Are you struggling to get valuable feedback after your tours? Travel surveys are essential tools that can help you gather clear insights from your customers. Understanding what your customers want and need through these surveys will help you to improve their experiences and grow your business.
So we have gathered a list of 16 travel survey questions that will help you get clear customer insights so you can better enrich their experiences with your travel services.
Overall Customer Satisfaction
- 1. On a scale of 1 to 5, how happy were you with your [type of tour] experience?
- 2. How likely are you to recommend this [name of your tour] to a friend? (0-10 scale)
Tour Details
- 3. What was your favorite part of the [name of your tour]?
- 4. What did you find most interesting or surprising?
- 5. Was there anything that could have been better? If yes, please tell us more.
- 6. If your tour included hotel stays, how would you rate the room's cleanliness?
About Your Tour Guide
- 7. How would you rate the guide's knowledge and friendliness?
- 8. Did the guide explain everything clearly throughout the tour?
Tour Organization
- 9. Was it easy to find the meeting spot?
- 10. How would you rate the transportation during the tour?
- 11. Did the tour follow the schedule?
Booking and Communication
- 12. How did you hear about our tour?
- 13. How would you rate the service quality during the booking process?
- 14. How was your overall experience with our tour company?
Other Thoughts on the Travel Survey
- 15. What’s one thing you think was missing from the experience?
- 16. Do you have any other comments or suggestions for us?
So now there you have it. You may have more ideas about what to ask, depending on the type of tours and activities you offer. So feel free to make some tweaks and make these questions your own.
Now that you have the right travel survey questions, let’s talk more about how to ask them to maximize responses.
“How can I effectively ask my customers these tour survey questions?”
You might have tried sending out tour survey questionnaires to your customers before but received no reply. You’re not alone. Many factors contribute to customer satisfaction survey response rates (opens in a new tab).
It could be one or more of these possible factors:
- Design
- Timing
- Distribution Channel
Considering these factors, there are strategic ways to ask your customers the right way.
Keep it simple.
A study by Yonder about effective travel customer surveys says buttons within emails help customers respond to surveys 30-40% more often (opens in a new tab). That is a strikingly big difference from the 1-5% completion rate when the customer is redirected to an external site.
A mixture of buttons (multiple choice or ratings) makes a survey simpler to answer. Avoid overwhelming your customers with a long list of travel survey questions that would take them decades to answer. One way is to let them skip questions and avoid the ‘required’ fields.
The shorter, the better. So ask fewer but more insightful tour feedback questions. Choose questions from the list above (of course you can tweak them to your liking) that give you the enough information you need for smarter business decisions.
Make your customers feel welcome.
I couldn’t over-stress this principle enough but less is more. The faster and easier it takes for customers to finish, the more likely they are to respond.
Here's how you can make it less (hassle) but more (appealing for customers to participate):
- Make it sound easy and fast. You can say “If you have a minute or two, we’d love to hear how was your recent ‘food tour’.”
- State your purpose. Let customers know what you’ll use their feedback for. “We’re currently working on improving your experiences and your feedback is of great help to us!”
- Thank them. Everyone is busy and your customers are too. So make them feel valued and appreciated by sparing time to give you their thoughts. One way is to give them a discount coupon they can gift to others or they can use the next time they visit.
- Optimize for mobile. Most likely, your customers will read your feedback request on their mobile phone. So make sure it’s mobile-friendly.
And when I say less, I mean fewer words. Keep your email within 75 to 100 words. And you’ll probably get up to a 51% response rate, that is according to a Boomerang study (opens in a new tab).
Another tip by Constant Contact email software (opens in a new tab) is to not make it longer than 20 lines of text so you get a 16% more click-through rate.
Avoid sounding robotic, keep it human.
Speak to your customers with your brand personality. Avoid jargon and too formal expressions.
But of course, do not make it too casual that customers may not take your customer satisfaction survey questions seriously.
Ask at the right time.
Timing is everything. So when is the best time to ask? It depends on the field you’re working in.
For tours and activities, many find it effective to ask right after the tour because the experience is still fresh in their minds. For business travelers, it is crucial to consider their tight schedules and ask for feedback at a convenient time to gather their valuable insights.
But, don’t wait too long before you ask. Your customers may have had other things in mind that may make your post-tour feedback request uninteresting already.
Use the right channel.
Studies suggest that in-person surveys yield 57% (opens in a new tab) response rates. It is the highest among all channels.
But if you want to grow your online reviews, you need more than in-person responses.
You can choose between emails and sms. Interestingly, studies show (opens in a new tab) that SMS has higher open, response, and click-through rates compared to e-mail.
See these figures:
Open Rates
- SMS: Text messages are opened 98% of the time, so almost everyone sees them right away.
- Email: Emails are opened only about 20-22% of the time, meaning many go unread.
Response Rates
- SMS: Up to 45% of people respond to SMS messages, showing they engage with the content.
- Email: Email responses are much lower, around 6%.
Click-Through Rates (CTR)
- SMS: About 19% of people click on links in SMS messages, indicating strong interest.
- Email: Only about 3% of email recipients click on links, suggesting less engagement.
Whichever you may use, we highly suggest using the means of communication most of your customers prefer. You can try A/B tests and see which better works for you.
Gather more customer reviews and grow your online presence with TicketingHub
With TicketingHub, tour and activity operators can engage with their customers in both ways. They may prefer email or SMS, but either approach is effective.
With a TicketingHub account, you can set up and send automated message broadcasts and lead your customers to our customer review funnel tool.
This is what it looks like to a customer:
- Receives a text or email from you asking for their post-tour experience.
- Linked to your preferred platform. It could be your TripAdvisor review page, Google review, or a custom platform like SurveyMonkey or Yonder.
- Asked to rate their experience on a scale of 1 to 5. Leave a comment for a review.
- Then, done!
In as simple as that, you can gather and grow your online presence and use these customer insights to better understand your customer needs and preferences.
The best part of this review funnel is it filters the reviews that get online. If the review rating is 3 stars below, it goes straight to your TicketingHub inbox. From there, you can personally thank the customer and settle any issue he may have, privately. But if it is 4 to 5 stars, it goes straight online.
Meaning, that only great reviews appear on your website, Google, and your TripAdvisor page.
Disclaimer: This TicketingHub feature is best if you want to grow and manage online reviews. But if you want to gather more detailed post-tour feedback, sending requests through emails may be best. If you use SMS, it could be by leading them to a page where they can answer the tour feedback questions.
However, for cybersecurity concerns, allowing customers to answer a survey right within their emails is considered more secure. For this, you can use third-party apps like Yonder which also integrates with most reservation systems.
Conclusion
Using the right travel survey questions can help you gather important feedback and improve your services. You may or may not make use of all these 16 questions- you may handpick what fits your brand or business or you can use all of these to get detailed feedback from your customers.
So which of these travel survey questions will you use on your next tour?
And, don’t forget that these questions should be asked the right way.
- Ask at the right time
- Keep it simple and easy to answer
- Make your customers feel welcome
- Be human, make it personal
- Use the right channel
Why wait to grow your online reviews? Use TicketingHub's booking software to collect post-tour feedback and improve your travel survey process today! Get started for just 3.5% per booking on pay as you go.
