Was your last FAM tour a home run? Or a flop? Discover our secrets for amazing familiarization tour ROI
Hosting tour operators, meeting planners and travel influencers in person is a powerful way to win their business. But binging these kinds of VIPs on a group trip can be a lot of work for little reward — unless you do it right.
At The Group Travel Leader and Small Market Meetings, we have helped dozens of destinations host amazing FAM tours over the last decade. And today, we’re sharing our secrets to making your next FAM a smashing success.
Here are five things you must do right to get great returns on your FAM investments.
Planning It
You know your destination inside and out, so planning a FAM tour to highlight it should be easy, right? Maybe not.
There are a lot of stakeholders in your community who will want to influence your itinerary. But planning by committee is difficult and often counterproductive.
To plan a great FAM, you must stay focused on your guests and their needs. Avoid the temptation to plan jam-packed days or take detours to less-than-relevant stops to curry favor with influential locals.
A great FAM itinerary will leave your guests wanting more — and when they come back, they’ll bring groups with them.
Promoting It
You have planned the most amazing itinerary possible, but if you can’t reach the right guests, what good will it do you?
For many destinations, promoting a FAM opportunity is the most difficult part of the whole project. You may have a list of tour operators or meeting planners in your CRM, but it’s likely out of date or incomplete. Calling or emailing them all with invitations takes a lot of time, and the response rate likely won’t be what you hoped.
Without the right promotion, the group of attendees ends up small. Energy is low. And the returns fall short of expectations.
Fortunately, we can help solve that problem. When you partner with us to run an OnSite FAM, we promote your trip to thousands of America’s best travel planners. You’ll be swimming in solid leads before you know it.
Filling It
Quantity is not the same as quality. This is especially true of group travel planners — just because you can get a lot of them doesn’t mean they’ll be good ones.
One of the most important things you can do to make your FAM successful is to qualify applicants before allowing them to come. There’s a wide range of professionalism among tour and meeting planners, and having one rotten attendee can spoil the experience for the whole group.
Qualifying applicants is all about asking the right questions. Specific questions about their travel profile will show whether they are right for your destination. Open-ended questions, on the other hand, can reveal a lot about their personalities.
This is where our OnSite FAM program really shines. We’re experts at qualifying applicants (we can sniff out a pretender or diva a mile away) and can very often recommend top-tier candidates based on our personal relationships with them.
Hosting It
We won’t sugarcoat it — hosting a FAM can be one of the most stressful experiences in destination marketing. You’re managing guest’s arrivals, coordinating with hotels and restaurants, struggling to keep the group on time and scrambling to put out the inevitable fires that arise… all while trying to be cheery and friendly with the VIPs you worked so hard to bring.
In our experience, this is too much for one person to handle on their own. Successfully hosting a FAM is a team affair. You should ideally dedicate two or more staff members to joining the FAM group while they’re in town and have other backups ready to problem-solve behind the scenes.
That’s one of the best parts of partnering with us on your FAM. We send experienced staff members to join the trip and help make sure everything runs smoothly. We focus on logistics so you can focus on relationships.
Leveraging It
Your FAM trip has come and gone. You have spent thousands of dollars to showcase your area to a group of VIPs. But what comes next?
After a FAM, follow-up is crucial. You can’t sit back and hope the travel planners put arrange group trips on their own. You need to follow up, answer questions, make suggestions and keep your destination front and center in their minds.
When we run FAMs, we conduct detailed post-trip questionnaires — and send you all the results. We gather information on guests’ plans for return trips so you can meticulously track your ROI. And best of all, we write an eight-page feature article about the trip in the magazine of your choice, giving you invaluable exposure to thousands of other travel planners who weren’t on the trip.
Want to make your next FAM a home run? Reach out to our sales team to learn more about partnering on a FAM program for fewer hassles and better results.
