Travel agency marketing that a small agency can actually keep up

For a small agency, the marketing that pays is boring and cumulative: a complete local business profile, a steady trickle of real reviews, and photographs from trips you actually arranged. Daily posting is not on that list, because an agency of two or three people cannot hold it, and a feed that stops in March is worse than a feed that was never started.

The order matters too. Get found, be credible, then be interesting. Agencies usually do it backwards, spending months on content while the profile that decides whether they appear in local results at all sits half filled in.

Fix the profile people find before they find your website

When somebody decides to talk to a person instead of a booking site, they type a town name into a search engine or open a maps app. What they see there is your business profile, and it is free.

Complete means complete:

• the real address, and the hours you actually answer the phone, including the ones you close for
• the phone number a human picks up, not a switchboard you never check
• the categories that match what you sell, primary category first
• photos of the office, the shopfront and the people, not stock images of an infinity pool
• a description written for a person deciding whether to walk in, not stuffed with destination names
• the link to the page you want them to land on, which is usually a specific one rather than the homepage

If you have no walk in office, most platforms let you present as a service area business, which shows the area you cover instead of a street address. Your eligibility for a profile at all depends on having in person contact with customers, which an agency does, and the platform will ask you to verify the business before the profile is fully live. Do the verification the week you start, because it can take time and nothing else works until it is done.

Then keep it alive with small things. Posting to the profile, answering the questions people ask on it, and keeping the hours correct during the holidays does more for local visibility than a month of content elsewhere, because it is what the platform is measuring.

Reviews do more work than anything else you will do this year

A review is the only marketing asset that keeps working while you are on holiday, and the mechanism is simple: the person reading it wanted proof that somebody like them trusted you with an expensive purchase, and no amount of your own writing supplies that.

The system that works for a small agency:

• Ask a few days after they get home. The trip is still vivid and the annoyance of the flight home has faded.
• Ask by name, once, and make it one tap. Send the direct review link. Do not send a form that asks them to pick a platform.
• Ask everyone, not just the happy ones. This is both a policy rule and the correct instinct. Google's review policies prohibit paying for reviews and prohibit discouraging or selectively suppressing negative ones, the practice usually called review gating.
• Say what would help. "If you have a minute, mentioning the part you were most nervous about and how it went would help someone in the same position" produces a useful review instead of "great service".
• Reply to every one of them, including the good ones, in two lines and without a template. The replies are read by people who have not decided yet.

Never buy reviews and never write them yourself. This has moved from bad practice to unlawful in several places. In the United States the Federal Trade Commission's rule on consumer reviews and testimonials prohibits buying, selling and creating fake reviews. In the EU, the consumer protection rules as amended require traders who display reviews to say whether and how they check that they come from consumers who actually bought the product, and ban submitting or commissioning fake ones. In the UK, fake reviews are covered by the consumer protection provisions of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. The detail differs by country, and platforms remove what they detect regardless of the law.

Photos from real trips, and what to post when nobody is travelling

The content that works for an agency is evidence. Evidence that you have been there, that you send people there, and that it went well.

• Photographs you took. Badly lit and real beats a stock shot of a place you have never visited. Clients can tell, and so can anyone who has been.
• Client photos, with written permission. Ask at the welcome home message. Keep the permission somewhere, and never post a face or a family without it.
• The specific over the spectacular. The doorway of the restaurant you always book, the view from the room you always request, the platform where the transfer actually waits. That is the content no stock library has.
• Before and after a trip you arranged, as a short series: the plan, one problem that came up, how it was handled.

When nobody is travelling, and that is most of the year, the reliable material is answers. The visa question everyone asks. What changed about baggage this month. Which week of the shoulder season is the one worth taking. Whether the beach is walkable from the cheaper hotel. One answer, one post, no design work.

Two practical rules. Take photographs on every trip with the intention of using them later, because the agency that has a folder of its own images never has a content problem. And put the same material in more than one place: a post, a line in the newsletter, an answer on the business profile.

A rhythm you can hold for a year

Pick the schedule you can keep in your worst month, not your best. For most small agencies that is something like one or two posts a week, a newsletter monthly or quarterly, and reviews asked for after every trip. Written down, in a calendar, with the topics decided a month in advance so that nothing depends on inspiration.

Choose one platform properly rather than four badly, and choose it by where your clients already are, not by where the growth is. An agency selling multigenerational family holidays and one selling diving trips do not belong in the same place.

The measure worth watching is not follower count. It is enquiries that mention something they saw, and you only know that if you ask every caller how they found you and write the answer down.

Where all of this sits among the other ways clients arrive is in how to get clients as a travel agent.

The day a bad review arrives

It will, and usually for something that was not your fault. The only wrong responses are the fast angry one and silence.

• Wait until you are not annoyed. A few hours, not a few weeks.
• Reply once, in public, short. Thank them, state plainly and without argument what happened, say what you are doing about it, and offer to continue in private with a name and a direct contact. The audience for this reply is the next person reading, not the reviewer.
• Never argue the facts line by line. A long defensive reply reads as guilt even when you are right, and it makes a one line complaint into the most prominent thing on your profile.
• Take the details out of public view. Never post booking references, itinerary details or anything about a third party in a reply.
• Report it only when it breaks the rules. Platforms will consider removing reviews that are fake, off topic, abusive or from a competitor, but not reviews that are simply negative. Report, document, and do not expect speed.
• Ask two happy clients this week. The healthiest response to one bad review is an honest flow of new ones, because a single complaint among many detailed positive reviews reads as normal rather than as a warning.

And fix the thing, if there is a thing. A complaint that names a supplier you already had doubts about is free market research.

Pick two of these and do them for a year

An agency that completes its profile, asks for a review after every trip and posts its own photographs twice a week will be ahead of most of its local competition within a year, without a marketing budget. The reason is not that this is clever. It is that almost nobody keeps it up.

Wigoo works with agencies through our partner programme, and the agencies that grow fastest on it are the ones whose clients can already find them.

Quick answers

Do I need to be on social media at all?

You need to be findable and credible, which is the business profile and the reviews. Social media is where you show you have actually been where you claim. If you can only maintain one thing, maintain the profile and the review flow.

How do I get more Google reviews without breaking the rules?

Ask every client a few days after they return, by name, with a direct link, and ask regardless of how the trip went. Do not offer discounts or gifts in exchange, and do not filter who you ask. Paying for reviews and screening out unhappy clients are both against platform policy and, in several countries, against consumer law.

Should I pay for ads?

Not before the profile is complete, a few reviews exist and there is a specific page to send people to. Otherwise you are paying for clicks that land somewhere unconvincing. When you do test, keep it narrow: one destination or one kind of trip, in your own area.

Sources: Google Business Profile Help, review policies and prohibited content, including the prohibition on incentivised reviews and review gating (checked 27 September 2026); Federal Trade Commission, Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, 16 CFR Part 465 (effective 21 October 2024, United States); Directive (EU) 2019/2161 amending EU consumer protection rules on review transparency (27 November 2019, applied from 28 May 2022); Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, consumer protection provisions (United Kingdom, in force April 2025). Rules differ by country. Checked 27 September 2026.