Margie Lenau’s granddaughter Kaitlyn was in kindergarten when she announced she wanted to take over the family business. The Disney app would come on TV, and she would say “Grandma, grandma, look, it’s your work!”

In middle school, she was involved in a program that taught children about business. She spent a few summers there studying marketing, building marketing plans and budgets to support them. In college, she majored in business and marketing. Read the rest of this entry »

Storms are getting bigger, airplane parts are hard to come by, and the aviation industry is understaffed. So what’s a travel advisor to do when air travel is one big snafu and less dependable than ever?

To a certain extent, it depends on where your customer base is. In New York, for example, Laurie and Paul Bahna, owners of a Dream Vacations franchise in Plainview, found an easy option for taking the flying out of the equation altogether: cruising out of your home port.

“Paul and I truly believe that people are really tired of the airline cancellations,” Laurie says. “So many customers are saying that airline prices are very high and the airlines are just not consistent Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a busy time for travel advisors—perhaps the busiest in history. Everyone is trying to manage their time and balance their obligations. Given this environment, we asked travel advisers if the time they spend on industry advisory boards is still worth the effort. Not surprisingly, the answer came back: that depends on the travel advisor and the board on which they sit.

Lori Foster of Luxury Travel Associates/Dream Vacations in San Clemente, CA is one of about 10 travel advisors on Outrigger Hotels’ Southern California Advisory Council. Over the past five years Read the rest of this entry »

There was a lot of news—and a record number of travel advisors and suppliers sharing tips on how to sell land vacations—at the Avoya Land Forum in Mexico last week. Some of the numbers bordered on astounding. The biggest growth was Cindy Roller’s 216% year-to-date; the top seller, Andrew Wells, booked $1.7 million in land alone; and the top land rookie, Ana Serpa, sold $167,000 in her first nine months in business. The largest sale of the year was Carri Kersten’s $63,000 Delta vacation; the largest group was Annamaria Livdal’s, at $100,000.

It takes a village to launch a new cruise ship. Last week, 1,000 travel advisors, reporters, financiers and cruise-industry executives were joined by Jay Leno, Emeril Lagassi and Carnival Cruise Line president Christine Duffy to welcome the new Carnival Venezia to its homeport at the Manhattan Cruise Terminal.

It’s 2:00 on Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend, and I’m waiting in line at the Tip O’Neil Federal Building in Boston to pick up my replacement passport for the one I lost. For the second time in two weeks.

I’ll note that I’ve had passports for 50 years before I lost my first one last month. I know it’s in my house somewhere, as I used it to fill out a form for my Lindblad Expeditions/National Geographic cruise to British Columbia and Alaska. Then, it just disappeared.

There’s nothing like a good fam trip. A picture of you having an amazing experience on Facebook is worth its weight in marketing gold, allowing your clients to envision themselves where you are. Meanwhile, you learn the nuances that show why they need you, and make the personal friendships and connections that keep the trip on track when they do go.

When your destination is Egypt—a third-world country with an ancient infrastructure and an old-fashioned economy that suddenly finds itself a top international destination

It’s not a year to be shy about upselling, said virtually every supplier at the Avoya Travel Land Forum earlier this week. Travelers are eager to extend their land and sea vacations, and to try unique and upscale experiences. It’s up to their travel advisors to point them in the right direction—and that direction is up.

“We all want to increase the bottom line,” said Sandals senior regional sales manager Ian Braun. “Every conversation we are having we should be upselling, telling clients the things they should be doing on their next vacation.” Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been there on a Norwegian cruise; I’ve been there on a Globus coach tour. But when Lindblad Expeditions invited me on their 40th Anniversary sailing to Alaska, I knew I was in for a different kind of experience.

We sailed into the sunset on the National Geographic Venture, Lindblad’s partner since 2004, with about 80 intrepid explorers, most of them enthusiastic return guests. One lady was on her 30th cruise (and only tight finances had prevented more, she said), but most had sailed with Lindblad six or eight times before, to far-flung destinations around the globe. They promised we would experience good service, make friends with the crew, and be educated by the National Geographic scientists who trade their knowledge for free passage to remote locations. It’s a cooperative venture that works for everyone.

If you’re not part of the solution, they say, you’re part of the problem.

The travel business literally revolves around Planet Earth, and we all share a responsibility to sustain it, says Internova CEO J. D. O’Hara. To that end, the travel company is committed to becoming carbon neutral by the end of the year. And when they invited some top suppliers to talk about their own efforts to cut down carbon emissions and sustain the Earth, they also called on travel advisors to do their part to help. Read the rest of this entry »

What do you do when your passport is lost and you are cruising to Alaska in two weeks? You take any appointment that’s available at any US Passport Office, and get in your car and go.

If the closest office is in Portsmouth, NH, though, you’re in luck. Think of it as a road trip to a quaint and peaceful New England town, where the passport office is small and uncrowded, and the staff really does try to be helpful. Who cares if it is 280 miles from home, and your appointment is the day before you sail? Read the rest of this entry »

As the busy cruise seasons in Europe and Alaska begin, TRO met with a number of executives to talk about what’s new and exciting for 2023 and beyond.

AMAWaterways’ Janet Bava said the 2023 river cruise season is “going to be phenomenal,” and much of her focus will be on “the relationship with travel advisors, making sure they have the tools they need.”

Most exciting is the new destination of Colombia, where AMA ships will sail the Magdalena for the first time. Read the rest of this entry »

Start with unique itineraries and anticipatory service, add a dollop of extra-long deployments, top it with a dash of sustainable natural sourcing. And serve it with a craft liquor or healthier style cocktail. That’s the recipe for success Holland America Line president Gus Antorcha offered up at a media lunch onboard the Nieuw Amsterdam, at Seatrade Cruise Global in Fort Lauderdale this week.

There’s no business like show business, they say, and many travel advisors are finding consumer travel shows to be a great source of new customers and positive ROI.

“It’s crazy this time of year,” says Tara Bodell of Trips by Tara and Associates, taking a break from the details of her upcoming shows, two in March and one in May, to chat with me on the phone.

“I have a completely different outlook than those who say they don’t go to consumer travel shows. I love doing these shows, and it’s very worthwhile; I did seven or eight in 2022, and this year I’ll do even more. But now, I’m so busy that I was thinking maybe I need to slow down. Instead, though, I’m in the process of hiring an assistant. I’d rather do events and hire people to help me run my travel business than give up the events.”

It’s always fun and educational—and sometimes quite rewarding, for prize winners—to listen in to Vicki Freed’s Coffee Talk webinars.

A sort of travel conference in an hour, the webinars were launched by Royal Caribbean senior vice president of Sales, Trade Support and Service as a way to keep in touch with, educate and inspire travel advisors during Covid. And even now that people are back to face-to-face, they have become such an institution that she continues to hold them, albeit just once a month.

It’s kickoff season for the biggest year yet for American Cruise Lines, with more ships in more states than ever before. American Serenade, the line’s sixth riverboat, and the first two Coastal Catamarans will join the fleet. On the West Coast, American Jazz will be the first riverboat in 80 years to sail San Francisco Bay and into California Wine Country; on the East Coast, American Star will sail an eight-day Great Rivers of Florida itinerary roundtrip from Jacksonville.

If there’s one thing Lisa Watson knows after 19 years in the travel industry, it’s just how much there is to know. On Valentine’s Day, she launched a project she hopes will help travel professionals by pulling all that information together in one giant free educational resource.

FyndTravel—”where travel pros belong”—has been her mission since 2018, when she left Oasis Travel Network to go out on her own. Interrupted by Covid, she launched a beta of the FyndTravel website in 2022, and took it live just this month.

In a previous life, when Sue Peyer was director of quality for Cox Communications, part of her job was to monitor customer service calls. The company used Israeli software that turned the dialogue into text, so she could read the transcribed conversations in a Word document.

When ChatGPT came out, Peyer was curious to see how the technology had advanced and how this latest development in artificial intelligence (AI) could help her run her travel agency.

There were four interesting takeaways from the Travel Leaders Network press conference in New York last week, but this one really caught my eye: An air booking system, already in beta testing at new TLN member Avoya Travel, that holds the promise of increasing airline commissions and making it possible to build and price your own resort packages.

Also on the agenda were membership numbers that keep on growing, a new cruise booking tool, and more education around potentially profitable niches.

Lissa Caltrider was in the middle of planning a scuba trip to Costa Rica and a weekend in Santa Monica—and thinking, “Boy, I wish I could make money doing this!”—when the Instagram ad from Fora popped up. And suddenly, it seemed, there was an easy and inexpensive way to make that happen.

“I’ve always loved traveling, and I was down the rabbit hole doing all the research when I saw the ad,” Caltrider says. “It seemed like a no-risk opportunity; it seemed too good to be true. But I have a business background, and I did a lot of research. I read up on MLMs and knew I didn’t want that. So I signed up with Fora. I did the onboarding and got an IATA number. And then I first really started to learn about this business.”