After the economic struggle of the last two years and with travel and tourism being one of the worst affected industries, we are only just beginning to see a rise from the ashes, just in time for British Tourism Week, which is from 15th – 21st March.

With summer fast approaching and consumers jumping back into holiday mode, now is the time to be communicating with your international audience, as they turn to the world wide web in search of the best package deals, flights, hotel bookings and car hire.

As frugal consumers (and let’s face it, who isn’t one these days?) from every region of the world start to look for the best deals, the UK, as the 6th most popular holiday destination worldwide, is  fast becoming a very popular prospect indeed. According to visitbritain.org, over 40 million visitors to the UK spend over £16 billion between them each year.

With the serious decline in the value of the pound there’s no reason why those figures can’t rise in a similar fashion. However, less people are in fact travelling to Britain – the number of people travelling to Britain (on inbound holiday or short-stay flights, at least) today is almost 2% less than this time last year. This was compounded, or perhaps caused, by an annual 4% drop in global tourism last year, which makes the market more competitive than ever.

To be Frank (sorry), the tourism industry could help itself with localization

Now, you might be led to believe that attracting new customers in the tourism industry has always involved investing in localization – but I wouldn’t be so sure that this is the case.

In fact, many online industry operators still only operate in a single language.

It’s crucial to speak to existing and potential customers in their own tongue. The Common Sense Advisory revealed that international customers are four times more likely to buy from a local language site.

At Applied Language Solutions, we focus heavily on supporting the tourism sector with localization services.

We have teams of specialist linguists covering a wide variety of languages who are both experienced in the industry, online marketing and, crucially, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

As well as offering quality localisation, delivering your messages into any language and country, we’ve added the “kill two birds with one stone” service, by adding localized SEO services to ensure more visitors are attracted to your offers in the first place.

With people worldwide warming to the idea of holidays and trips abroad, the time is right to localize your site and capture audiences that speak different languages.

Likewise, if you want to attract new visitors to your hotel, golf course or even your town (anywhere that a tourist might be interested in visiting) – get in touch and we can open your business up to new audiences straight away.