10 QUESTIONS WITH Go Cotswolds

‘We’re a minibus tour company providing day tours of the Cotswolds (an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) from Stratford-upon-Avon and Moreton-in-Marsh on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. We also provide charter tours and private hire on request.’

‘As a keen traveller I’ve been on many tours around the world and I’d always been surprised that my local area, the Cotswolds, had a limited offering of affordable guided tours. For such a well-known and beautiful area, it’s a pretty difficult place to travel around if you don’t have your own vehicle, so for many years I talked about the idea of buying a minibus and doing guided tours – combining my knowledge for the local area with my passion for travel. So in 2013, I finally quit my job and – after travelling around Africa for a few months – decided to give it a go. We’ve now been doing tours for over 3 years!’

‘Rupert! We play cricket together and as someone that knows me, marketing and website design/development, it seemed the perfect fit for our requirements.’

‘Our website was already set up before we came to 5874. We’d built it ourselves and it was a bit clunky and not as user friendly as we wanted. Rupert and Lucy changed this by tweaking a few things to make it look and work more professionally, as well as making it a lot easier for us to change and update ourselves. The whole process was very simple and we accomplished most of it in a morning over a few coffees!’

‘As I mentioned above our initial requirements were to make it look more professional and be more user friendly. As well this we wanted someone on hand to help us with updates and support us if we happened to break something whilst updating the website – which tends to happen when I’m tinkering with the website!’

‘It’s the only way customers can book their tours directly through our website so it’s important that it’s simple to understand, secure and easy to use. Events Calendar Pro is just this – we’ve seen online bookings, through the website increase exponentially since we’ve introduced it.’

‘It’s on an as and when basis. I don’t do too much to the website aside from blog posts, basic tinkers with the text and uploading tickets, but if I break something, try and change something I don’t know how to, or need something new doing, I simply send an e-mail to Rupert & Lucy who are on hand to help out. In addition to that, Rupert and I will get together once or twice a year to see if there are any further improvements/additions we can make to the website going forward.’

‘As a marketing graduate this is an area of personal shame as I don’t use Google Analytics to keep a track of site visits! Something I’m hoping to master this winter to help work out where to focus our marketing spend for 2018. However, since the website has become more established we’ve had an increased volume of online bookings year on year. 79% of our day tour bookings this year have been through the Go Cotswolds website compared to 60% in 2016, 33% in 2015 and just 5% in 2014.’

‘Absolutely vital. I don’t know anyone who travels these days that doesn’t cross check their research through guidebooks/company websites with TripAdvisor. By having a high volume of good quality reviews it gives people the assurance they need to go ahead and book. It also helps customers to build a picture of what sort of tour you provide as well as the customer service they’re likely to receive should they make an enquiry. We’re pretty reliant on it!’

‘Just do it! If you don’t give it a go, you’ll never know.’