Free online business tools for tourism companies

There are some extremely useful online business tools, services, and applications for all tourism businesses. This article is built especially for tourism businesses in Western countries, in other countries some practices and tools could be different. I have gathered various tools together that could be useful especially for tourism and hospitality businesses and destinations.

Online forums

All tourism businesses should claim their TripAdvisor listing: https://www.tripadvisor.com/Owners

All tourism businesses should also start their own account on Google My Business: https://www.google.com/business/

Set up an alert for your business whenever it (or something else that interests you) is mentioned online: https://www.google.com/alerts

Website

Websites are super easy to do with WordPress or Wix for example. It is just so important to have modern-looking, responsive websites for every business with plenty of multimedia material to increase consumer trust and interest in the company.

Google analytics should be implemented on the website to track traffic: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008080?hl=en

Google Data Studio helps to get insights and use the data a company collects: https://datastudio.google.com/

Google tag manager can be used optimize marketing and analytics on the website: https://support.google.com/tagmanager/answer/6102821?hl=en

Online chat to your website: https://www.zopim.com or https://app.crisp.chat

Is your site mobile ready? Test it at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights and  https://ready.mobi/

Analyse and get suggestions to improve SEO, usability, performance, social aspects and security of your website: https://www.seoptimer.com and http://nibbler.silktide.com/

Search Engine Marketing

Keyword planning tool in Google Adwords should be utilized to start building search engine presence: https://adwords.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/ 

Learn Search Engine Optimization: https://moz.com/

Social media and content marketing

Facebook and Instagram pages should be opened and used: https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/set-up-facebook-page and https://business.instagram.com/getting-started

Buffer helps to manage various social media accounts: https://buffer.com

Statusbrew also supports social media management: https://statusbrew.com/

Likealyzer helps to develop Facebook marketing: https://likealyzer.com/

For content marketing, you can get free pictures from Unsplash.com

Canva helps to design visually more appealing content: https://www.canva.com/

Tweetdeck to help with your Twitter feeds and content: https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/

Hashtag insights: http://hashtagify.me/

Information and research

Similar Web and Alexa provide information about the website.

SurveyGizmo or SurveyMonkey could help the company to survey its customers: https://www.surveygizmo.com/ and surveymonkey.com

Know what people are searching for and what are the trends with different keywords: https://trends.google.com/trends/ 

E-mail marketing and marketing automation

Free to start e-mail marketing and marketing automation: https://mailchimp.com/ or https://www.mailjet.com/ or https://www.mailerlite.com/

Management

Google offers great free services for sharing and creating: https://www.google.com/docs

Trello for organizing business functions and activities: https://trello.com/

Video conferencing: appear.in

Learning

You can study and understand the business aspects of these tools for free at Google Digital Garage: https://learndigital.withgoogle.com/digitalgarage/

Google insights for digital business: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/

More online business tools?

What tools am I missing? Are you using some free tools in your tourism business that you think are valuable for you? E-commerce and customer relationship management tools, for example, are missing from this listing. I would also like to add more tools from non-Western context.