, Royal Caribbean, Marriott, VRBO, and Hertz... but what about the emerging brands that have found their path to scale?
The Travel Marketing Podcast is about sitting down with successful marketing professionals in the travel, transportation, and tourism industry to learn what has worked for them, what they’ve learned along the way, and what new trends they’re noticing.
We are Propellic, and we’re on a mission to create more diversity in thought for the planet. We’re doing that by helping brands - specifically travel, transportation, and tourism brands - increase their reach through intelligent marketing that travels further.
This is the Travel Marketing Podcast, brought to you by Propellic, bringing you the news and insights and what's working and not working in today's competitive transportation and tourism landscape. From emerging brands to the most established professionals, these lessons of intelligent marketing will help your marketing plan travel further.
Brennen Bliss: Today I get the opportunity to interview Ushma Shah from Action Tour Guide, which is a forward thinking tour company that specializes in providing audio guided tours via a very user friendly app. The tours are innovative, they're a personal way to explore tourist attractions, historical sites, and cultural landmarks at someone's own pace.
And Action Tour Guides distinguishes itself by leveraging technology to enhance the traditional tour experience. It's more flexible, it's engaging, and it's accessible for a wide range of audience. Ushma Shah, she's the founder, she's a visionary entrepreneur with a passion for travel and technology.
She's got a background that marries expertise in both fields, and she's played a pivotal role in the company's development and success. I'm really excited to interview Ashma. Let's get started.
Well, Hey, I'm so excited to talk today. Thank you so much for joining me.
Ushma Shah: Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be on this with you.
Brennen Bliss: We love companies in the tourism activity space. I know right before we started recording this, we were just talking about her arrival. So I'm like super excited to dive in and share some of the things that are working for y'all with some of our marketing listeners, which is, I think we're like six or 7,000 downloads and just a couple of episodes that we've done, which is pretty awesome.
That's the first time I've actually looked at the analytics.
Ushma Shah: That's very exciting.
Brennen Bliss: It is. It's great for my, my big ego. It's already big enough. I actually don't think that number is not impressive. I think some other podcasters would hear that and say, that's like two people, but that's okay.
Ushma Shah: It's all a snowball effect, right?
Ushma Shah:I mean, that's the thing with Downloads and things like that.
Brennen Bliss: Yeah. We are here for the two people. So there you go.
So tell me, so Action Tour Guide is your company, Audio Guided Tour is not necessarily the traditional route. Tell me about the origin story.
Ushma Shah: Oh gosh. Well, that goes back pretty far as with, you know, most people always love to travel, but one thing that I think, one trip. That really made a big difference was actually a family trip that we had. It was my parents, myself and my brother, I don't know, probably 10 years ago at this point. And we'd gone to Peru and we were standing on top of Machu Picchu and we'd take, you know, a guided tour and a difference between what our guide was telling us and literally the group next to us, what their guide was telling them was, So that's , and we found ourselves sort of like listening to this other guide and kind of wishing we were on this other group tour, which was kind of insane because, you know, we booked very carefully when we booked somebody that had great reviews and things like that.
But so much of what we found very interesting, you know, the history engineering that went into Machu Picchu was missing from that story. And so, and it wasn't, I mean, that's not to say that we weren't standing there, like, completely in awe of this majestic place that we were looking at. We absolutely were.
But I think it really also helped that we ourselves had done a lot of research ahead of time and kind of knew a little bit about what we were already looking at.
And it was kind of like this little seed that sprouted because, you know, the first feeling that I had when I left there was that, you know, I hope that somebody else doesn't accidentally end up in this kind of position where at an amazing site, a once in a lifetime trip, and you feel like you're missing things or there are questions you don't even know that you're supposed to be asking because you just don't know, you know, that's something interesting that had happened here.
And so that was kind of the first time, you know, I said, Hey, I guess I like history, I like stories, I like fun storytelling, and I think other people do too. And, you know, is there something I can offer to other people who are also interested in the kinds of stories I'm interested in? And so that's kind of how our journey began.
We said, Hey, you know, let's, let's go see if someone's interested in the kinds of things we're interested in and we're going to explore no matter what happens. So like you said, you know, you know, if it's just two people who are interested in exploring with us, you know, great, come along for the ride, whether two people or 2,000, 20,000 whatever, 200, 000.
Brennen Bliss: I see you've got an Austin self guided tour. I'm definitely going to be giving that a try.
Ushma Shah: Yeah, we actually released that very recently. We were in Austin for a wedding and just driving around and we were like, that city is super cool. Like very cool.
Brennen Bliss: We just missed each other. Oh no. I actually also just had my wedding in Austin.
So maybe you were just crashing my wedding and I didn't know.
Ushma Shah: Yes. I was. It was just for the good gin and the dancing.
Brennen Bliss: I already, this early in the podcast, I'm getting us off track. That's my M.O.
So obviously this is the Travel Marketing Compass, so I'm going to ask some questions about marketing. So distribution, you clearly on Viator, I see the badge right on the front of your website.
Tell us about your distribution strategy, direct versus through partners, through OTAs. How does that work?
Ushma Shah: Yes. Well, our basic strategy is to say, hey, you know, go for everything. So, I've seen a lot of success with direct, a lot with OTAs, not all OTAs, I think you'll find, you know, are the same and partners, uh, partners as well.
We work very closely with several VCs and DMOs in, in different regions, especially if we have like a cluster of fours in one place. We find that's very effective to have a local partner, you know, because at that point, you know, you don't want to confuse the messaging too much. If you've got multiple wars, you know, in an area and if someone's visiting that area and let's say they're there for three days or they're there for a week, you know, it should be very easy to figure it out what, you know, what kind of package they should be getting.
And so that's where we find it very helpful to have local partners. Because they can help make that very clear.
Brennen Bliss: Yeah. And you don't have, I mean, you're, one of the benefits of doing audio is you don't have any costs of goods sold. Like your investment comes on producing the content, but you don't have to get a tour guide to service them if they book five minutes in advance.
Ushma Shah: Oh, yeah. No, that part is fantastic. It's immediate in that sense that you can book at the very last second and still have a fantastic time. And then that's not difficult for us to handle in any way. I don't ever like to downplay the, what you call, maintenance costs of a tour, like for Austin, for example, if we just sort of built it once and then sat back, you know, within like six months, the experience of the customer would be significantly degraded.
There are, there's construction, there are detours. There's something on the route that may be, you know, blocked for some reason or the other part of it might be, you know, under construction.
Brennen Bliss: So how do you manage that? Do you send someone to the destination to look at it and go on the tour?
Ushma Shah: Yeah, well, there's a couple of different things.
We do send somebody, but again, you know, oftentimes we'll have somebody local already who we've already worked with. Or we'll have local partners who will work with us to identify something that may have changed.
But yeah, I know this sounds kind of crazy, but we get alerts, like road alerts from different municipal agencies as well.
We stay on top of those things.
Brennen Bliss: And how many cities are you doing this in? Too many, like over 50 cities.
Ushma Shah: We have at this point over 150 tours.
Brennen Bliss: What is the title of the person? What is the name of a job title for somebody who monitors this?
Ushma Shah: Well, I'm happy to say it doesn't all fall to one person because that would be an incredibly boring job.
No, that work is just distributed again among, you know, a couple different teams.
Brennen Bliss: I envision Chat GPT being able to come up with a fantastic name for that role.
Ushma Shah: Yes. Oh my gosh. Chat GPT can come up with some very hilarious titles and things like that.
Brennen Bliss: Oh yeah. I've used it recently to name a product, but I'm thinking something along the lines of Traffic Monitoring Guru or something like that. Oh, I don't know.
So you're obviously, I mentioned, I saw the Viator tag on your website, and got recognition from them. What about direct to consumer direct bookings? How are you, what do you do to generate direct bookings?
Ushma Shah: Our website is a very powerful tool as our different social platform, as is, you know, directly the App Store and the Play Store themselves.
They have their own, just as there's SEO for the internet, there's ASO.
Brennen Bliss: ASO is what they call that, yeah.
Ushma Shah: Yeah, for the app stores. So those are both powerful platforms on their own. So yeah, that certainly, you know, took us some trial and error to figure out, but I'm happy to say that I think we've finally gotten to a place where it's working very, very well.
Like you said, we get a lot of inbound that way for direct sales.
Brennen Bliss: I mean, it looks like your content strategy is heavily focused on the middle of the funnel, like 17 mile drive, or where is Martha's Vineyard? What is Martha's Vineyard famous for? Middle of the top of funnel or where in New Orleans? What is your philosophy around SEO and how do you acquire customers via that channel?
Ushma Shah: It's a very powerful tool. I am curious to see what changes ChatGPT and AI will bring to this space. But as it is today, it's been extremely, extremely powerful for us. There used to be, pre COVID, there used to be a lot more content that we generated that talked about, you know, what even is self guided?
What is the idea that you can drive around on your own and hear an audio tour? That actually, post COVID, we actually feel like that hasn't been as necessary. And so we've been able to focus a lot more on these other questions that people have when they're planning to travel somewhere. And that's been fantastic because it just means that, you know, taking a tour like this that is very flexible, very easy to kind of DIY has become more the norm, certainly much more than it used to be.
Brennen Bliss: It'll be already over by the time this podcast is published, but Next week on the 22nd of February, I'm speaking at the Travel Trends AI Summit on the title is from Keywords to Conversations, AI's Impact on Travel Marketing. And if you are curious to hear our thoughts on how middle to top of funnel content is going to be impacted through chat, through generative AI over the future. I'm happy to grab you a ticket.
Ushma Shah: That sounds fantastic.
Brennen Bliss: Yeah, I'll get you a ticket for that.
Ushma Shah: Yes. Yeah, it's a big source of discussion for us internally every day actually.
Brennen Bliss: So any digital advertising, any paid media or just SEO?
Ushma Shah: Oh, of course. No, paid media as well.
Brennen Bliss: Social or Search?
Ushma Shah: Mostly Search. Social, we are still in, I think, what I would call the experimentation and exploration phase. For us, social Facebook in this market continues to be popular. The others, we have yet to figure out what is the right angle. Where do we need to put a lot of our focus.
Brennen Bliss: Are you capturing people via Facebook? Cause generally with Meta, Instagram, Facebook. It's a passive consumer, right? So we're looking at somebody who is scrolling through their feed and we're targeting them based on where they are or potential travel intention, depending on what targeting you have set up.
And if you're using a third party list, how do you see that work? So you talk, is there a specific type of person you target? Is there a specific segment?
Ushma Shah: Yeah, absolutely. So Facebook in general the age range there is, skews older. And so, and we've actually found that, you know, that people tend to think, Oh, technology, you know, self guided, it's app based, you know, this is for a younger crowd.
But we have not found that to be the case. We have found that the older folks, you know, equal, if not, you know, higher, you know, level of interest in experimenting and exploring on their own. Or at least they're very interested in that content when they travel somewhere. Sometimes the TikTok crowd right now is very young.
And so their purchasing power is lower, their ability to travel is more limited and their interest in what they're doing while they're traveling is also very different and not necessarily aligned with what our ethos is, which is very much based on storytelling. And so I think we've really found that the average, you know, Facebook user when they're traveling, they have the means to travel and they have the interest, you know, they have interests that align with ours when they are traveling.
And so, yeah, so that's one of the reasons I think Facebook succeeds where other socials haven't yet. But although I see that now and then in a month, we could find the secret sauce for some other platform. That's one of the great things that we found is that with a little bit of experimenting, sometimes it takes a little longer, but eventually you can figure it out.
Brennen Bliss: Yeah, because there's really not substantial search volume for audio tours or, I mean, like it's just, it's a, generally what we find is that type of search term is not as productive as a general tours term, but it's hard to target a tours term with an audio tour because the user intent doesn't 100 percent match.
I can see a passive social channel being a strong option in the fact that we don't have that much inbound opportunity otherwise. So when looking at marketing performance and looking at your effectiveness of ad spend of investment in content with SEO, technical SEO, link building, whatever you're investing in, How do you track success?
What are your key performance indicators for marketing?
Ushma Shah: Our two biggest ones are obviously ROI, but then conversion ratios. Um, so we put a lot of focus on that. It's much easier, especially on the app side, on the App Store and Play Store, for you to track at each step. What is your conversion ratio from one step to the next.
Brennen Bliss: What are the steps in your customer journey? Um, so first there's visibility search and then to convert that into somebody who has actually clicked on your app and is browsing through that page. This is pre-download. That in and of itself is a huge ratio to get right. And there's very little scope for, you know, what you can do.
You have to have a fantastic title, a really, really strong app icon. And then your app screenshots have to be very powerful and in very few words and in a very clear image convey what you do and why it's right for the customer. So that takes a lot of work to get right. But once you can get from that stage to get from that stage where they're looking at your app to where they're downloading, that's actually not as much of a leap. Because at that point, you've already captured somebody who is interested in downloading something and all you've done is convince them that you are the right thing to download or what they want to do. And then at that point, so the way we do it is the app is a free download and you get a demo of the tour.
And if you enjoy the demo, you can upgrade to the full version.
Brennen Bliss: What is the scope of the demo? Is it like the first two stops or?
Ushma Shah: Oh, no, no. I mean, it does typically include the first stop at least, but the demo is a very powerful tool. And so we don't just want to give something based on these first five.
So we pick and choose what we think, you know, a few pieces of content that a few stops, which have stories that speak to the whole very well. So they'll really get a sense of what the storytelling is going to be like. If they ask you to buy the full tour and go on this experience, I think something to get really right is to make sure that you're picking stops in your demo that will paint an accurate picture and not just first 5, first 10, whatever these are convenient to include.
That's not the way that we found.
Brennen Bliss: Yeah, it's a very interesting product strategy when you've got the ability to give a test without, like, this is not something a traditional tour can do, right? Try before you buy.
Ushma Shah: Exactly.
Brennen Bliss: What's the ratio between people who try it and convert into paying customers look like?
Ushma Shah: Our goal is always for it to be over 50%. Some tours exceed that very, very easily and it doesn't take a lot of work and for others, you know, it is always the constant process of, you know, tweaking, tweaking, tweaking to try and get to that stage. It also depends on the platform. There's a huge purchasing power difference between Apple users and Android users.
And so that's something we always try to balance. I mean, we would see a difference if we price differently for Apple and Android, you know, we don't really want to do that, that then there's a lot of confusion. Sometimes we'll get a husband and wife where one's got Apple, one's got Android, and that leads to other questions and things like that.
So, so yeah, getting the price right for the right customer and the right location. That's a balancing act.
Brennen Bliss: Sure.
Ushma Shah: And then, oftentimes, you know, we'll have a number of pours in a certain area. And so, figuring out how to price that package is also something that makes a big difference in that ratio.
Brennen Bliss: Is the pricing strategy that significantly varied across markets?
Ushma Shah: Not hugely. Android is our biggest one where we see the biggest difference. Otherwise, you know, between OTA and Apple and our website, you'll see that we don't find that there's a big difference in what people are willing to pay. But Android is the only one where folks want everything for free.
Brennen Bliss: Yeah, that's so interesting.
So you do a meaningful discount for Android users? We don't, we did try it and then we ran into some issues and I just think also it just doesn't make sense. If you look at us, It's a branding experience. It doesn't make sense to.
Brennen Bliss: I would imagine it does. And then if you look at the entire product portfolio of destinations, are those, is it generally flat across the entire portfolio of products that you have?
Ushma Shah: No. I mean, you'll see trends, you'll see that walking friends are typically anywhere between two and 5 less than your driving tour. You'll see that bundles, you know, sometimes there'll be seven tours in a bundle, and sometimes it would be 10 tours in a bundle. But those prices are a little bit stickier.
And so for the sake of our own sanity as well, we try to keep things, we try to have tiers. But then that's where it becomes interesting because then you will see that, okay, you know what? This particular tour is not really meeting its conversion ratio targets. It's fallen below 50%. You know, what can we do there?
And now you start playing with the price a little. And, you know, suddenly you find yourself, Oh, somehow I've hit the top of that bell curve, you know, and I figured it out.
Brennen Bliss: Okay. So scaling back into the strategies a little bit more, you mentioned social media early on. I know that you mentioned you're using Facebook ads.
Are you doing organic social as well?
Ushma Shah: We are doing organic social as well. Organic Facebook is, again, more successful. I did mention social early, but mostly, Because it's something that's always top of mind for us, because it's not something we have figured out yet. Facebook, we have figured out, but everything else we are still trying to figure, yeah, find that right balance.
Something we discuss every day.
Brennen Bliss: Believe it. I believe it. Social is hard, especially when you're a destination based business. Like I can see a DMO or a hotel doing social marketing. For their local audience, but even, and then it's like, that's not who they're trying to attract, right? They're trying to attract external people and it's just odd to think people are going to just follow a brand for no reason.
Like a brand that's in a different destination. Now, the great thing is you've got a multi destination. Do you have a good grasp on what lifetime rebooking value is? Do you get repeat customers generally?
Ushma Shah: We do. Yeah. That has been very powerful for us. And in fact, we really value those customers.
Oftentimes they will ask us and they'll say, Hey, no, next year I have these four trips planned. And I see that you don't have those tours, you know, are you planning on adding them? And a lot of times, even if we weren’t planning on it, we'll say, Hey, maybe we should, when we do, or maybe we had planned it, but we had planned our timeline in our timeline much later in the year.
And we'll pre cone it just because I think if someone comes back to us, it really means that they enjoyed that experience and they're going to keep using us wherever we are. And so if we can engage that loyalty with that loyalty and nurture it, and so much the better for us.
Brennen Bliss: That's the product driven strategy that typically works quite well. And in travel, I mean, there's a sense of a lot in travel that you build a good product and they will come. And sometimes that's true, and typically you need to add some strategic marketing, because generally the brand that wins is not going to be the brand that has the best product, but the brand that markets it best.
But building a poor product certainly does not result in success. The fact that you've got repeat customers and people reaching out to you and they're informing your roadmap, how much work, how much time does it take from inception of an idea for a specific destination to actually having a published live tour?
Ushma Shah: The fastest we've ever done is one month, but our typical is usually, I would say two months is our average.
Brennen Bliss: Got it. So that's not crazy. The production timeline.
Ushma Shah: No, no, it's not that bad. Yeah. And frankly, like we are every year, we have such ambitious plans. We want to add so many new tours everywhere.
Yeah. We also want to be very careful that every single thing that we put out is the same quality that someone has come to expect from us. And every time we have a new tour out there, that's also a tour that we want to make sure that we maintain. And so those are two things that we're always trying to balance with our desire to spread and tell more stories.
Brennen Bliss: It seems like an honest, incredible product. That's the reason I was so thrilled to have the opportunity to talk to you. Couple more questions and then I'll send you on your merry way and stop wasting your time here.
Ushma Shah: No, not at all. This is my favorite topic to discuss.
Brennen Bliss: So incredible. I guess when customer reviews is where this question is going, and you've got not just one platform, you don't just have Viator or TripAdvisor or GetYourGuide or Klook or wherever you're advertising.
You also have app stores. So you've got to diversify your review generation strategy pretty substantially. And I bet that makes it a little difficult. How do you go about generating customer reviews and what platforms do you prioritize?
Ushma Shah: For every single platform, that is actually the number one target.
In every platform that we have that improves our reviews and our ratings because we recognize, you know, in some platforms, it's just a lot, lot easier for a customer to leave a rating instead of a review, and there's not necessarily, you know, anything we can do about it. So we lean into that and we say, Hey, you know, even if we can't convert them into an actual review, our rating is still very powerful for SEO, ASO purposes or whatever else. And so for some platforms, that's our primary focus is to make sure that we maximize ratings and for others it's, yeah, it's reviews. OTA is one example of where you don't have a lot of control over-request reviews and things like that.
You have some control. You can message them and so on, but you have to be careful because the OTA platform is also messaging the customer. And you know, as a customer, you don't want like six messages hounding you for a review. And if you've done multiple things at a destination, that's just extremely, extremely annoying.
Brennen Bliss: Yeah, because if you've got the App Store request and the Viator request, and Viator requesting the Viator request.
Ushma Shah: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it is definitely tough, but it is also, you know, the single most important thing in our business, as you know, reviews are the backbone of what we do. And so there's really nothing more important than that.
Brennen Bliss: Fuel, of course, like, it's the fuel and travel. We see over 70 percent of bookings involve a review, a review analysis, or some sort of like, check the reviews. And so much as one negative review. If it's the first, second or third one on the list it can cause someone to not book or not purchase, which is terrifying to say the very least.
Ushma Shah: Yeah, absolutely.
Brennen Bliss: Well, thank you for hopping on with me today. Before we wrap up, I've got two questions. First one, is there anything else you think that marketers in travel specifically anybody doing online transactions in the tourism activity space to know about your strategy, about go to market, about anything that you've learned that you'd like to share.
Ushma Shah: The thing that has made the most difference for us over the last few years is recognizing that it doesn't help you to think of the customer as somebody who doesn't know anything. Um, actually it's very much the opposite. People know exactly what's going on, what they want. And what we have found is that if our goal is to show them that what we have is an extremely robust, extremely valuable product that will make their experience that much better. And that's the messaging that we have to focus on. It's no longer that age where someone doesn't know anything about where they're traveling to. Everyone pretty much knows, you know, why they're going somewhere and kind of top level what they want to do there. Our work in that sense is a little bit easier and a little bit harder because you have to dive right into talking about why you're the best experience, the best way for them to spend their time there, because again, they're spending time on you. They're not spending time on something else.
Brennen Bliss: It's tough with limited time. You got two days in a destination, spending three hours a bit as a commitment, right?
Ushma Shah: Absolutely. Yeah.
Brennen Bliss: Well, wonderful. Thank you so much. Where are you traveling next?
Ushma Shah: Back to New York, which will be exciting. But actually this weekend, we're doing a little trip within India. We're going to Chennai, which is very exciting because not only are there some, there's a lot of fantastic history there.
But just an hour from Chennai is this amazing site called Mahabalipuram, where you have these amazingly intricate, you know, rock murals that take up this entire, the entirety of the sort of island. And we're going to spend a whole day exploring that area. So I'm very excited. That's history and architecture that's completely new for me.
So I'm looking forward to that.
Brennen Bliss: That's incredible. It's so nice to be in a destination for two months so you can go and see areas nearby without it being impactful to your experience there. That's wonderful.
Ushma Shah: Yeah, that's nice. You really start to feel like you live here and you can do things that otherwise.
You know, like you said, with two days somewhere, you're not, you know, the Nalbali Puram is not on your list. But two months, definitely.
Brennen Bliss: Yeah. Travel is a pretty incredible piece of our lives. So thank you so much, Ushma, I appreciate it. And best of luck to you.
Ushma Shah: Thank you. Yes. This has been great. All right, take care.
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