Our latest cover story is focused on group travel, and one of the quotes in the story stood out to me.
“Let’s say you’re planning for a group of 50, versus a honeymoon couple that you might traditionally plan for,” said Brian Jewell, executive editor of The Group Travel Leader, a publication about group travel. “You don’t do 25 times the work for that group of 50 — you might do two or three times the amount of work when you plan a group as you did for that honeymoon couple, but then you get 25 times the amount of revenue.”
Jewell makes a great point. Many travel advisors are intimidated by group travel, thinking, “If I have this much work for one client, imagine how much work I’ll have to do for a group of 20 or more.”
But although planning for a group might be more work, the rewards can be many times those for a single client. Simply put, the benefit vastly outweighs the extra work. By focusing on the rewards instead of the challenges, you might have a better mindset from the start.
Speaking of group travel, TravelAge West is proud to announce the call for entries in our annual Trendsetter Awards for travel advisors. Every year, we ask agents to send in their success stories in a variety of categories, including Best Group Booking Effort; Best Use of Social Media; Best Targeted Marketing Idea; and Upward Bound, Rockstar Advisor Under 40. This year, we have added a fifth award: Saving the Day, which will acknowledge what an advisor did to save a trip from disaster.
Once we have selected two finalists in each category, we honor them at our annual WAVE Awards gala in Los Angeles in June. The winners and runners-up are profiled in a future issue of TravelAge West, and they win great travel prizes from our sponsors. So, go ahead and let us know what makes you a Trendsetter (learn more here).
