We have previously discussed the need to train clients. Let’s revisit the discussion. It is not an exaggeration to indicate the success or failure of your travel business will depend on the extent to which you are capable of taking charge of your client relationships and professionally leading them into behavior conducive to traveling safely and well.
Top travel professionals train their clients to be good clients. Training your client assists both you and the client to achieve optimal results from every travel planning effort. At the outset of the relationship, these great travel professionals set expectations. They explain to their clients the services that a travel consultant performs and how the client benefits from those services. Educating the client becomes an ongoing project. By demystifying travel the agent provides the client with base knowledge from which to more confidently operate and feel empowered.
More importantly, however, a good travel consultant will also establish the role and responsibilities of the client, up front. The client becomes a full and active partner in the relationship. In the initial interview, expectations are set on topics ranging from open communication to the necessity to have payments in on time. This early work sets the tone of a professional relationship. These agents anticipate the problems that might arise and address them from the outset. Introducing a firm control at the beginning of the relationship allows the agents we interviewed to demand behaviors of clients that assisted in the efficiency and accuracy of the entire planning, booking and follow-up process. By demanding that the client be an active participant, the work load is properly distributed and the clients are more fully engaged in the success of the partnership.
Don’t misunderstand what training is all about. Training is absolutely essential to any relationship. We train our animals, our life partners and our co-workers. We teach people how to act and respond in the relationship. If you fail to do so, then you are likely to be unhappy with some of the responses you receive and may even blame others. Remember, you are the professional in the relationship. Lead your client professionally and responsibly.
A well-trained client stands a far better chance of being a happy client. Expectations are well grounded, the relationship is established and based on trust. Infuse your travel practice with a plan to train each and every client to be a life-long client, and they might just be.
Your Clients are Civilians
Your clients will be misleading. Most often, they will do so unintentionally, but they will give you bad intelligence and then expect you to work with it. If you are not careful, you find yourself sending clients off to invade the wrong country. It can happen.
Clients do not always know what they want. They say they do. The truth, however, is clients are influenced by advertising, by word of mouth, by friends and other resources that do not take into consideration the real needs of this particular individual.
Your client is a civilian. You are the professional. That’s why it’s important for you to take charge of the relationship and lead them to where they need to arrive.
The very reason clients come to a travel consultant is for advice. It is very seldom that a client knows exactly what they want, even if the client says they do. Many clients will come to an agent with the destination in hand, with the hotel and dates picked out in advance. They can be SO convincing! If not careful, the agent picks up the phone and makes the booking without ever discussing the rationale for the decision with the client. The client arrives at the destination and the hotel property is a total mis-match for the client. It looked good in the brochures, but the reality is far from picture-perfect. To top it off, it happens to be the rainy season and the client has been outside to golf only once since they arrived. Who does the client blame? The agent of course. Why? Because the agent is at fault!
Don’t let clients use you like an online booking engine. You are a travel advisor. Your profession is one of consultation, and that very fact is a key differentiator from the large, on-line travel agencies and booking engines. Slow down the process to one of questions and answers even when the client comes to you with travel plans in hand. How did the client choose the destination? What do they want to do while they are there? Why are they going in November? What does the client want from this vacation? With whom are they traveling? Why this hotel? Each of these questions gets closer to uncovering the reasons the client wants to travel. The travel consultant’s job is to assist the client in making a good purchasing decision. If the agent does not assist the client in asking the right questions, there is no value-add by the agent. The client may have as well booked online and taken their chances.
Suppliers do an excellent job of marketing their product. From the perspective of a couch, every cruise looks enticing. Every escorted tour looks like the trip of a lifetime. The reality, however, is it takes a professional to find the perfect match between client and product. That is the real value of the travel consultant – matching exactly the right trip to the right client, and doing so from a professional platform of good research resources. Performed in this manner, travel consulting is a valuable service, one that cannot be replicated online, or by a client operating on their own.