7 WordPress Plugins to Improve Your TripAdvisor-Style Website
1. Instant Booking
If you’re running a business in travel and you’re looking for ways to make it easier and more convenient for your customers to book their accommodation and transport arrangements, then you might want to look at Instant Booking. With this plugin, creating an account is quick and straightforward. From there, you can set how you want payments handled (via your bank account or a special wallet) and whether you want email or text notifications about new bookings.
2. Custom Welcome Mat
Another great way to make your visitors feel special is to give them a custom welcome mat. With this plugin, you can create an area on your site where new subscribers can register for a free account. Once signed up, you can customize their welcome mat with a photo, background color, and text. You can also choose to have them subscribe to your email list or follow you on social media.
3. Lead Generation
Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation are buzzwords in digital marketing right now, but this area of marketing has been around for quite some time. What is inbound marketing? Well, according to HubSpot Blogs, inbound marketing is defined as “generating leads without selling a single advertisement. Instead, you build quality relationships with potential customers, gain their trust, and encourage them to buy your product or service.”
To put it simply, inbound marketing drives traffic to your website, but you don’t directly sell anything on the site. Instead, you educate your audience about your products and services through content that is useful, relevant, and engaging. This method of marketing is extremely effective because it focuses on what the customer wants, needs, and is looking for, rather than trying to push a product or service on them.
As for Marketing Automation, it involves using software to automate the collection of data about your target audiences and customers. You can use this data to send automated emails, schedule posts to social media, and track the results of your efforts.
4. Shopify Widgets
Shopify has some fantastic built-in widgets that can be added to your site to make it look more like a professional, travel blog. One such widget is the “Product Review” widget. This widget will display product reviews from Shopify stores that are directly relevant to the product being reviewed. For example, if you’re reviewing a hotel amenity, you might want to consider adding in some review links for restaurants nearby.
5. Event Calendars
For those of you who are running a business in travel and you’re looking to let your customers know about upcoming events, then you might want to consider adding an event calendar to your website. This plugin makes it easy for you to add upcoming events from a variety of organizations and groups, such as travel agencies and tour operators, sporting clubs and associations, and cultural groups.
As a business owner in travel, you’ll find that there are numerous events that you can promote and display on your calendar, from major sporting events to theatre shows, music festivals, and much more.
This plugin also allows you to customize the type of events that appear on your calendar. For example, you can choose to display arts festivals, ticketed events, or a combination of both. You can choose to display upcoming events from local businesses or organizations, as well as major brands.
6. Google Maps With Directions
If you’re looking to let your customers know how to get to your hotel from the road, you might want to consider adding Google Maps with directions to your website.
To do this, you must first sign up for a Google Maps account. After that, you can integrate Google Maps into your website by adding your hotel’s details to the Maps interface. You can choose whether to display the map with or without directions, and you can also offer directions from the map itself. When a user arrives at your hotel and sees the directions to the hotel, it will make the trip more convenient and likely to be used.
Google Maps with directions is a simple yet effective way to enhance the travel experience for your customers. It can also help users find your hotel from a variety of locations, especially if you’ve set up your hotel’s location and directions correctly on your Google Map. This is important since some people might use search engines to find venues and destinations that they’re not familiar with, especially if those venues and destinations are not well-known to them. In those cases, the directions from Google might not be the best directions to reach their goal, leading to unnecessary frustration on their part and probably a complaint or two to your customer service department.
7. WooCommerce Products
Last but not least, let’s not forget about all the wonderful products that you can sell on your website using the WooCommerce platform. This option allows you to sell anything from clothes to furniture to books to food to gifts to travel to…the list is endless. So, if you’re looking for a way to sell your products online, then WooCommerce is definitely something to consider.
WooCommerce is a popular option with WordPress users because of its intuitive design and ease of use. To get started, you must first log in to your WordPress dashboard and click on the WooCommerce icon at the top right of the page. From there, you can choose whether to display products that are physically located in your store or ones that are virtual. You can add some products from different vendors via the WooCommerce Market place.
The products that you choose to sell through WooCommerce will appear on your site just as any other product, but with a few extra features. For example, you can provide detailed product information (including pictures) and you can also set the prices for each product. You don’t have to use prices that are marked for each product, but you can if you wish. Finally, you can offer your customers the ability to leave a review about each product that they buy from your website.
At this point, you might be thinking that adding all these plugins to your site might overwhelm your customers, especially since some of them are free, while the others might cost you a pretty penny. The truth is, not all of these plugins are created equal. Some plugins, like Lead Generation and Event Calendars, are quite costly but are completely worth it, while Shopify Widgets and WooCommerce Products are completely free but require you to put in the time to learn how to use them effectively.
After you’ve added all these plugins to your WordPress site, you can start to see the benefits. You can optimize the user experience for your website and your customers can find what they need quickly and easily. Plus, you can start to see your efforts pay off and begin to gather useful data about your target audiences and potential customers. So, whether you’re looking to grow your business or just want to make your travel experience more convenient, you can use these plugins to bring your vision to life.