Creating an elevated experience

Creating and developing your visitor experience, such as a tour, attraction, or accommodation, can be the fun part of starting a business.

Just like your business plan, creating your experience requires detailed planning and research.

Understanding your visitor

With people sharing their travel experiences online, visitors are more informed and seeking unique, authentic, and tailored experiences.

Before you create your visitor experience, it is important to know your ideal visitor. Instead of targeting everyone, focus on key visitor types or target markets to help your business to find your ideal visitor.

Visitors will have different needs and wants depending on:

What type of visitor they are
Who they are
Why they are travelling
How they are travelling

Visitor types

Free Independent Travellers (FITs) are couples, solo travellers or families, who travel with a flexible itinerary. Sometimes they pre-book activities and sometimes they explore a destination at their own pace.

Visitors can also travel as part of a group, known as Group Inclusive Travellers (GITs). Groups typically have everything pre-arranged, including flights, hotels, activities, meals and attractions according to a set itinerary.

Visitors have different reasons to travel such as a holiday (leisure travel), or to visit friends and relatives (VFR).

Education can also be a reason to travel, for study or work-related learning such as conferences and workshops.

Business trips and incentives (where companies reward their top-performing employees) are other reasons for travel.

Visitors may also have a special interest focus, for example architecture, birdwatching, events or golf.

It is also important to understand how visitors are travelling to your destination. Visitors might self-drive by car, or campervan, or arrive via coach, train, cruise or plane.

Depending on their budget, their choice of experiences will also vary. A high-yield visitor will seek quite different experiences to a budget conscious visitor.

A visitor can fit into more than one type. For example:

A family on a self-drive holiday seeking a flexible road-trip itinerary with family-friendly activities tailored for young children
A senior group exploring a special interest such as history, birdwatching, architecture or gardens
A young solo traveller visiting friends and family on a tight budget
An older couple on holiday with a high budget and seeking private, premium accommodation and experiences
A company arranging a conference and treating its’ top employees to high-quality experiences and stays as an incentive.

For most visitor economy businesses in NSW, visitors from around Australia, known as the domestic market, account for most of their bookings.

Within the domestic market there are a range of segments with their own preferences, spending habits, interests, travel patterns and demographics.

Destination NSW regularly produces statistics and research on destinations and market segments in the domestic market. Once you have a clear picture of who is visiting your business, it’s useful to look at who else you could be targeting.

The NSW visitor experiences: state of play research is designed to support businesses with 10 reports covering priority experience themes, including Aboriginal tourism, agritourism, aquatic and coastal, arts and culture, journeys, luxury and wellness, nature-based, outdoor activities, social impact tourism and urban tourism.

By using research, you can focus your efforts on the visitor types that align with your experience to meet their needs and make your marketing effective.

The visitor journey

Once you have identified your ideal visitor, review your experience, and assess how well-matched your experience is to their specific needs. Think about every stage and process of the experience from the visitor’s viewpoint:

Before arrival
Arrival
During the experience
Departure
Returning home.

How can you connect with your visitor at each stage from the planning phase before arrival when they are deciding on and booking your experience; to arrival and during the experience; and finally on departure and returning home.

Try to find ways to not only meet the needs of your ideal visitor but also exceed their expectations. Consider:

How will they find you?
What will be their first impression?
How will they book and pay?
Will they tell their friends and book again?
What will they remember the most from the experience?

For example, if you decide that older couples and solo visitors interested in nature-based experiences are your ideal visitors, you could provide the following touchpoints:

Before arrival: Showcase the wellness elements of your experience on your website.

Arrival: Provide a quiet location or moment for visitors to absorb their surroundings.

During the experience: Add nature journalling or a fresh local produce lunch.

Departure: Tell visitors that a portion of the experience price is donated to a local project.

Returning home: Keep visitors engaged with regular blogs or newsletters.

10 foundations of an elevated visitor experience

Discover the foundations that make up an elevated visitor experience and practical tips on how you can apply them to your own experience offering—whether you're just starting out or already established. Learn more here.