How to Attract Transnational Customers During the End-of-Year Holiday Season
Thailand has always been a destination for transnational tourists. In 2019, the estimated revenue from transnational tourists is about 2.04 trillion baht generated by about 39.8 million tourists. Furthermore, the Tourism Authority of Thailand plans to generate 2.22 trillion baht from transnational tourists in 2020. Naturally, eating is one of the main activities attracting tourist spending, so restaurant businesses have been given a great opportunity to make a lot of money from tourists. What do you need to do, though, to attract tourists to your restaurant? We recommend some techniques below.
In attracting transnational customers to your restaurant, the principles you apply are not really different from those used to attract Thai customers to your restaurant. So, in addition to product quality and high service standards, adding stories to your restaurant and products is essential. Regardless of the nationality, transnational tourists often pay attention to background stories about things that interest them. If your restaurant offers interesting stories like those about the chef’s awards, media, the restaurant’s history, and tales of unique menu items worthy of sharing accompanied by great plate decorations are sure to effectively attract customers.
However, none of that will produce any results if you don’t make your restaurant known among tourists! As a result, it is vital that you market your restaurant in channels popularly used by tourists to make their searches and review eating and visiting places. This is because marketing on Facebook and Google alone might not be effective for transnational tourists. With that said, the four popular channels tourists use to review and search for eating places worldwide where restaurant owners want to increase their restaurants’ visibility to tourists are as follows:
- TripAdvisor
This is a tourism website and application used by as many as 260 million registered users each month. It also offers over 125 million reviews of restaurants and hotels, most of which are restaurants, followed by accommodations. TripAdvisor is used by large numbers of service users worldwide. With TripAdvisor’s ability to fully meet the needs of tourists in terms of places to visit and eat, TripAdvisor is a great channel for promoting your restaurant among tourists.
There are two ways to promote your restaurant on TripAdvisor. You can register for membership on its website to request to enter your restaurant’s information on TripAdvisor. Before doing that, though, you need to go to th.tripadvisor.com/Owners to check whether or not tourists have previously reviewed your restaurant. Type your restaurant’s name into the search field. If your restaurant’s name appears, then tourists have already reviewed your restaurant on TripAdvisor. What you then need to do is claim your business rights to confirm that you are associated with the service venue. However, if you can’t find your restaurant’s name, you can send a request to enter your restaurant’s information or ask friends who are already members of TripAdvisor to review your restaurant. That’s all you need to do to be able to use the Owners mode to promote your restaurant among tourists worldwide.
View TripAdvisor’s registration and usage details at: https://th.tripadvisor.com/Owners
- Dianping
This is the leading application Chinese people use worldwide to find places to eat, visit and stay. It includes lots of department stores, entertainment venues and service providers. If you want to attract Chinese customers, Dianping is the number-one choice to make yourself known among Chinese tourists.
Some Chinese language skills might be needed in using this channel. However, the service usage is similar to TripAdvisor. Basically, you need to register membership before you can promote your restaurant. Otherwise, you need somebody who’s already a member of Dianping to write reviews for you.
View Dianping’s registration and usage details at: http://www.dianping.com/
- C-trip
As another popular website and application for Chinese tourists, this channel provides a way to organize every stage of every trip, whether accommodation reservation, plane ticket reservation or various deals. Over five million Chinese tourists in Thailand currently use C-trip’s services annually, and this number is continuously increasing. However, the Chinese are not the only people using this channel. Lots of people of other nationalities use C-trip because C-trip supports up to 17 languages, including Thai. Therefore, it is a very interesting communication channel for attracting transnational tourists, particularly Chinese tourists.
View C-trip’s registration and usage details at: https://th.trip.com/?locale=th-TH
- Baidu: This is China’s largest search engine platform. Over 800 million people use it every month. So, if you want to attract Chinese customers, Baidu is a key channel for your PR efforts. Baidu’s marketing methods are similar to Google’s. In other words, you buy ads so your restaurant will appear on Baidu’s search engine. However, due to various limitations and prohibitions imposed by the Chinese government concerning Baidu’s advertisements of transnational businesses, it is very difficult for entrepreneurs to do this themselves. The best solution is to use a digital marketing agency permitted to advertise on Baidu.
Another channel that has long been popular and is still effective is making official deals with tourism companies, so they include your restaurant in their travel itineraries. In doing so, you pay a per-capita percentage to the tourism company. However, this method guarantees that you will definitely get people from tour groups, and clear scheduling also makes it possible for you to plan your restaurant’s work management.
Thailand’s tourism industry has been part of the plans for generating revenue by every administration. As a result, related businesses such as restaurant businesses directly gain from the industry. Transnational tourists are another group of customers that restaurants should not overlook, particularly restaurants located in tourist destinations.
