As a professional tour guide, you have communicated with your client back and forth. You have designed a perfect itinerary specially for your client. You have agreed on all the schedule and payments. Now it’s time of the tour day. Do not miss your client at the very beginning of the tour by being late for the start time. It will often annoy the client. And sometimes even affect the tour schedule. Here are some tips and reminders for you.

If your meeting place is at airport or cruise port, check with the flight/cruise arrival on the day. As a tour guide, you may have picked up clients for hundreds of times. But it’s recommended to check and make sure. Do not take it for granted. Flights may delay or cancel, or arrive early in some cases. Better not have the client wait for you, even though the flight arrives earlier. They have limited time in your city and prefer no waste. So it’s worth a quick call to confirm the arrival time. Same with cruise and other transportation meeting place.

In most cases you meet your client at their hotel lobby. So on OurExplorer, this is set as the default meeting place. How could you miss a client in a hotel lobby? Well, it may happen. Call the hotel to confirm your client’s reservation. Avoid going to a different hotel of the same brand. Clarify the meeting lobby with your client. In Shanghai, Grand Hyatt has a front desk on the 1st floor and lobby on the 54th floor. Shangri-la has two adjoining building thus two lobbies – just be careful of these potential points of confusion.

Sometimes the client would like to meet at a public place. As a tour guide, you need to make clear of the exact meeting point. It shall be with clear signs and away from the crowds. Otherwise, it’s hard for you to identify your clients, vice versa.

Thanks to the invention of mobile. If tour guides and clients have exchanged mobile numbers, it’s less possible that you miss each other. Even if you can’t dial internationally, short message may help. First impression makes a difference. So don’t be late, and start the tour without missing your clients.

In the news: Toyota Motors Sales USA Inc. has announced recently that they will launch a nationwide tour with a theme â??Highway to the Future: Mobile Hybrid Experienceâ? which aims to provide customers with the opportunity to personally experience automotive hybrid technology.

The tour has already kicked off January 11 this year at the San Jose international Auto Show and will continue to travel to more than 150 events throughout the country for the next 18 months. Consumers are to be given the chance to test Toyotaâ??s Hybrid Synergy Drive system and at the same time be educated on the hybrid technology through the various interactive educational exhibits and test drives.

According to Celeste Migliore, Toyotaâ??s National Manager for Advanced Technology Vehicles, “Most people have heard of hybrid technology and probably have a vague idea of how it works, but few have actually driven a hybrid and or taken an up-close look at its operation. This tour allows consumers to learn more about the technology behind this system and the benefits of hybrid vehicles.”

Toyota, maker of the high quality Toyota outer tie rod will also allow attendees the opportunity to test drive some of their hybrid vehicles such as the Prius, Camry Hybrid and Highlander. Aside from the test drives there will also be distinct interactive learning areas within the exhibit such as the following:

*”Alternative Fuels: Fueling the Future,” identifies the differences in the various types of alternative fuels and how they are produced.

*”Environment and Resources: Small Steps, Big Difference,” shows attendees what they can do to make a difference to the environment.

*”The Prius Driving Experience” simulates the current Hybrid Synergy Drive technology allowing visitors to interact with system while on screen instructions offer driving tips.

*”Hybrid Technology: Not All Hybrids are Created Equal” exhibit gives visitors a better understanding of the various hybrid technology options on the market and how hybrids benefit the consumer and the environment.

The tour will not only be educational but will also benefit the environment since Toyota will plant more than 50,000 trees as tribute to those who will join the tour and also in connection with the National Arbor Day Foundation. The trees will also help in offsetting the carbon footprint of the trucks transporting the tour while it goes around the country.

Toyota Motor Sales (TMS), U.S.A., Inc. is the marketing, sales, distribution and customer service arm of Toyota, Lexus and Scion in the United States, marketing products and services through a network of 1,427 Toyota, Lexus and Scion dealers in 49 states.

FANBRIDGE has teamed up with ARTISTDATA to launch a new Tour Calendar feature that allows musicians to sync their tour date data between the two sites.

The Tour Calendar feature unifies FanBridge’s email campaign creation platform with ArtistData’s automated tour date manager and social media synchronization tools. Tour dates that are entered into ArtistsData can now be synced with FanBridge’s Tour Calendar feature, enabling ArtistData users to take advantage of the direct-to-fan marketing tools offered by FanBridge without having to enter their tour date information multiple times.

In addition to the time savings, this unique feature also allows artists to automatically include all important show information in the footer of their FanBridge newsletters including dates, locations, and direct links to purchase tickets. Additionally, this feature is integrated with Google Maps to provide fans with easy to read maps and directions on how to get to a particular venue.

Other innovative benefits of the Tour Calendar feature include enabling fans to self opt into receiving reminders about future shows, along with full integration of tour information on FanBridge artists custom fan subdomains/landing pages.

FanBridge co-founder, Spencer Richardson notes, “We are very excited to be launching this highly demanded Tour Calendar feature, and look forward to working with a great company like ArtistData who is equally dedicated to providing tools that not only save artists time but that also empower artists to generate greater value from their music marketing initiatives.”

Brenden Mulligan, ArtistData founder and CEO, adds, “A lot of our artists love using FanBridge to manage their email lists and we’re thrilled to be able to make their lives one step easier. We look forward to continuing to work with FanBridge in new and exciting ways as we open up our system even more.

With the intention of helping artists increase ticket sales and fan awareness of upcoming shows and events, FanBridge indicates that much of the development of the new feature has been centered on ensuring that fans have consistent exposure to simple and clear calls to action across artists’ fan outreach.

About FANBRIDGE:

FanBridge, Inc. is the leading provider of fan relationship management technology designed to give bands the tools and resources need to easily build their email and mobile fan lists and create/send customizable and targeted campaigns and newsletters via email, mobile and social network channels. To find out more, please visit www.FanBridge.com.

About ARTISTDATA:

ArtistData is a leading provider of solutions designed to automate and centralize the process of updating tour date information across artist websites, social network profiles, concert databases, Twitter, official news feeds, iCal, local press, fan newsletters, and tour books. To find out more, please visit www.ArtistData.com.

Nowadays, moving a business from offline to online becomes a sort of good-style marketing among large and medium companies. If a company does not have at least a promo-website, that is considered to be either as oldie ignorance or as a scoped marketing. Indeed, the Internet sales are in the speedy reincarnation after the painful 2002 dotcom-crash. No doubt, doing business online becomes profitable and less-costly than selling stuff from offline shops or stocks.

Lets look what consequences this trend brings to the touristic sectors. The trend kicks first of all the so called tour operators, that organize and provide a complete tour packages including tickets, accommodation and excursions. In the old (no-Internet) days, that was a great offer for a traveler. Get one tour package that includes everything, without any calls and organization issues â?? that was great and easy. Therefore, we can see so many tour operators jumping from nowhere around us last decades.

However, with introduction of the internet-order-opportunities the tour operators are in danger. There are number of factors that lead a tourist to use the online-services instead of going to the tour operator office or website:

* Online booking services provide lower rates because they (a) have direct agreement with hotels, car rentals or airlines, (b) do not need to rent offline offices, and (c) they just have larger turnover.

* Normally, the international booking services (for instance for hotels – Booking, Hotels.com, OrangeSmileTours, HRS, Venere, TravelNow) have much larger amount of hotels and provide extensive choice for their clients.

* A client can control his travel arrangement right from his home computer, without going to the operator office and signing the package.

* The online reservations can be easily cancelled sometimes even 12 hours before check-in.

These beneficial factors actually turn more and more people towards the online services. In order not to be forgotten and abandoned, some tour operators already started looking at the ways to bring their business to the online. Their mobility in this aspect might play an important role in their survival. Future will show how effective the tour operators can be in the online business. Anyway, our prognosis concludes that in several years we probably will not notice the standard tour-operator-offices at our streets anymore.