Going solo
When I was travelling down the Australian coast last year, I did so as a normal human being rather than a pampered travel journalist. One of the things that struck me was how difficult it can be to do anything when you’re on your own.
How many?
The classic example was in Mission Beach. I picked up a few leaflets for things that looked interesting, and tried booking on to them. The first question I was asked each time was: “How many of you are there?”
Answering, “just myself”, I’d then be met with a variation on what became a standard reply. They only operated with a minimum of two or four passengers, and couldn’t go ahead unless someone else booked as well.
South Africa tours
I was reminded of this on my recent trip to South Africa. In Durban, I was getting special journalist tummy tickles. The tours were going to run just for me, irrespective of whether anyone else booked. As it happened, I had Normal Human Being company on each trip.
Sergey’s single strife
On the trip up the Sani Pass into Lesotho (which is brilliant by the way), I was with Sergey, a slightly odd but well-meaning chap from Russia. He was travelling alone, and by the sounds of it, hadn’t done much despite having spent two weeks in and around Durban.
He’d constantly run into the same problem that I had in Australia: tours wouldn’t run just for him, and he didn’t know when anyone else was going to book. Essentially, he’d managed to get on to the Sani Pass trip because I was getting special treatment.
Hluhluwe game drive
On the drive up from Durban to Underberg, he mentioned that the one place he really wanted to go to was the Hluhluwe-Imfolozi game reserve. As it happened, I was going there the next day with the same company. Sergey asked the driver if he could book for then too, and had fully paid up by the time we got back. The tour company had done rather well, simply by running the trips for one person and then fitting in extra passengers later.
Travel agent insight
Back to Mission Beach. I ended up speaking to a travel agent while I was there, and she said that the boat trip that I had my eye on hadn’t run for a couple of weeks. A few people had come in asking about it, but there was never a big enough group to ensure a departure.
This is madness, surely? How could the boat trip operator being making any money? Surely it’s better to take the risk on running for one or two people rather than wait for four people to happen to book at the same time.
A solution?
Or, an even better idea, and one that tour operators should really be using if they want to take advantage of what must be a fairly large frustrated solo traveller market. Why not designate one day of the week where departures are guaranteed, even if only one person books?
Yes, there is a danger that only one person will book, but chances are that there will be more. Think about it – the tour operator puts “guaranteed departures on Sundays” on their website, and tells all the travel agents they work with that this is the day to push all the solo travellers towards.
If the travel agents can say to potential clients that the tour they want to go on will definitely depart on Sunday, they can book it straight in rather than going for the rigmarole of phoning up to see when the tour has got the right numbers.
Staggered departure days
And if your company runs more than one tour, stagger the guaranteed departure days. The boat cruise goes on Sunday, the cultural tour goes on Monday, the game drive goes on Tuesday (etc, etc). This means that if the solo traveller is pressed for time, the travel agent can say “unfortunately that one isn’t going until Thursday, but this one goes tomorrow if you’re interested”.
Repeat business
The other crucial factor, as Sergey so brilliantly demonstrated, is that the best way to get someone to book one of your tours is to get them on one of your other tours. Get two or three solo travellers on Tour A, get the guide to plug the other tours running that week, and there’s a very good chance that the singletons will band together and sign up for Tour B or Tour C.
Also, the more people that do the tours, whether in ones or twos or larger groups, the more people you have to spread the word about the tour.
Mindset change
This takes a mindset change from tour operators, however. A risk has to be taken on minimum numbers, and the approach has to be “great, we’ve got one – now let’s get some more” rather than “it’s only one – we’d be running at a loss”.
Any tour operators, travel agents or solo travellers care to share their thoughts? Leave a comment below.
Sounds dangerously like common sense to me David. As a traveller (solo or not) I will be far more inclined to book a ‘guaranteed departure’ than to sit and hope that a tour I book isn’t pulled at the last minute.
We took a hiking trip in Laos where the company immediately guaranteed the trip for the next day, even though we were two persons (would have done for one). Ok, we paid a 2 person price but we really wanted to do the tour and were prepared to pay the premium. So did we do? We went to the nearby backpackers’ cafe and persuaded others to join us. Result: 8 people on tour. We got 40% refund, while tour company made a tidy sum through incentivising us to go and sell their trip. Simple business sense.
At the very least you’d think they could post some kind of sign up sheet. But as a solo traveler I know all too well that we’re not popular!
I once was the only passenger on a 20-seat commuter plane, a feeder airline for one of the biggies. When I asked why they’d run a plane with just one passenger, they said they were under contract to the major airline and had to run it whether they had 0 passengers or 20. (They’d had no passengers on the leg before mine.) Luckily for me they had this policy or I would have missed the international flight I was catching out of Seattle.
But your idea about tour operators guaranteeing at least one departure a week, regardless of number of passengers, is a great one. I never ran into this problem when traveling before I got married, but that’s mainly because I avoided tours. I took a day tour only when I couldn’t get some place easily by public transportation.
Many bus operators in China go when the bus is full, regardless of any scheduled departure time. If the bus fills in 5 minutes, you leave early. If it takes an hour to fill a bus, then you leave in an hour. I remember one time in South China I made a day trip to a neighboring city. I was ready to go back, but the bus wasn’t full. The driver kept yelling to potential passengers they should ride with him because he had–gasp!–a foreigner. (This was in a city that didn’t get too many foreigners.) He was so afraid of losing his drawing card that he even escorted me to a bathroom a half block away and waited outside, then took me back to the bus. Guess foreigners weren’t that popular in that city as buses without foreigners filled quickly, and the one I was on didn’t.
I represent a tour operator and when we started out this was exactly our problem. until we set certain days with guarenteed departures. One or none, we’ll go. And certainly it’s far more frequently more than one than none. And in getting not only the ones and twos, but the 10s and 12s, when the phone rings, you just have to be able to say yes to customers.