Should you show relevant travel offers on your itineraries? The answer is simple: yes and no 🙂
It all depends on who the itinerary was written for. If it’s for a specific client, you might not want to show specials and offers, as they may see something different from what you’ve already booked for them, and cost you a lot of time explaining why that offer isn’t actually as good as what you got them, or the dates don’t allow it, etc. etc.
If, on the other hand, it’s what we call a “marketing itinerary”, e.g. something you share on your blog or Facebook page, or link to from your website, then it’s a very good idea to show travel specials. In my experience, running travel lead generating websites since 2001, you need to show some sort of sample pricing for a resort, or you’ll get virtually no leads for that resort. (By the way, that’s another reason you ought to embed our free travel offers widget on your own site!)
There seem to be two reasons for this:
- people sometimes assume that if you don’t show a price, it must be expensive and/or overpriced
- people like to take advantage of special offers…everybody likes a deal!
Can you have it both ways? Of course you can!
First, edit your profile (click on My Profile), and select the suppliers you’re interested in showing special offers from (whenever you do want to show offers). You can select multiple suppliers by holding down the Ctrl key while you click the suppliers one by one with the mouse.
Now, within each itinerary you create, you can control whether or not offers show. You can even show offers for a while, then once the client books, turn the offers off…then turn them back on later, in case the client uses the Visual Itinerary to show friends where they went, where they stayed, what they did etc.
Select the itinerary and edit it as you would to add additional resorts, activities, etc. At the top of the page, you’ll see a checkbox that says Show travel offers. Check it (or un-check it), and click the Update button.
That’s all there is to it!