With over $1 million in sales, Anna Harrison already was busy, busy, busy when her baby boy was born in December. She took a short break—but soon she was back at the helm of her agency, sleep-deprived and distracted, juggling customers and infant care. She knew that not even her traditional route to salvation, hiring part-time assistants, was going to be enough. So she jumped in with both feet, took a course by her friend, travel advisor Mary Beth Lynn, on how to hire executive assistants, and ponied up $2,000 a month to give one a try.
Six weeks since hiring one, Harrison already can’t even imagine how she got by without her. “I was doing a lot of things at night after I put the baby down—and I realized that even if I was not making mistakes, I was just not going above and beyond, the way my customers have come to expect,” she says. “This has made a huge difference in my mental health and in how my clients are feeling. It’s changed my life.”
Indeed, Lynn started her Travel Agent’s Roadmap to Assistants at Work program when she herself was averaging 50-80 hours a week taking care of her own clients. “I received a top agent award but it came at this horrible cost of impacting my personal life,” she says. “So I gave myself six months to hire an assistant and make things manageable.”
The program is designed to teach travel advisors to think like a CEO, with tips on how to find and hire an executive assistant. And if you’d like help, they have a partner agency that can find one for you.
To hold down the cost, Harrison went for a virtual assistant in the Philippines; she pays the agency and they take care of everything. “This is not someone I am sending little tasks to,” she notes. Like any assistant to a CEO, her new right hand checks things every morning and lets Harrison know at the end of the day that they are done. She reaches out to clients if something is missing from their file; she does social media scheduling; she creates commission reports and follows up; she sends out final payment reminders; she drafts emails and leaves them for Harrison to review. She even designs final travel documents and puts them into Travefy. And because she is in the Philippines, she is happy to work 1 pm to 10 pm, “which is great because I can shoot her a text and say, ‘Hey can you help me with this real quick?’ or ‘I’m going to bed, can you do this?’ and in the morning it will be ready.”
To help train her (and various previous assistants), Harrison created a video library, taping herself doing various tasks: how to ask a hotel to VIP a guest, confirm restaurant reservations, remind clients to send in flight information, run a booking report, verify flights and check client seats.
“As entrepreneurs, we all think our business is our baby, and we’re afraid someone else may mess it up,” she says. But with a real new baby of her own, she has come to accept that “we all taught ourselves how to do these things. There’s no reason not to pass that knowledge along.”
Going the IC Route
At Andavo Travel in Salt Lake City, meanwhile, the focus is on independent contractors (ICs) rather than assistants. Building on its relationship with Virtuoso, the host agency has added seven newer-to-the industry independent contractors in recent months and put them through its own training program, headed by its new professional development manager, former IC Nikki Miner.
New travel advisors who come through the Virtuoso outreach program must pass a series of three to five interviews at Andavo, designed to determine whether they are a good fit for selling luxury and for being entrepreneurs, then take the Virtuoso training programs and then two additional layers of training under Miner over six to nine months. They focus on general industry terminology, how to work with suppliers, the multiple ways to make a booking, standard operating procedures for their business—plus one-on-one coaching by Miner whenever they need help.
Andavo reaches out to offer interviews to about 10% of the leads it gets from Virtuoso, Miner says, and about 1% of those join as an IC. Right now there are five ICs in the new-to-the-industry program, which started in April, “from all walks of life,“ including everything from stay-at-home moms to second careers.
“We can’t have 20 people in the program if I meet with them once a week for individualized training; you can’t just say it’s on the internet, go find it. So we are selective in whom we bring on,” she says.
The program costs $4,000, and includes the Virtuoso training; registration for VCTA, Virtuoso’s in-person training; and a one-year membership in ASTA. “This is not for someone looking for a side hustle,” she notes. “We are investing in them, and we can tell pretty quickly if they are thinking like a business owner. Do they have a name for the business? A domain name for their email? Some have a business plan or a marketing plan. We look at where they have traveled and where they stay when they travel, and if they currently book for friends and family, what do they book?”
In all, Andavo has between 100 and 130 ICs, and perhaps another 30 or 40 sub-agents.
On a Smaller Scale
For Tammi Ruffini, meanwhile, onboarding three new ICs since February has taken a total of about two hours of her time, thanks to a unique mentoring plan she developed with her existing staff. When one mentioned that she had a friend who wanted to become a travel advisor, Ruffini’s first reaction was that she simply didn’t have time to train a newcomer to the industry—but perhaps the advisor would be willing to train her friend herself?
Today Ruffini’s agency, Envision Travel, has three mentors from her existing staff, each training one new IC in exchange for 25% of any commissions the mentees earn; Ruffini and Nexxion also get a share. Each newcomer must take the Nexxion training course, but beyond that there is no charge for the mentorship program. At the end of the year, as the need for training wanes, they will sit down together and consider a new split, Ruffini says. But for now, everyone seems happy.
Perhaps the easiest onboarding was that of Cheerie Dorris. Dorris spent about a dozen years as a certified vacation planner for Royal Caribbean, selling cruises to her own customer base as a sort of in-house travel advisor, before the pandemic got her thinking about starting Cheerie Travel LLC.
She spent months interviewing a score of host agencies and franchise companies before settling on Avoya—and then rushed through the training program in seven days “because I already had clients waiting to book.”
Her first year in business, she was Avoya’s Rookie of the Year; by the second, in October and November 2022, she brought on four of her former RCCL colleagues as independent consultants. The team sold just over $1.4 million in travel in 2022, about 95% of it cruises. Then they sold $1 million in the first quarter of this year alone, and Dorris expects to hit $3 million before 2023 is out, including for the first time land vacations. “Our goal in land was $100,000—and we’ve already blown that away,” she says.
Dorris knows she was lucky to have a built-in base of ICs from her teammates at Royal Caribbean to bring on board. They all know how to sell cruises, and they live in the same town, making it easy to hold monthly meetings and share marketing ideas, talk about the struggle they are having with suppliers and work out schedules to back one another up when someone is traveling. Because they were used to working in a lead-based environment, they have adapted easily to the Avoya system.
“I told them, when they came onboard, that this is not like being a paid employee. They were not going to get rich; the first year is hard because you book and do not get paid—you need to have savings built up until you get those commissions,” she says.
Her personal sales are up in 2023, but she also is spending a lot of time managing the group. But is it rewarding? Absolutely, she says.
Dillon Guyer has added eight people to his team over the past two years, most of them cruise lovers he has met at sea. “I try to find people who want to focus on a specific market or product. I have one that focuses only on cruise, some that focus on honeymoons, etc.” He offers his own personal training and a set of documents he has put together, such as “What Would Dillon Say?”. Group chats allow them to talk among themselves and earn from one another.
“I let them be them,” he says. “I don’t micromanage.”
Even beyond the ICs, he has a larger team that offers support—“a great lawyer helping me write up agreements that detail commission payments, dates, responsibilities, what happens if you commit fraud, a mistake, etc. etc. and making sure my LLC is valid; a great CPA making sure I have everything coming in and going our correctly; a great insurance agent.”
In short, be they ICs or employees, assistants or lawyers, “It takes an incredible team to make a travel agency a success,” Guyer says.
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.
