Fall is the best season for travel writers, filled with events featuring travel advisors and suppliers offering up great ideas for the new year. I’ve been to a few in the past couple of weeks, in person and online, at beautiful resorts and high-end Manhattan restaurants, with hurricanes blowing or bright fall colors shining in the sunshine. Here’s some of what I learned.
The simplest to attend was Rita Perez’s insightful “Prep for Wave Week” podcast, offering up insider tips on running a travel business. I listened to two.
From Margie Jordan, owner of Executive Travel in Jacksonville, FL:
Posting on social media and sending out emails is a good first step for marketing, but look to the data to see what is resonating with your clients. Look in your Google Analytics for:
- How your customers find your website. Make sure anything you post on social media and all your blog posts have a referral link to your website.
- What pages they are landing on.
- Which pages they are spending the most time on.
Then distinguish between what is a traffic problem and what is a conversion problem; if people are coming but you are not getting conversions, you need to change the message. (On blog posts, always include a call to action so they don’t just read and move on, she says. “If you want them to do something, you have to ask them.”)
Don’t expect a first-time visitor to want a consultation. You want return visitors—and that requires lots of content. And don’t just post in one place; Jordan’s new post is headed for Pinterest, her Google Business profile, Facebook (not so much Instagram), Flipboard. Type in a keyword in Google search and see what other content is out there and where it is and follow suit.
Make sure your posts are being picked up by the Google news feed and check your Google Analytics. “I’m not looking to build a huge following. My goal is to keep my business top of mind, to get them off social media and onto my website and hopefully into my e-mail list,” she says.
Keep the intake form short. Think about what you absolutely need to know in that first interaction. “You need to be as basic and simple as possible and get them in your list, get them to schedule a consultation and then you can ask all that stuff.” Then track how many people call, and how many of those calls you convert into bookings.
Jordan recently created a “Start here” page on which visitors can join the email list or become a VIP. She finds visitors are spending well over a minute there.
SOPs on Everything
Courtnie Nichols, founder of TravelBash and CEO of TRVLB, has been creating Standard Operating Procedures for every step of her business. Now she is uploading them to ChatGPT and asking it to “improve this procedure for me.”
“ChatGPT is a member of my team,” she says. “It’s like makeup – you don’t overdo it, but you use it to enhance what you are.”
Also on her tech team is HoneyBook; “it does everything from front end to completion. I put everything in HoneyBook; literally if I pass away tomorrow every step is there, from the form entry, the who, the what, the how, all the way until they get home, through the lessons learned and what works and what doesn’t.”
Clients fill out a HoneyBook form on her website; they can sign a contract or make a payment right there. And all the leads are automatically downloaded into Asana. For the actual reservations, she uses VacationCRM.
Nichols creates her SOPs in a Word document with a link to a video; there’s everything from how to be the CEO on through hiring and onboarding, marketing and finance, every step for FITs and groups and weddings. They are all listed on a master SOP template all staff members can access, and she updates them quarterly.
Okay, she’s a little OCD and that may be too much for many advisors, she acknowledges—so “just start wherever you are.” Think about things you do over and over each day. How do you reply to an email or upload a blog post? Use Tango to “just record a little video and it will create an SOP for you.”
Suppliers Checking In
On the supplier side, the Jamaica Tourism Board and the luxury Wymara Resort + Villas in Turks & Caicos offered updates over dinners for travel advisors and the press.
At the New York stop of a national road trip for travel advisors, Jamaica’s Victoria Harper noted there are direct flights from all major US gateways. And business is booming.
Opening November 1, the Grand Palladium Jamaica Resort and Spa will add a conference center and 900 new guest rooms, including Signature Level VIP rooms with butler service. And the 2,000-room Princess Grand Jamaica Resort and its sister property, the adults-only Princess Senses The Mangrove, will bring the first casino to the island—as well as over-the-water villas for the big spenders.
The 450-room Unico Hotel 18*77* Hotel Montego Bay is scheduled to open summer 2025.
The new Hard Rock Hotel and Casino will bring 1,000 rooms to St. Thomas Parish.
Joining the existing Bahia Principe Grand Jamaica will be a new Bahia Principe $1.5-billion project that includes two hotels, a PGA-certified golf course and a fishing village.
The Grand Palladium Jamaica Resort and Spa will add 900 rooms and a conference center, as well as Signature Level VIP rooms with butler service.
Spanish-owned Catalonia Resorts and Hotels has acquired the former Holiday Inn Montego Bay and will add 250 units to the current 510. Catalonia plans to upscale the property a bit in its first foray onto the island, adding exclusive areas and “the Catalonia service experience.”
The all-new Sandals Dunns River has opened, Sandals Negril has been renovated and Sandals Ochi soon will undergo a complete renovation. Beaches Negril has added villas, including new suites that sleep up to 18.
While it’s not new, I learned about an interesting and less well known property, the eight-room Mais Oui Villa, “the perfect blend of privacy and exclusivity,” available for buyout only by groups up to 16. The property comes fully staffed and includes a private pool, hot tub, gym, tennis and pickleball, “anything your guests want from tennis lessons to fire dancers.”
Meanwhile, Jamaica’s top seller from the Long Island area, Jeannine DiMaio, sold 1,000 room nights on the island, thanks in part to her growing niche selling trips to the graduating class of West Islip High School (go Lions!).
Luxury Is Always in Fashion
Turks & Caicos, meanwhile, will get its first ocean pool courtesy of Wymara Resort + Villas, the “sustainable coastal retreat for sophisticated travelers and wellness enthusiasts.” The intimate resort features 91 oceanfront suites overlooking Grace Bay Beach, a 7,000-square-foot infinity pool, state-of-the-art wellness facilities, and a day spa, and soon will launch its first six-bedroom villa. Also on the agenda is a new partnership with 111Skin for dedicated spa services, CEO Shelley Rincon announced. Meanwhile, its restaurants, under Australian Chef Andrew Mirosch, are ranked numbers one and two on the island by TripAdvisor. (And if you are looking for a site for a dinner in Manhattan, follow their lead and consider Hav & Mar—and order the brussel sprouts!)
Hurricane Helene got between me and The Affluent Traveler Collection Symposium conference on Marco Island, FL, but I did catch up by phone with my old friend Gang Yang, the top seller last year, with whom I sailed to Antarctica once on a Swan Hellenic fam. He’s built his business with a laser focus on Antarctica expedition cruises and on his clients, he says.
Gang figures he sold more than $2 million worth of polar cruises last year—but really, he doesn’t know exactly how much. His business plan is easy to follow: “I don’t look at numbers; I don’t look at my volume for each supplier; I don’t look at who are my top three. For me it’s just simple: I just make every customer happy,” he says. “I listen to them, I stay in touch, I make sure they know I am there for them. And they come back and refer their friends and families.”
Gang has made one big change this year, adding The Galapagos as a new destination. Its warm weather is appealing, and it’s the same type of expedition his core clientele enjoys, full of wildlife that “you can’t imagine, you have to go there to see it.”
His tip for others hoping to build a luxury niche? You can’t rush it; it takes years to build trust and earn referrals. So take that first step and pay for that first trip out of your own pocket, and post your pictures. That’s what he’s done now in the Galapagos—and in six months he’s sold “quite a few” trips. But he’s not sure exactly how many.
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.
