One good thing about a week-long conference on a cruise ship is the opportunity to sit and chat about how we all got to where we are. I did that recently with the smart and businesslike folks who own Dream Vacations and CruiseOne franchises. And so I thought I’d share a few of the tales of how to succeed in business and how to just love what you do that I heard there.
Even if the business model is not one most people will copy, the most interesting story I heard is about the guy who sold more travel than anyone else in the Dream Vacations/CruiseOne network—a whopping eight digits worth in 2022, 98% of it in cruise sales.
“I’m a big goal-setter,” Jason Newquist began by saying. “I set my goal to be number one, right from the very beginning, when I bought my franchise. Then I sold what I love—and I love cruises.”
With a family depending on him, Newquist did not rush into things unprepared. A successful mortgage broker until that industry went bust, he started looking for a new business with “unlimited opportunity and not held back by local demographics.” After deciding the travel industry fit the bill, he spent his first full year working only on marketing; in his second he sold a single cruise.
“Before I even started to book a cruise, I tried to figure out my marketing to get to #1”, he told me. Rather than compete with existing agencies, he came up with the idea of filming video tours of all the ships he sailed, and selling the experiences online.
“It’s funny how the universe works,” he says. “I was 42 years old and starting from scratch. But as soon as I decided to do videos, I received a few emails inviting us on a cruise. I didn’t even know which camera to use; I started researching editing software and watching YouTube. There was a lot of trial and error.”
He spent his second year figuring out how to edit his first video and put it online. But then “the calls started rolling in—and I got good at booking cruises very quickly because the calls did not stop. The video went a little viral. I had to put up a mattress and sleep next to the phone for a year. If the phone rang in the middle of the night I’d get up and answer it. I wanted to make sure my customers were taken care of, and I didn’t want to let a sale go by. Then during the day I’d run out to a ship, do a day tour and run back.”
A little more than three years after opening his franchise, in 2016, he became the top seller of travel in the entire Dream Vacations/CruiseOne network—and he has held the position ever since.
Is there a secret to a great video? “It takes a lot of hard work and time to make a video—I’d say a good two weeks,” Newquist says. While he doesn’t normally appear in the videos, “occasionally, I’ll get in a hot tub.”
But really, he acknowledges, “I don’t know the true reason people watch. I just put a lot of effort into it, take a day or two to think about what I am going to say, try to get into a good mood before I get in front of a microphone. Then I randomly choose music, that’s usually the last thing and I don’t spend too much time on it.”
After ten years in the business now, he has thousands of customers who have watched his 70 videos more than 15 million times. He runs a “mid-sized call center” manned by agents who work from home and has a total team of about 30. In 2023 he will add two more, plus a full-time recruiter/trainer and “a lot of marketing” by a new marketing team.
“I do lots of marketing to bring customers to YouTube, but I keep the details of how I do that a secret. It’s not just making a video and putting it up.”
His audience is not luxury or even particularly upscale; he sells mostly Norwegian, Royal Caribbean and Carnival. But he was the top seller of all three brands in 2022.
Trapper Martin and Shane Smartt Love Groups
Trapper Martin and Shane Smartt started in the travel business after sailing on the Carnival Magic inaugural, where they met a CruiseOne travel agent, picked her brain for two weeks and decided to open a franchise of their own. The agency took off in 2016 when Trapper quit his full-time job—and then exploded in 2019 when Shane joined full-time as well. Today they are running close to $3 million, about 70% of it in cruise and 30% in land.
“I was shocked at how fast business increased when I went full time,” Smartt says. “It was a big step for both of us to quit our jobs; we had a backup plan of what might have to happen. But literally, when we announced we were going full-time, our referral business went off the charts.”
In 2021 they sold a lot of Iceland; it was “insanely popular” thanks in part to “a crazy amount of business” for the first few months after they were named Iceland experts in TripAdvisor’s Recommend program. This year they are too busy for that, focusing their efforts instead on their biggest business builder: hosting groups.
“We let our customers know that, if they get to a certain number of guests, we will travel with them; that’s the biggest thing. When you go on a cruise with clients the FIT referrals that follow are off the charts,” Martin says. “We do a daily newsletter; we’ve brought printers onboard cruise ships to do that; we do private excursions. Our biggest group was 90; from that group we have 10 on a family cruise right now, 16 on Princess, and 3 active subgroups that came out of it. Things just spiral. Don’t be afraid to ask if your clients have any other family that might want to come, or might want to upgrade. We had one group where we let everyone know we were booking a suite—and then nine people booked suites too.”
David Johnson Needs Help
Two years into the business, David Johnson has seen his sales double in 2022, and the products he sells move steadily upscale. He’s so busy he’s about to hire what he thinks will be the first of four independent contractors.
“My business more than doubled last year, and the mix of product I’m selling really surprised me,” he says. “I was expecting contemporary cruises, maybe river cruise, but I’ve done so much business to Italy and Greece, bespoke tours and three-week trips that you really need a travel advisor to plan for you. My suppliers make me look fantastic. Now I’m going to try to accelerate the growth by hiring four ICs in the next six months,” through the World Travel Holdings Associate Program.
He’s already found the first, a fellow veteran of the US Armed Forces who lives in Daytona Beach, giving geographical reach to Johnson’s Colorado-based agency, Travel Yetis by Dream Vacations.
“After the Army, he worked in law enforcement and at the US Post Office, and everyone knows him as the guy who knows how to travel. My job now is to enable him to be successful,” he says.
Short and Sweet
Karen Quinn Panzer saw her business rise 86%, to over $2 million, in 2022 thanks to the escorted groups in which she specializes. “All those groups are now exploding into a lot of FIT business as well,” she says. “I feel like I invested in that business, and now I am seeing the fruition.” With seven independent contractors, she’s so busy she also is partnering with another agent to share an administrative assistant.
Eight months into his new career in travel, Marc Eisner of San Jose is loving the switch from a long career in legal technology on which he had racked up 2.5 million miles on United Airlines. “I wanted to retire but I was too young to be sitting around doing nothing,” he says—and when he started talking to a friend who owned a travel agency, he was intrigued. “When I wasn’t traveling for work, I loved to travel with my family but I don’t know how to run a business—and I haven’t got a clue about how to market.” For him, being an associate at Valley Travel Associates in Rancho Mirage is the perfect compromise.
Christine and Gary Pappin, meanwhile, have worked as independent contractors at World Travel Holdings for 17 years—and sailed on 70 cruises—before taking the plunge this year and becoming franchisees themselves. “I love putting people on their dream trips; I can’t see myself doing anything else,” says Christine.
The sweetest story comes from Gary Smith, owner of Travel Perks, who finds himself this year looking at his business through a new lens.
After a couple of hard years paying a staff of employees and a slew of fixed expenses, “We’ve invested a lot,” he says. “But we are in it to build something great. When I look at my business, I ask myself, ‘What do I want to be?’ My whole philosophy is about investing for the future, building something that will last. Making money is not the lens that we look at things through. We want to double our business in the next four years—and build a business that one day our employees will take over.”
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.