How to Use Calendar Filters as a Tourism Bureau
Tourism bureaus are usually responsible for promoting a mind-boggling quantity of events across tons of distinct categories. We’re talking fine arts, conventions, conferences, outdoor recreation, museums, hotel openings, and more! With so many different types of events, any tourism site will want to engage lots of different audiences. That includes including tourists, business travelers, and locals, all looking for things to do!
So how do you organize your calendar’s events that make it easy for all these audiences to find events? The answer: A user-friendly events calendar combined with the power of WordPress calendar filters.
Calendar Filters: A traveler’s BFF
Filters empower travelers to quickly find exactly what they want. For instance, that could be free events within walking distance of the hotel. For others, it’s live music events on a Thursday night. By beefing up your calendar capabilities with filters, you’ll help visitors spend less time searching for events. That way, they spend more time enjoying those events while they explore your destination.
Visit Carson City is one tourism bureau that’s making the most of Filter Bar. Their events calendar is super searchable and accessible to all kinds of travelers. We’ll share tips inspired by Visit Carson City for how you can use filters and other tools to make your calendar easy to navigate.
Quickly connect travelers to events from your main nav
What do tourists see when they first arrive at your site? At Visit Carson City, visitors are instantly greeted by an “Events & Conferences” link in a prominent location on the website’s main navigation bar.
Pro tip: Aside from your main navigation, you can also feature your events front-and-center on your home page. Use events calendar widgets or embed events on the homepage to highlight featured events, venues, or a countdown.
Add WordPress calendar filters to help tourists sort through events
Visit Carson City uses filters to allow visitors to narrow their results by event category, day, and time of day. As a result, this helps tourists who are looking for a specific event or day with events.
When users first arrive to Visit Carson City’s calendar page, filters are collapsed, but they can be easily expanded when visitors are ready to take advantage of filtering capabilities.
If you need more granular filtering options for your destination’s events, create your own custom WordPress calendar filters to get more specific.
Organize events by category to help visitors find what they love
Consider adding a dropdown list of event categories below the events link. Since tourism bureau websites attract many different types of visitors, this makes it easy for audiences to find the events they want. Whether that’s a business traveler looking for a convention or a canine enthusiast looking for a dog show, that helps! And without having to sift through unrelated events.
Pro tip: You can also add categories to your WordPress calendar filters so that users can filter events by category from your calendar page.
Bring your destination’s diverse events to the surface with WordPress calendar filters
Don’t let your tourism bureau’s overflowing events calendar be a source of stress!
Take advantage of event filters, categories, and all the other tools at your fingertips in WordPress and The Events Calendar. That way, with a few tweaks and tricks, you can whip your destination’s unruly calendar into shape and make it a go-to resource for visitors.
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