Want to know what your client really thought about their trip? It can be tough to gauge someone’s true opinions, but surveying your clients can crack that code to help you gain valuable feedback that you can leverage to improve their experience — and your business’ success.
Surveying takes time, and it may not be as fun as some of the other parts of the job. But experts insist it’s crucial to your business’ progress — helping you retain current clients and find new ones.
“Our growth is because of repeats and referrals,” said Don Capparella, CEO and founder of Quality Travel Solutions. “It’s so much easier to retain an existing client than to go out and find a new one.”
It can be easy to fall into the trap of assuming you know what a client thinks, but it’s pivotal to build a relationship and truly hear from the client.
“In order to grow our business, we need to personally step outside of our own comfort zone and hear the voice of our clients,” Capparella said. “We need to truly understand what their needs and their travel motivators are.”
Whether you’re new to surveying or you want to hone your existing surveying prowess, consider this a step-by-step, how-to guide with advice from the pros.
Building Your Tool Kit
First, decide what survey medium works for you.
For Capparella, online surveying through Jotform makes the most sense for his business. It’s one of many online platforms (SurveyMonkey is another popular option) that allows advisors to customize questions, send a link to clients and easily interpret the data. If a client prefers to talk things out, he’ll happily jump on a phone call, or preferably a Zoom meeting, so they can speak face to face.
He’ll also occasionally post a poll on Facebook to ask about destinations of interest. But, he cautions, that’s not always effective, as Facebook followers may never turn into clients.
On the other hand, Angela Hughes, owner of Trips & Ships Luxury Travel, does all her surveying by phone — through text or call. This method offers her clients a personal touchpoint to help build a relationship, which she advises is a two-way street. If a customer has been difficult to work with or bad with communication, she may opt not to survey that person.
When talking with a client, she doesn’t even call it “surveying” per se. Instead, she thinks of it as a post-trip conversation. Plus, this method allows her to directly upsell or cross-sell.
“I want new advisors and old advisors to think about continually asking for feedback and crafting those questions throughout,” she said, emphasizing the need for constant feedback. “There are so many missed opportunities in cross-selling and upselling when you’re just sending out the package, then you’re getting final payment, and then you’re just sending out the brochures.”
When To Survey
As for when to survey, both experts share a similar philosophy of following up to seek feedback after the client returns home.
Hughes never reaches out for feedback during a trip, saying it can open a can of worms. Instead, she recommends waiting two to three weeks after the client has returned to contact them. “You want feedback when someone’s rested,” she said. “The memory becomes sweeter for people.”
Even if they had a negative experience, they’ll now have had time to process it and get some rest and distance from it.
What To Ask
Here’s where you can really customize the experience.
Hughes goes for an open-ended approach in her text messages to clients, often drawing on what clients have posted on social media during their trip. She’ll say something like, “I followed your trip. It looks like it went really well. How are you doing?”
She’ll also use this opportunity to talk through pain points, when needed. She makes sure to listen carefully and identify problems, ensuring clients feel heard. For example, if a client faced constant rainy days on a river cruise, she might suggest an ocean trip for next time.
For his online surveys, Capparella suggests a comprehensive post-travel survey with several questions:
- Did you feel that you got the best value?
- How was your experience with your advisor?
- What was the ease of the booking process?
- What was the quality of your lodging?
- What was your overall experience?
- Would you refer our company to other people you know?
- Would you book your travel with our company again?
Some questions ask travelers to type out an answer, while others ask them to rate their answer on a scale from one to five.
In addition to post-travel surveys, he recommends sending more general surveys to your full database several times a year. These surveys ask different questions:
- What are some destinations that you’re thinking of visiting?
- Have you been anywhere recently that you’ve loved?
- Here are 10 destinations; which of these have you thought of visiting?
These questions seek to gather information on what’s hot, what’s trending and what’s on the radar for potential customers. Then, he’ll train his team based on those destinations of interest and market to clients about those places.
Improving Survey Participation
No matter which method you choose, and which questions you ask, some people will never respond. Both experts accept this as a fact of the business. There are ways you can encourage participation though.
For Hughes, it always comes back to relationship building. If you’ve built a relationship with a client and made sure to ask them questions throughout the booking process, they’re more likely to respond when you text them to follow up.
If you’re sending surveys via email, Capparella recommends offering a variety. If it looks like the same survey every three months, recipients aren’t likely to participate.
He also suggests using creative subject lines to spur people to open the email in the first place. In the past, his team sent surveys with the basic subject line “Post-trip survey.” That only garnered about a 15% return rate. Now, he’s changed that to read something like “Ready for your next trip? We need your help” or “We value you and we want the best, please open.” Those subject lines bring in about a 60% response rate, a massive increase by tweaking a few words.
Capparella has found another way to increase survey participation: Make the name field optional. It provides a level of comfort for clients who may prefer to reply anonymously.
How To Interpret Results
Online surveying tools typically offer the ability to interpret data within the website, as well as to export the details into a spreadsheet. Capparella exports all survey responses to Excel, then reviews it, makes notes in the document and sends the spreadsheet to his leadership team for review and feedback. Every month, the leadership team meets, and those survey results help inform their marketing and communications plans. Survey results help them decide which suppliers to use, which destinations to focus on and what training to give the team. After that’s complete, they share important details with the clients.
“Always circle back. We have to let them know that their voices [are] being heard,” he said. “We’ll reach out and say, ‘Here are some outcomes and results of the quarterly survey we did about upcoming destinations, and this is what we're finding.’”
Meanwhile, Hughes opts for a more open-ended option: She’s looking for verbal data that indicates client satisfaction. One key way to answer that question is to see if the client recommends your business.
“Now [that] you’ve secured the business, you want to make sure that person becomes a marketer for you,” she said. “When they’re willing to recommend someone to you … that’s when you know they’ve been successful in the marketing funnel.”
The Bottom Line
No matter what kind of travel you’re selling — from luxury adventures and safaris to honeymoons and leisure travel — surveying can help you build relationships with your clients that will keep them coming back and referring friends to your business. Whether you choose to text, call, email or video call your clients, these experts agree it’s worth your time to ask the tough questions and truly listen to your clients’ feedback.
Originally appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of The Compass magazine
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