There’s more to Mexico than Cancun—and our neighbor to the south is counting on travel advisors to spread the word about its abundant luxury, adventure, cultural, and family travel opportunities. To help them along, 200 or so travel advisors showed up for CCRA’s PowerSolutions conference in Jersey City last week to hear about new options, like the jaw-dropping Copper Canyon (25,000 square miles, four times the size of the Grand Canyon) and the new lines on the Mayan Railroad, many of which are aimed at high-end travelers.
The goal is twofold, said keynote speaker Miguel Torruco Marques, Mexico’s Secretary of Tourism: to deliver new products that attract tourism, and to ensure that local communities share in the wealth by bringing travelers to the smaller—and indeed, more interesting and authentic—towns and villages in the countryside. And Mexico is changing the way it promotes its tourism products, “targeting precisely the partnerships we have” with travel advisors like those in CCRA, which in the past five years has brought 900,000 guests to Mexico.
To that end, the new Tren Maya (Maya Train) will run almost 1,000 miles through 177 “tourism products of high impact” in the Yucatan countryside when it is complete. The first circuit, opened in December, runs from Cancun Airport to Merida, including ancient Mayan ruins like Chichén Itzá and Palenque, and the walled city of Campeche. The second circuit, opening in “a month or two,” will run to the other side of the country, to Playa del Carmen, the new airport in Tulum and the blue lagoon of Bacalar. The final piece will open in September, from Bacalar through the jungle to Calakmul, “the New York of the Mayans,” a sprawling ancient city four times the size of Chichén Itzá. There the Mexican government is building six hotels as a seed for future growth, as it did in the earliest days of Cancun’s development.
In a private interview at the Hyatt Regency Jersey City, where the conference was being held, Marques told me “this will be a very important product of the next 10 years,” a sort of authentic Mexican Disneyland. To protect the environment, they asked the local indigenous people to point out the routes the animals follow through the jungles and built about 400 tunnels under the railroad tracks so the jaguars can pass back and forth. Situated at the shortest point between the Atlantic and the Pacific, the train is designed to compete with the Panama Canal, carrying not only tourists but also cargo. “It can take across in hours what used to take six or seven days,” Marques said, and “will mean a lot of progress economically.” The growing Mazatlan now offers a host of new attractions for tourists, including the biggest aquarium in Mexico, many new museums and a double-decker tourist bus.
(Also highly successful has been the annual Day of the Dead parade and celebration, which began in the James Bond film Spectre in 2016 and has grown into an over-the-top extravaganza in Mexico City and Oaxaca, featuring enormous floats and marionettes and attracting thousands of visitors. It will pirouette through the streets this year on November 4.)
Indeed, “the strategy to promote different regions of Mexico has generated all this new traffic to new locations—and 50,000 travel advisors have tapped into this new market,” CCRA’s chief commercial officer Peter Pincus told me. CCRA is holding monthly webinars—and every one is followed by a fam trip.
Of the Maya Train, he said, “I’m surprised at how luxurious it is, how large the bathroom is. It’s actually built for the comfort of the passengers; the meals are great, the doors are glass, the schedules run like a Swiss train, they have the most modern buses you’ll ever see (on the airport shuttle), and as you check in people ask if you need assistance to buy a ticket or to get on the right train. Every seat is reserved. The attention to detail is amazing. You don’t have to rent a car anymore to go from Cancun to Playa del Carmen—you can take the train, drink a margarita, eat traditional food, and drink as many tequilas as you want.”
Keys to Travel Advisor Success
Also interesting at the conference was a presentation by Travefy CEO and founder David Chait that focused on financial fundamentals for travel advisors—a particularly important aspect of business that many newcomers skip. The key to a successful career in travel, he said, is to “understand your why.”
Travel advisors come to the industry for many different reasons: for financial gain, for flexible working hours, because they just plain love to travel. Focus on your personal “why” to achieve the unique outcomes you are looking for, he said.
To optimize your business, focus on these things:
#1: Sales. What do you sell most of and where do your customers come from? Focus on the top two things you sell—be they your top two niches or your top two destinations. Don’t just look at the number of trips you sell, but also at the return on your investment in selling them.
#2: Expenses. Understand which are your fixed expenses—your “must-haves,” like a website and a phone—versus the flexible expenses that you can turn off if times get tight. You always should have a safety net of cash big enough to cover your required expenses for three to six months. If you don’t, start setting aside part of your earnings to build a sustainability fund.
#3 Levers of growth. How can you get more leads, qualify them sooner, close them faster and service them more efficiently?
Some tips:
Think about where your most successful leads have been coming from and focus on that pipeline.
To qualify customers sooner, think about the commonalities of customers who ultimately book. Spend more time with someone who says “I want to go to Italy in May” than someone who says “I want to plan a vacation for 2026.”
Consider fees. They are one way to qualify who is really looking to book.
Always remember to ask for the order.
Set an action plan. What areas can you tweak to grow your business? Harness the power of compounding by making many small incremental changes. Come up with one new thing to test or try at every step of the sales process. And make sure each is in the context of your personal “why.”
Cheryl’s 40-year career in journalism is bookended by roles in the travel industry, including Executive Editor of Business Travel News in the 1990s, and recently, Editor in Chief of Travel Market Report and admin of Cheryl Rosen’s Group for Travel Professionals, a news and support group on Facebook. As an independent contractor since retiring from the 9-to-5 to travel more, she has written regular articles about the life and business of travel agents for Luxury Travel Advisor, Travel Agent, and Insider Travel Report. She also writes and edits for professional publications in the financial services, business, and technology sectors.
