TourRadar hunts for world’s ‘most amazing tour’

Australian aggregation platform TourRadar, designed solely for group tour operators, is running a global search to find the world’s ‘most amazing tour’.

Australian aggregation platform TourRadar, designed solely for group tour operators, is running a global search to find the world’s ‘most amazing tour’.

With the campaign comes the opportunity for UK operators to sign up for a free-of-charge trial of its services for up to two months and have their own tours entered into the contest.

TourRadar will combine statistics from the suite of online and mobile apps it offers to operators including Facebook, online reviews, wishlists, ‘liked’ tours and other social messages to give an unbiased result.

The platform has more than 500 operators worldwide signed up, with 79 based in the UK including Contiki, Explore, Topdeck, Tucan Travel and Exodus.

It is looking to attract double the number with the competition.

Operators can sign up from now and throughout the duration of the campaign – which runs from August 6 and September 5 – free of charge. The data from this period will be analysed from which the competition results will be judged.

Winners will be announced by September 10 and the operator who runs the top-voted tour will win a year’s worth of TourRadar’s social and mobile apps, worth more than £10,000.

The campaign coincides with a redesign of TourRadar’s website to include improved usability, enhanced features, and a ‘social radar’ feed which shows real time updates of what tours are being discussed, compared, liked and reviewed.

Chief executive and co-founder Travis Pitman said: “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.

“We want to show UK 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 £30 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 the social network’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 August 6, said Pitman.

“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 and 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.”