Your team: the people
behind the experience

I want to ask you to do something before we start.

Think of a trip you still talk about. One of those ones that comes up in conversation years later, where somebody mentions a country and you say, oh, we did the most amazing thing there.

Now, when you picture it, what do you actually see?

I would put money on it not being the view. Or the weather. Or the room.

It is a person.

A guide who knew the history of the place inside out and told it like a story instead of a lecture. An instructor who was so obviously mad about what they did that you caught it off them. A woman at a door somewhere who made you feel, within about ten seconds, that you had made exactly the right decision coming.

That is what people remember. That is what they tell other people about.

And yet most tourism websites in Ireland hide the people entirely. A general About Us paragraph, if you are lucky. No names. No faces. No sense at all of who you are going to meet.

It is like running a restaurant and keeping the chef in a cupboard.

People do not book experiences.

They book people.

Now let me explain why that matters commercially, and not just as a nice sentiment.

When somebody is choosing between two fairly similar experiences at fairly similar prices, what tips it? Nine times out of ten, it comes down to confidence. Confidence that they are making a good call. Confidence that the people they are about to hand a few hours of their holiday to are knowledgeable, and warm, and actually interested in whether they enjoy themselves.

A website that introduces you properly builds that confidence before anybody has made contact. A photograph of your guide. Three or four lines about how they ended up doing this and what they love about it. That is not vanity. That is the most persuasive content on your entire website, and it is sitting there unwritten.

And look at what you have to work with.

Maybe your guide grew up on that water and knows it the way most people know their own road. Maybe your instructor has twenty years in and a story for every bend on the mountain. Maybe you are a family business and three generations have stood at the same door. Maybe your chef was foraging that shoreline as a child and the whole menu comes out of that.

That is gold. And it is the one thing no competitor can copy, ever, because nobody else has your people.

Now, I want to deal with something that always comes up when we have this conversation.

A lot of operators feel that putting themselves forward is showing off. That it is a bit much. That visitors are really only interested in the boat or the beds, not in who is behind it.

I understand that instinct completely. It is a very Irish reluctance and there is something likeable about it.

And it is costing you money.

Because your visitors are not buying a commodity. They are spending their precious holiday time on something they have never done before, with people they have never met, usually in a country they do not know. Of course they want to know who those people are. That reticence you feel about putting yourself forward is the exact thing standing between you and a share of the bookings going elsewhere.

Now, if you are sitting there thinking, fine, but what on earth would I write, let me make that easy.

Forget the qualifications. Nobody has ever booked a kayaking trip because the instructor holds a level three certificate. Have it on the page by all means, at the bottom, in small print, for the person who needs the reassurance. It is not the story.

Three questions will get you everything you need.

How did you end up doing this? That is where the interesting bit always is. Somebody came home after twenty years away. Somebody took over from a father who took it over from his father. Somebody was made redundant in 2009 and had a boat and a notion.

What is your favourite part of the day? Ask anybody who loves their work that question and watch them light up. Whatever they say next is the best line on your website.

And what do you wish people knew before they came? That one is pure gold, because it is useful and personal at the same time.

Four or five sentences out of that is plenty. It does not want to be polished. It wants to sound like the person actually talking. If it reads like a CV, go back and take out every word you would not say out loud to a guest.

Your first hello should feel like meeting a person, not reading a brochure.

When visitors feel like they know you a bit before they arrive, the booking becomes the easiest decision they make all day. And when they do turn up, they arrive as people who already feel a small connection to you, rather than as strangers who have to be won over from a standing start.

So what can you do this week? Three jobs.

The first one. Go to your About page and ask honestly whether a visitor reading it could tell who they are going to meet, what those people are like, and why they love doing this. If they could not, that is the page to rewrite first, and I would start with whoever has the best story. Write it in the first person if you can manage it. How did you get into this? What is the best part of it? What do you wish every visitor knew before they arrived?

The second. Look at the photographs on your team page. Are they actual photographs of the actual people? Are they recent? Do they show somebody doing the thing they love, rather than standing against a wall being told to smile? A candid shot of a guide mid-explanation on a clifftop, with the wind taking the hair off her, tells more of a story than any headshot ever taken. And if you are using stock photographs of people who do not work for you, that needs to go this week.

And the third. If you have people who deal with guests directly, give each of them a few lines of their own. Three sentences and a real photograph is enough. It turns a faceless operation into a place where actual named people are looking forward to meeting you.

And here is what I want to leave you with.

When guests arrive having already read about your team, something changes. They mention your guide by name before they have met her. They reference something they read in a bio. They arrive warm, already a bit invested, already halfway to the review they will leave on the way home.

And those reviews, the ones that name your people and describe one specific moment of human connection, are the most persuasive thing your website will ever have on it. You cannot manufacture them. You have to earn them.

But it starts here. With introducing your people properly.

Your team is your strongest advantage.

The only question is whether your website knows it yet.