Are you getting your share of tourism dollars?

According to a recent World Wide Worx report, over a third of small businesses still don't have a website. With millions of travel and tourism searches being made online every day, having a web presence is more vital than ever before. It's even more crucial to keep your business growing during the economic crisis, where businesses are competing for and counting every penny that is spent. But just how much time do people spend researching their holidays?

In a survey run out of the UK by Nielsen, it found that people who purchased a travel product online in the UK searched on average 55 times, visiting 26 sites, over 60 times, resulting in the buying of three travel products. In total, the average travel purchaser spent five hours researching their holiday, over a 67-day period. Furthermore, people do not follow a simple sequence of booking a flight, followed by finding accommodation. For example, of the people who ending up buying a flight online, most visited map sites, travel guides and hotel aggregators before finally deciding to buy a ticket.

Boosting your e-tourism presence online needn't be expensive, time consuming or require technical expertise.

Know your customers

Just knowing where your customers are coming from and what they're searching for online can be very helpful. According to Google's Insights for Search, a public and free tool that provides information about web search trends, the highest volume of people searching for travel options to South Africa over the last year are from the UK, Australia, Canada, the United States and India. Offering special deals to these countries may be one idea, another would be to promote your website in these countries. One way of doing this would be through keyword advertising tools like Google AdWords. Here, ads are displayed along with search results when someone searches Google using selected keywords and allows users to create adverts for their businesses online, quickly and simply.

(Image: Google Maps)

Looking locally, "self-catering accommodation" is the highest searched term over the last year in South Africa. The highest volume of holiday searches occur for accommodation and holidays in the Mpumalanga province. So, if you're a B&B, a tour operator or an enterprise that relies on tourists in Mpumalanga and you don't have an online presence, you're really missing out.

Make sure your website is interesting, visual - and looks great!

This may disappoint and frustrate a travel business, but know that people probably won't buy your travel product the first time they visit your site. Remember that the average person visits around 26 sites before making a purchase. Not only are they looking for the best holiday deal, but they are also consuming content related to their destination of choice, like travel guides and reviews. More than ever, it's important to make sure your website is interesting, visual and engaging. Think of it as your shop window, you have one chance to grab your customer's attention, so make it count.

There has been one other fundamental shift in behaviour that businesses need to consider. The rising importance of customer reviews, rating sites like TripAdvisor and the influence that social networks have on people's opinions cannot be ignored. A recent poll in the US showed that 45% of leisure travellers surveyed strongly agreed with the statement "I have made travel plans based on the reviews and experience of others," while almost half of all travellers used social networking sites to help them make decisions.

Encouraging your customers to leave positive reviews, and replying to these reviews, shows that you do care and are interested in their feedback.

With the prediction that global online travel bookings will grow twice as fast as the total market over the next two years, business owners would do well to heed these trends.