How this Project Manager Got All Hands on Deck to Kick off a New Supplier Support Blog

Rui Soromenho, project manager for the Supply Excellence team, works on initiatives that improve the experiences of our travel suppliers. These suppliers offer tours, attractions, transfers, seasonal sports, special excursions, and cooking classes on our platform. His team provides the tools, training, and processes to help tour and activities operators succeed in their business.

The project manager from Portugal tells us the story behind our new travel supplier support blog, GetYourGuide for Suppliers. Read on to learn why his team started the blog, what suppliers can expect to find there, and how he worked cross-functionally to prioritize its launch.

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Why did you start the travel supplier support blog?

On an on-going basis, we offer general support through our supplier portal, newsletters, and general advice within the community. Not to mention, we also have destination managers who communicate regularly with travel suppliers on their needs and concerns.

We hope that our understanding of the industry can continue to help suppliers manage their business better and improve their performance.

The idea for the support blog started before COVID-19 went global. We wanted to create an additional resource that shared the diverse knowledge of the GetYourGuide internal team with our suppliers. The goal of the blog is to educate, engage, and continue to build trust among our network.

When COVID-19 spread across the world, we expedited the launch of the blog and shifted the content to focus on supporting suppliers throughout the pandemic. Sharing knowledge has always been important, but standing together as a community is more important now than ever. That’s why we have such an incredibly multi-talented team of experts to provide a diverse range of support, including:

• a sales team equipped with local expertise of the global tourism landscape
• a marketing team bringing branding and design skills
• an engineering team that can provide technical support
• SEO experts who can help suppliers get their tours found through search engines
• a rich traveler and supplier database to learn from

We also learn a lot from our suppliers and which best practices have helped them succeed. We aim to scale those best practices to all our partners. So for quite some time, we had been planning a blog to provide additional resources to our suppliers. We hope that our understanding of the industry can continue to help suppliers manage their business better and improve their performance.

What can travel suppliers expect to find on this support blog?

Content is structured around four fundamental pillars:

1. Manage your business: Tips and advice on how to succeed in the overall travel industry, e.g., 5 ways to innovate a walking tour.
2. How to make the most of your products: This section helps suppliers succeed on our platform, offering tips to increase bookings or picking clickable images.
3. Travel insights: We share learnings from internal data and industry reports. For example, suppliers can find the latest trends from our customer reviews.
4. Why work with us and how to get started. This section includes helpful tips to help new suppliers set up on our platform.

As a timely pillar, we have a section for COVID-19-specific resources. Most recently, we researched government programs around the world that can provide relief for businesses.

We will also have a feature called Supplier Spotlights, where we partner with suppliers for content creation and highlighting top performers in our inventory.

Can you tell us a bit about your role in Supply Excellence?

To succeed in this role, I rely on understanding the supplier's needs on an ongoing basis. This could range from research and data analysis to drive cross-departmental initiatives.

This data helps me prioritize resources and define critical strategic initiatives with a high impact on the performance of our supply. Often, I will work with our product and data teams, as well as with different stakeholders from our sales, supply, brand, PR, and marketing teams to solve an identified need or issue.

As a project manager, in general, here are some key projects I'm focusing on for suppliers:

• Improving the supplier onboarding experience

• Working on how to provide suppliers with insights to improve the performance of their products

• Supplier communication and training

• Coming up with innovative ways to get more feedback from suppliers

Who was involved in coordinating the supplier support blog? How did you coordinate a project plan?

For an initiative with such a broad scope and reach, we built a cross-departmental team. This included specialists from sales, product, brand, and PR to ensure there was a diversity of perspectives and expertise.

I received incredible support from colleagues managing other GetYourGuide content platforms such as Inside GetYourGuide and the GetYourGuide travel Magazine. I learned from their experience, which definitely helped to get up to speed faster in this new world of managing a content platform.

This is one of the things I love about working here. You're constantly challenged to get out of your comfort zone, and when you do, you can always find colleagues internally with the expertise you need who are willing to help you.

This blog was truly a team effort with a very steep learning curve. We created a project plan and started working on the different pieces we needed to get a blog ready:

• Design and develop a platform
• Brainstorm the content our supplier's need
• Plan how to create the content
• Brief different teams and ask them to draft articles based on their expertise
• Coordinate with teams to ensure a successful launch
• Distributing blog effectively within the travel community

How has the feedback from suppliers been?

So far, the feedback has been incredibly positive. Our community of suppliers is so passionate and is always eager to learn more and strive for continuous improvement.

Before COVID-19, we were regularly publishing content on our supplier support FAQ page and newsletter. We were measuring total views, clicks, and average time on page of both combined. Since launching the blog as an additional communications channel, engagement on the support page and newsletter have doubled.

The numbers show we are now reaching a broader supplier audience and that the blog is an effective first communication channel that can be used to bring attention to emails and existing support material. We received great feedback from the first partner we featured in the article: How a tour guide became the leader of a movement keeping Rio de Janeiro's favelas safe.

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Thiago, from Santa Marta Tour in Brazil, told us, "Thank you for providing us with a platform to tell our story to the world and inspire more people to take action and protect their communities. We hope to take full advantage of this knowledge base to prepare ourselves for tourism recovery."

We created a webinar series where we coordinated with our regional offices around the world to provide suppliers with insights on the impact of COVID-19. The session explained what suppliers could do to protect their businesses and prepare them for when demand returns.

It's impactful for our suppliers to have access to global data and resources on how to support themselves. When I hear about the positive effect the blog has on business owners, seeing how it's helping them remain positive and resilient, it's a reminder of what all this hard work is for.

At the same time, our community is continuously pushing us to raise our standards. We continue to learn and make the blog more relevant and helpful to suppliers and will focus on:

1. sharing our insights on how the travel community can expect behavior to change and how travel suppliers can best prepare for it.

2. continuing to provide global and regional data on recovery.

3. inspiring our community and sharing knowledge by highlighting success stories from our partners.

Do you have any advice for travel companies out there that want to support their suppliers? Do you want to add advice to suppliers themselves?

I think communication strategies always depend on the context, but there's one piece of general advice I would give: Stay close to your suppliers and do what makes sense for them.

If you are working in supply excellence, or are an account manager in tourism, I would recommend to ask yourself:

• Are you listening enough to your suppliers and what they need?
• Are you learning from your suppliers?
• What information or resources do you have that can support them –– not only to make it through the short-term but also long-term, as demand increases?

For suppliers, it's essential to recognize the difficult situation that we're all in. The travel community has shown its capacity to adapt and reinvent itself, time and time again. You are not alone.

There are short term resources out there that can help you. Reach out to your community, read as much as you can, and ask as many questions as possible. Invest in preparing yourself and your business for the recovery. We're here for you.

For updates on our open positions, check out our Career page.

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