(Part 2 of 2. For two more great ideas, see Nine Great Ideas for 2024: Travel Advisors Share New Agendas for the New Year | Travel Research Online. I know that’s 10 in all, I’ve added one more since last week!)
It’s going to be a busy year, travel advisors say. While for some the focus is on building their client base, making it more profitable, or marketing to new customers, others say their biggest challenge in 2024 is time management.
At Cruise Planners-The Zeneri Team, Melissa Shanks is looking more to grow her high-end customer base through a luxury travel club she is organizing with two of her associates. The Explorer Society will meet once a quarter, each time introducing “a couple of new trips, aiming for extraordinary experiences, luxury level service and amenities,” each accompanied by her and one associate. The first trip will be to Italy with CIE, on its new Italy itinerary.
“Typically when you do a land tour you get on a bus and travel across a region; you ride in the bus and stay in a hotel and tour, and then you do it again and again. But on this new CIE itinerary, we stay in the same resort in Monpecacini the whole week and do day trips to Pisa, Florence and Tuscany. Then at the end, I put together a Railbookers trip so we will go by train to Milan and then Lucerne, and then to Zurich to fly home, 13 days in all.”
The trip sold out, at 30 guests plus Shanks, before the group’s first meeting. At the next meeting, in February, she will present a British Isles cruise and an Azamara cruise to Iceland and the fjords. After that, she will offer “some land and some sea, and vary the destinations so if they repeat travel they will want to go on every trip.”
Shanks is hardly alone in focusing on luxury clients for 2024. Jen Charles at Dream Vacations · Johnson & Wales University vows to “never do a wedding again, they are not worth the energy and the stress, and I’m turning away Vegas and Florida too and only taking referrals.”
Lynn Hutchison is “specifically asking for referrals” from high-end customers, trying to focus on adding new luxury suppliers and planning some trips she herself will attend. “Luxury travel is about referrals, it’s about a comfort level,” she says. (Though still, she acknowledges, 39% of her new clients in 2023 came from Google My Business—”an epiphany to me.”)
Jeni Chaffer at thought she had a pretty good idea about time blocking when she presented it at a Destination Weddings and Honeymoon Specialist Association conference—but she really didn’t expect people to come up and say she changed their lives. She does agree, though, that setting boundaries and blocking time on your calendar can keep a travel advisor from the dreaded burnout, and let you run your business instead of having your business run you.
In 2024 she’ll be running small group sessions to help people come up with their own ideas on where to set their boundaries and what’s important as far as time. (She charges $495 for six sessions.)
Here’s some free advice from Chaffer:
“I do not answer the phone; that’s one of my biggest boundaries, and I release the guilt around that,” she says. “I have certain times set to answer calls, and if you want to have one we schedule a time.”
Of course, true emergencies occur, but in her initial consultation with customers she outlines her office hours and sets the parameters. Now she has let her assistants go; using these principles “has made all the difference in my happiness and my business,” she says. Sales are about the same as before she started doing this in 2022, but she has higher quality clients now, and has raised her fees twice.
“For me what’s important is the level of stress and happiness, the additional time I have in every day or every week—and putting in these parameters has definitely helped with my personal travel. My turnaround for phone calls is 48 hours, emails are 24 hours within business hours. I have office hours six days a week but I’m off Friday, Saturday afternoon and evening, and all day Sunday. I do a lot of weddings and honeymoons, and I need those few hours on Saturday morning to meet with couples.”
Taking a New Look at Marketing
Unhappy with the conversion rates returns from social media, Dawn Nowlan at Nowlan Travel by Dream Vacations has been asking clients where they would like to go and then matching them with promotions from just those locations. Still, the most successful ones are when she posts that she is going somewhere and asks who wants to come along. “I have more followers on Facebook but I get more business on Instagram,” she says.
Scott Irish is taking his first steps into artificial intelligence with Toby, TRO’s version of ChatGPT, which he now uses to help write an introductory letter to new clients and a bon voyage letter before clients set off on their trips. “Toby is trained for the travel industry, which helps very much, and I like the branding aspect; if I’m writing a blog or an email it automatically adds my contact information and branding information at the end,” he says.
He’s also been using vsCreate to generate art for the LGBTQ customers in whom he specializes. “It’s very difficult to find stock photos I can use, but with vsCreate I can write out a prompt describing what I want—such as ‘four guys in the LGBTQ community dancing in a night club in Ibiza’ and generate a photo in about 20 seconds.”
And after about 18 months as a travel advisor, mostly selling independent European travel and ocean cruises, Jared Wexler, owner of LOVE LV TRAVEL, will be putting together his first-ever river cruise—by sailing on one for the first time, and inviting his customers along. As of now, his group of 17 will sail Viking Gersemi down the Rhine on August 8.
So what has he learned so far about groups? “I’ve learned that sometimes it’s easier to say, ‘This is when the trip is’ rather than, ‘When would you like to travel?’ And I’ve learned that when you market one group, you can sell river cruises on the same itinerary but different dates,” he says.
A Place for Education
Teri Hurley is trying to give back through Travel Professionals Exchange & Education, a not-for-profit “educational group of screened agents” for whom she sources “everything from industry information to business principles and practices, networking, etc. I try to put together a couple of fams each year that are not the cookie-cutter industry dime-a-dozen fams, or ‘businesses’ charging insane pricing and making a living off of other agents.”
Mary Barrett at Cruise Brothers has a higher goal: “trying to educate the public about the benefits of using a travel agent. I’m going to start putting a post on all my social media accounts about the benefits of using a travel advisor maybe one a week.”
But Paula McCarty of Travel Smart with Paula, an affiliate of Montecito Village Travel, is taking that one step farther: she has started a certification program for her clients, in conjunction with her BDMs.
“We agents are always in training and taking certifications—and I want educated clients, too! I’m pushing this out to my clients who truly want to get educated. There’s no fee, and upon completion of eight modules, they get a bonus comp from me,” she says.
What are you up to in 2024? TRO is always looking for interesting stories about travel advisors. Email Cheryl any time at crosentravel.com.
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.
