Kim Cooper has promoted her tours on more daily deal sites than most people know exist. Groupon, LivingSocial, Bloomspot, BuyWithMe, LA Weekly, Daily Candy, CBS Local, Tippr, DealPop . . . and the list goes on. Kim is co-founder of Esotouric—a brilliantly named Los Angeles “bus adventure” company. Her advice to other tour companies? Working with daily deal sites can be an exceptional experience . . . if you come to the table as “an informed, empowered consumer.”

Are you ready to be informed and empowered? Here are some tips from Kim on how to work with daily deal sites:

1) Setting a long redemption window is good if you're a company that offers infrequent tours.

Esotouric's tours only go out one or two days per week. To avoid overcrowding, yet ensure the company still meets demand, Esotouric sets a 12 month redemption window on its vouchers. This gives voucher holders several opportunities to book whatever tour they're most interested in.

For companies offering more frequent tours, Kim suggests running deals during quiet season and setting a shorter redemption window.

2) Don't get stuck sacrificing full price customers for voucher holders.

The more vouchers a daily deal site sells, the more money it makes—this is why many of them pressure tour companies to agree to high maximum numbers of vouchers sold. Set a reasonable maximum that is based on the true capacity of your tours during the window when the voucher is valid. If you don't you could be caught “scrambling to accommodate voucher holders, with no room for full price customers.”

Lately I've been talking to a number of tour companies and activity providers about how they use daily deals sites. I've been surprised to discover businesses have a lot of positive things to say. I figured most tour companies were less than enthusiastic about working with daily deal sites (based on the assumption a lot of sites take a rather large cut of profits earned from deals, and dealhounds aren't likely to become repeat customers). Turns out I wasn't completely correct.

Over the next few days we'll be sharing advice from businesses who have used daily deal sites to promote tours and activities. We'll start with SWS Mountain Guides.

For the past two years James Brown, Senior Guide/CMO with SWS Mountain Guides, has been using Zozi.com to promote his company's trips. When his company first started working with Zozi, they got terrible results. SWS is a mountain guide service based out of Mt. Shasta, CA and the Eastern Sierra. One of their struggles was matching the right clients with the right trips. “Value shoppers, as we describe it, usually book at the last minute,” says James. “They generally haven't been training for a big mountain climb, so booking them on a trip like that is setting them up for failure.” SWS learned this lesson the hard way after running their first deal with Zozi. They responded smartly by adjusting their offerings to one-day introductory courses that aren't as strenuous.

Another issue was inconsistent service. In James's words, Zozi was growing too fast. They never had the same contact person year to year, and trips weren't being posted online on the agreed upon date. SWS have found they need to be flexible with timeline to ensure trips get posted on time and people make bookings.

On rare occasion you will find that visitors accompanying your tours are in a foul mood. Perhaps one of them is a leg amputee and it did not occur to them that a three-hour walking tour could be of issue. Or your ex-boyfriend and his entire family booked a tour utterly unbeknownst to you or them.

More likely, ill-tempered tourists are angry because they did not eat lunch, they are out of shape, they are astounded that their native currency is not exactly the same in value as local gold bullion, or they hail from a foreign culture which does not comprehend things like “sarcasm.”

There are many ways you can prepare for such spoilsports. For instance, it's always a good idea to bring two umbrellas with you on a tour. This way, when torrential downpour starts, you can hand one to whichever idiot didn't realize what cloud banks foreshadow. You look like a swell person, and the otherwise soggy, irritable tourist delights in your comely demeanor.

I had to laugh when I came across this article from BookingCounts on why auto-play of travel videos & music is a bad idea for tourism business websites.

We spend a lot of time at Travergence visiting tourism business websites. It's not uncommon, when visiting said websites, to be met with a cacophony of foley effects that sound like they were recorded on a Fisher Price tape deck while standing in the shower awkwardly blowing air through a set of bagpipes. The soothing/exciting sounds of an ecoadventure instead resemble the death rattle of a water buffalo. Is this really the first impression you want to give to people researching your business?

Of course the sites that play animal sounds or babbling brook noises or god-awful new age music are still better than the sites that launch videos with voices telling you about the joys of jet-skiing, or some other travel activity. It's 2012 people. Most of us are conditioned to think if we hear a voice when we open a website we're about five seconds away from unleashing a hideous virus on our system. You may have some great videos and useful information on your website, but hearing unexpected voices is scary, and it makes a lot of us run away.

The BookingCounts article mentions auto-play is especially brutal for people trying to browse websites on mobile. Honestly, however, auto-play is brutal for everyone—regardless of how they try to access your site. Frankly websites that use auto-play should have been stuffed in a time capsule 15 years ago with a Savage Garden CD and a copy of Titanic. Maybe loud, obnoxious websites were cool in 1997, but now they're either incredibly annoying or hilariously out of date. Please, if you know what's good for you, take the advice of BookingCounts and immediately remove auto-play from your website.