Quality + relevant Marketing Advice With a Difference that sells tours

For small tour companies | curated by a Private Tour industry Expert.

Perhaps The Most Important US$899 you will ever spend on your business!

That’s right and a pretty snappy slogan! - Quality advice at an affordable price.

…. and you know what, sometimes you just need an Industry Expert in another country to do a quick but very detailed review of your business and US$899 is for a lot of companies, affordable, the benefits in terms of a potentially huge increase in bookings more than covers the modest fee I charge.

Jamie, 52 years living in Hong Kong, over 45 years business experience.

If you are an Owner | Operator of a small Tour Company then my simple but effective advice could save you years of expensive missteps

2,324 completed Private Tours and 6,000 guests served since 2011 - I am a very committed Owner | Operator | Guide with 11 years experience in building my Private Tour Business from scratch in the very competitive Hong Kong market, I do more tours than much larger companies with a team of guides! I focus very much on the human condition - the best advertising you can do is to give a fabulous tour every time. This is not a job for me, it is my life and I learn just as much from my failures as I do my successes.

I figure most small Tour Operators have a similar work ethic to me and that is a great but getting guests to book your tour is incredibly hard for start ups and small companies, I am extremely fortunate to have 45 + years experience in sales and marketing and running companies. Hong Kong is an International City (and according to the HK Tourism Board - Asia’s World City!) and up until the Covid 19 Pandemic we had huge numbers of English speaking visitors coming to Hong Kong and there was and still is a huge market for Private Tours, Group Tours, Walking Tours, City Tours, Food Tours and such, the success I have had in the Hong Kong market can be replicated in any large town or city that receives visitors no matter that they are there for business or pleasure or both!

I know what it is like to be involved in a start up, money and time are both in short supply - many of the excellent larger Tourism Marketing companies offer an overwhelming array of quality services covering Website Design, SEO Marketing, Content Management, Advertising, Market Analysis etc but the fees they charge can be totally out of reach for a start up or a small | medium sized company with a limited budget.

To give you a few examples, over the past 14 years I have on a regular basis looked at subcontracting these services for J3 Private Tours to experts - I was quoted US$5,000 for a simple website with ongoing recurring monthly fees for changes and updates by a company in Hong Kong, an SEO Company charged me US$100 per month for their service and some consultants I approached to do content management ( blogs and such ) wanted US$125 per hour! and a company I contacted to run a Social Media Campaign wanted to charge me US$80 per hour … so I did it all myself (.. that is a little white lie, our oldest son designs all my logo’s etc, he is a real expert at stuff like that and it was free)

My fee is a one off fee of US$899 with no hidden charges.

I got the idea and motivation to set up a Tour Business in early 2010 when I was repeatedly stopped by lost and disorientated tourists on the streets of Hong Kong and asked for directions which eventually led to me just taking them to where they needed to be if it was in walking distance! and then that led to detailed research and then I had the lightbulb moment, in essence it took me 7 months to get my first tour on April 8th 2011 and then it just exploded.

As a start up, my first real business promotion was in the first 3 months of 2011 and it was a leaflet - I distributed it by hand with the help of my brother in law, it was well over 5,000 heavy duty, quality leaflets put into the hands of likely looking tourists all over Hong Kong, we staked out Hotel Lobbies, the Airport Arrival Hall, known Tourist shops and places | sites where tourists were known to visit, it was a resounding failure, as far as I could tell I never got a single enquiry from the leaflets but it did make me realise that the secret to success was to get the guest interested in a tour during the planning stage of their trip in other words before they came to Hong Kong and therefore my website (which was under construction and very basic) was going to be what I call the golden key!. The point is that the leaflet itself was a failure but I did get to talk to an awful lot of tourists and many of them mentioned “if I had known you did tours a month ago I would have booked one” lesson learned

Tourism Marketing

Quality Sales and Marketing advice for small Tour Companies is scarce to say the least

Here are a few chestnuts that have been doing the rounds over the years

• The more you can present yourself as a specialised ‘one-stop shop’, the more useful your website will be

• An online presence and good design will lend credibility and engender trust amongst potential customers

• Keeping up with the new developments in tourism marketing is crucial

• Connect with customers on a deeper level through video

• Consider creating special package deals for groups.

• Take online bookings all year long

A lot of this advice is “free” but there is nothing to back up the comments such as detailed reports with statistics and real world case studies.

I do not work for a multinational company and never have, I am not like Tourism Marketing Agency, Be a Better Guide, Trip School or Tourism Tiger - recognised Industry Experts who do fabulous work and have excellent reputations, I am a recently retired Private Tour Guide working for myself with a wealth of ongoing and extensive knowledge and I want to help small companies who simply cannot afford big company fees, have a good look round my website it is designed to sell tours and I always strived to provide the best private tours in Hong Kong.

I have lived in Hong Kong for 52 years and have a background in Consulting with emphasis on Sales and Marketing and since 2010 I have been in the Private Tour business, starting from scratch and building a very successful business despite intense competition, in 2010 Hong Kong had roughly 2 companies offering a simple type of private tours and quite awful websites and none of the existing companies had an online price list so I had no idea what to charge, 2 companies has now grown to around 400+ companies in 2024 (listed on Tripadvisor Hong Kong) and we also have over 1,600 - 1,750 registered Travel Agents in Hong Kong many of whom offer local Hong Kong Tours to residents and visitors alike… and to this day I am still a one man company and proud of it …. and it goes without saying (sorry for the repetitive remarks) that I simply want to provide the very best private tour experience for my guests.

I am not University educated having left school at 16 but I am a big fan of common sense, hard work, expansive knowledge and simple to the point statistics - and using Google I have acquired more relevant knowledge that I need to run my business in Hong Kong than a hundred University Courses, when I talk with young people (who have the impression I am a luddite) they are amazed that I have been using Google search and helping people create websites and advising on sales and marketing for well over 20 years and I bought my first personal business computer in 1989 and had someone make me custom software - I am an information junkie and I know my way around Social Media.

I started my first job when I was 16 years old preferring to learn on the job so to speak and I have never regretted that decision one bit. I am still very much in the Private Tour business as a consultant - and due to Covid 19 I had plenty of spare time and frankly as I get older I had always planned to do less tours and more consulting and I have actively assisted other Private Tour Companies in Hong Kong in the past and on an ongoing basis.

One of my strengths is “plain talk aligned with common sense” my core service is actually very simple.

This is NOT me and I have NOT authored any books!, see below

I could tell you that I get deeply involved with you in analysing your..

• SEO Strategies and Management

• Brand Optimisation

• Building a Client Base and Prospect Conversion

• Writing a Successful Blog

• Profiling your Competitors

• Paid Advertising on Facebook and other Social Media sites such as Twitter, Instagram etc.

• Website Design including the “not as good as you think it is” Keyword Research and Optimisation

• and hundreds of other variables both real and imagined

…. all with the benefit of having a consulting contract and a dedicated team of experts on the job covering several months and a very hefty fee.

but I don’t nor have I produced a fabulous 400 page book of practical marketing advice for the Tourism sector, (but I wish I had!) if you want it, it is free and is called Lookers into Bookers by the Tourism Marketing Agency and in all honesty it is a brilliant document, you just have to take your hat off to these guys.

…… and yes, I consider that view to be a major USP for my own tours

I stick to the basics and keep it simple, a concept in this day and age that gets lost in the wacky world of Social Media, how on earth do you stand out on Facebook with over 1.7 billion users, Instagram with close to 1 billion users and Twitter with close to 350 million users and you think that is bad, there are currently over 6 billion indexed websites out there! and did I mention podcasts? there are over 850,000 active podcasts out there - it is all a little overwhelming…. if you are interested and have the time go to this website 367 Social Media Statistics it is simply mind boggling and it simply highlights the struggle to get noticed in the digital age.

If you are like me, researching Industry News is like oxygen I get 70+ emails a day from news and idea sources relating to Travel and Tourism, I also get many marketing emails every day from SEO companies and Website Companies that claim they can get me to No. 1 on Google within days, the sheer volume of information I get is overwhelming, one SEO company emails me every single day with between 5 and 10 tips for improving my SEO, that is a minimum of 35 “articles” a week on a subject that is very complex and that is just one company, there just isn’t the time nor do I have the inclination to read all these tips and act on them although I have given it a go over the years but again even I am overwhelmed by the amount of information out there.

Always in the back of my mind I ponder whether 2 million company owners are all following the same advice for SEO in which case it just all seems a bit pointless and there is there is the small issue of companies paying for ads to be ranked No. 1 in Google search.

The fact is I have been doing all of this myself since day 1 but I eschew fancy talk, organisational charts, baffling buzz words, zoom meetings and long, time wasting conference calls in favour of my simple tried and trusted method of analysing your website and using my own statistics and sales and marketing knowledge - I prepare a detailed report based on how I perceive your business with recommendations on how you may wish to make a raft of small but essential incremental improvements to make your business a long term success.

… and yes, I am quite aware that you probably think your business does not need any outside expert advice and your website is brilliant, I have learnt over the years that no matter how great you think you are there is always lots of smarter people who do it better! and the companies that succeed do so by doing hundreds of small things just a little bit better than the competition.

Review | Tourpreneur Approved Directory for Tour Operators May 2021

Worldwide Travel and Tourism Marketing with a difference

Excellence in Business Consulting | Private Tours | Private Experiences

J3 Consultants Hong Kong | J3 Private Tours Hong Kong

Email | jamie@j3consultantshongkong.com Email | jamie@j3tourshongkong.com

Phone - (+852) 90338226

WhatsApp - (+852) 65325013

Web | j3consultantshongkong.com + j3tourshongkong.com

Instagram | j3tourshk

The Stats page below is from my Flickr Image site, 169,000+ images uploaded and over 62 Million views

The importance of photography for promoting your business - I always recommend you join Flickr (as a Pro Member) and start building up your image portfolio of the places you do tours, just start now and add images daily, it does not require too much effort and the result is that I average over 15,000 - 35,000+ views every day - it is important that you give descriptions and titles for the images….. and yes, that is 62 million + views since I joined the site in 2012 but did not take it seriously until I became a pro member in 2015.

Tags

Tourism Marketing | Tourism Marketing Agency | Travel Marketing Agency | Travel and Tourism Marketing | Direct Marketing for Tours | Direct Tours Marketing | Marketing Direct Tours | Direct Marketing for Private Tours | Marketing Direct Tours & Attractions | Marketing for Tour Operators | Selling Tours | Tourism Marketing for Small Tour Operators | Selling Private Tours