We who work in the travel industry are doubly blessed. First, we get to see the world and meet amazing people in places that take our breath away. Then, we get to bring home stories to enthrall and amaze our friends and families.
I think that’s what Silversea Cruises’ SVP Katina Athanasiou was getting at with the advice she offered at the annual conference aboard the Norwegian Encore. These days, “people don’t care about what you do or where you live,” she said. “They want to know where you’ve been and how it’s changed you.”
This year—as every year, but a little more so—selling travel is not about the product or the destination. And it’s rarely about price, she said. It’s really about the experience. In this new world of travel, your job description is not just “travel advisor”—and it’s definitely not “travel agent.”
What you are is a “travel investment advisor.”
“It’s about how you make people feel, and how you can emotionally connect with them when talking about travel,” Athanasiou said. “It’s about connecting clients with people and cultures, seeing how others live and work, how they go to school. You are an experience architect—you create journeys that change people’s lives.”
Like any financial advisor, your role is to create an annuity that pays off into the future. The key is to teach customers about the value of the investment they are about to make by “deep diving” into their wants and needs so that the relationship continues. Don’t wait for them to tell you what they want; reach out with an “I saw an amazing video I thought would resonate with you” and tell them what they need. And always, talk about how the experiences you suggest will make them feel.
Nowhere to go but up, say Brad Tolkin 
Debbie Fiorino and Drew Daly 
Relaxing by the pool 
NCH CEO Harry Sommers, Cheryl Rosen, and crew 
Don’t be normal, be the top gun, says Dondra ritzenthaler 
Best practices from the Circle of Excellence 
One on one with Debbie Fiorino 
Sandi Szalay, Brad Tolkin and Michael tip their hats to the attendees 
Brian and Melissa Cohn brought their travel advisor in training 
Brad Tolkin, co-CEO of World Travel Holdings
Riding the Wave of 2023 Sales
Onstage, Alicia Linden, marketing director for Dream Vacations/CruiseOne parent World Travel Holdings (WTH), noted that the franchise organization is here to help travel advisors do just that, with emails and direct mail, a new honeymoon registry, and a library of 150 videos that can be customized to the individual agency. To help get to know your customers better, a welcome-home survey asks what they liked and what they didn’t, and offers them a chance to win a $1,000 gift certificate. Almost half of customers who fill it out also leave a public review of the travel agency that helped them, she said.
In the audience, almost all the travel advisors seemed to be feeling that titles are of little importance this year. No matter what they call themselves, most said, business is booming.
David Johnson of Travel Yetis, for example, who’s been in business for just two years interrupted by Covid, saw his sales double in the past year, with a “mix of products that surprised me,” he told TRO. “I was expecting contemporary, maybe river cruise—but I’ve done so much to Italy and Greece, bespoke tours and three-week trips where clients really need a travel advisor.” He’s so busy that he just took the next step and signed on his first independent contractor; if all goes well, he will add three more before the year is out.
“It’s been so much better than what I expected,” he says. “I’ve done 16 river and ocean cruises, and that has given me insane insights into what’s out there.”
WTH CEO Brad Tolkin said cruise bookings for 2023 are “well ahead of what we did in 2019, and when we look at the numbers, it’s not back-ended.” For January, the most important month of the year for selling cruises, sales are running 40% over 2019, and in the first five months of 2023 “they are greater than 20% better—just amazing statistics.”
SVP Drew Daly told TRO that while Covid restrictions on cruising brought a big shift to all-inclusives, both domestic and in the “Steady Eddies” of land vacations like Mexico and the Caribbean, cruising is now roaring back. And “land volume also has continued to increase exponentially,” with sales up close to 50%.
Meanwhile, WTH’s top-selling franchisee, Jason Newquist of Orlando, credits his soaring sales to a steadfast focus on the single goal he brought with him when he opened his agency in 2016: to be the number-one franchise in the system.
A former mortgage broker whose market tanked, “I was 42 and starting from scratch,” he says, though he did have an entrepreneurial background. “I had my own company—I know how to deal with people, make sales, learn quickly.” Still, he took two full years to just research without selling at all, studying the business and developing his model of selling cruises by posting cool videos on social media.
Then came Covid, and the fam trip offers from the cruise lines, anxious to fill their ships, began to pour in. He sailed Norwegian, Royal Caribbean and Carnival, posting videos on social media wherever he went. Today he’s the top seller for all three of those lines, with 70 ship tours on film—and “more than 15 million views and thousands of customers.”
Indeed, WTH COO Debbie Fiorino told TRO, “if you’re not making money in the leisure travel business right now, then either you’re not putting in the energy or you’re just not taking advantage of your host agency’s programs.”
While the traditional avenues to success, like niches and groups, will always be important, “some of the most successful franchises we’re seeing now are very focused on social media as a way of growing the business. We have a couple doing really well that are built entirely on Instagram and Facebook, and now TikTok. They are traveling themselves and showing people what it’s like.”
The key, though, is to find the model that works for you—and the product that works for your customer. “A good travel advisor will spend 20 minutes finding out what the customer likes and what they don’t, and which vacation is best for them,” Fiorino says.
Whether you sell land or sea, on TikTok or in a brick-and-mortar, 2022 is wrapping up to be a good year for most travel advisors.
“What I love is that the land numbers are staying strong—but cruise is growing in double digits every day over 2019,” she said.
Onboard for a couple of days, Norwegian Cruise Line CEO Harry Sommer said that since launching its no-NCF program, NCL has “had the best three weeks in the history of the company, both overall and with trade sales”—and will close the best November in its history. Even though the first two weeks of the month are traditionally slow, as customers wait for Black Friday sales.
Ships in North America and Europe are near 100% occupancy, and come April 1, “we should be 100% full,” he said.
Let’s hear it for those travel investment advisors.
For more on Sommers’comments, see last week’s Rosen Report at NCL’s Sommer Highlights Big Dreams and Big Things—Asks for 8% More Bookings in 2023 | Travel Research Online.
I really did hear a million great stories in the course of our week together on Encore. If you shared one that I didn’t use here, stay tuned—it just may turn up in next week’s column. Or the two others I have in mind. And as always, thanks for sharing your time and expertise with me, with TRO and with your peers.
–Cheryl
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.
