Group Mentality

Travel agent Susan Tanzman, of Martin’s Travel & Tours in Los Angeles, works out at the women-only fitness center, Curves. The atmosphere is chummy and supportive the kind of place where the gals can commiserate about saddlebag thighs and cranky bosses. It’s the perfect setting for Tanzman to do one of the things she does best: sell group travel.

“I went to the owner and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we did this?’ And she said, ‘Fabulous!’”

“This” was a three-day ocean cruise out of San Pedro, Calif., aboard Royal Caribbean’s Monarch of the Seas. To give this trip-to-nowhere a purpose beyond 72 hours of wanton self-indulgence, Tanzman suggested a $25 surcharge on each ticket, with proceeds going to one of her favorite charities, the Revlon breast cancer run/walk.

Curves members loved the idea of mixing fun and philanthropy. The Monarch set sail on March 5 carrying 28 members of the fitness club, plus the franchise owner and three employees. Tanzman paid her own way, but in return got a much-needed mini-vacation, a nice commission check and a bunch of new names for her database.

“Selling groups is really fun,” said Tanzman, who estimates that about 25 percent of her business involves group travel.

Fun and profitable. Travel professionals say that agents who aren’t doing group travel whether it’s sending a bridal party to Los Cabos or the country club golfers to Pebble Beach are ignoring an aspect of the business with a huge profit potential. Group travel can generate fat commission checks and attractive markups. What’s more, groups are like living, breathing organisms that can replicate themselves year after year or spin off smaller groups.

“I have a group leaving on Friday for a three-day cruise. Fifty-seven members of the same family, and they are already talking about doing a seven-day cruise later on,” Tanzman said. “My head is just spinning. I could triple what I just made on this one.”

For many agents, group travel is as much a necessity as a fun niche.
“With the outlook in our industry, group travel seems to be becoming more and more the predominant thing in order to make a financial success of a business,” said Badonna Retin, of Northridge Travel in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley.

However, Retin acknowledges that group travel has its own challenges.

“Anyone who says a group isn’t any harder than a couple has never done a group,” said Els Delanoy, of Brea Travel in Orange County, Calif., where she organizes trips for lady golfers age 60 and older.

A successful trip involves hard work, creativity and sometimes financial risk.

“But when people see the earnings potential, they love you for it,” said Adrian Rops, sales manager for CIE Tours International, which offers commissions as high as 19 percent for agents who bring in 40 passengers or more for the company’s escorted motorcoach tours to Ireland and Great Britain.
For agents who haven’t already gotten into group travel, there’s no time like the present. In the United States alone, group travel represents a $36 billion a year industry, according to a survey by the Travel Industry Association (TIA) in conjunction with ASTA and Group Leaders of America. Family travel is especially hot: A 2004 ASTA survey of travel agents found that family bookings are up nearly 20 percent since Sept. 11.

Meanwhile, high-tech tools are making it easier for travel agents to cope with the complicated logistics of group travel. Club Med’s new online booking engine allows agents to make travel arrangements around the clock, bypassing the hold button at the call center. Built exclusively for travel agents, the Web-based tool provides access to live inventory, promotional pricing and air-inclusive packages.

Get Out There
You can wait for the phone to ring and wait, and wait or you can hustle.

The experts recommend that you look for congenial groups of people who enjoy traveling. Start by focusing on your own areas of interest. If you’re studying French or art history at night, query your classmates to find out how many would be up for a week of museum-hopping in Paris. If you’re a golfer, ask the local pro if he or she would be interested in accompanying a group.

“I met one guy early in life who made a ton of money selling trips to people who were antique clock collectors,” said Horst Engel, president of VIP Travel in Brea, Calif., which is part of the company owned by Delanoy and her husband, George. “I learned from him that even the weirdest thing lends itself to a special-interest trip.”

To come up with ideas for group trips, Engel plays a word-association game.

“You give me a word and I’ll give you a trip for it. Motorcycles. If my buddy read a motorcycle magazine, I’d say, ‘Let’s have the magazine sponsor a motorcycle trip to Europe.’ Or, sailboats. ‘What about going to Honolulu and watching the Transpacific Race?’ You have to be creative,” he said.

Kerri Jaye, marketing and sales director for the West Coast office of tour operator Apple Vacations, has partnered for several years with a radio station to sponsor a group trip to Hawaii. The trip is tied to a performance by a band with a strong following among radio station listeners. The radio station handles the advertising while Jaye takes care of the arrangements. The relationship between Jaye’s office and the radio station started with a cold call to the station, Jaye said.

Tanzman focuses on selling what she loves. A diehard USC football fan, the longtime travel agent once advertised a trip to watch USC in the Orange Bowl by passing out flyers in the parking lot of the Los Angeles Coliseum. Her son, a fellow Trojans fan, talked up the trip in an Internet chat room for fans.

“We ended up taking 26 people with us to the Orange Bowl,” Tanzman said.

Pounding the pavement is great, but what if you’re stuck in the office or don’t have the salesmanship skills for it?

Review your database with an eye toward identifying people who have similar interests and might travel well together, recommends Beverly Auerbach, vice president of A Marketing Perspective, a travel-marketing consultancy in Santa Monica, Calif. Then select an agreeable destination and determine the price. Pitch your trip at an in-office event or over a meal at a local restaurant. Follow up with telephone calls, letters or E-mails.

Wine lover Shirley Rosiak of TravelStore in Palos Verdes, Calif., and past president of South Bay Women in Travel, has escorted groups of seven or eight couples on barge trips through French wine country for six years. She locates names among wine aficionados in her own database. Since barges involve living in close quarters, Rosiak selects people with whom she’s friendly outside the office. One couple will often invite another, so Rosiak doesn’t usually have problems filling her passenger list.

Find a Pied Piper ... Or become One
The best “Pied Pipers” (people who tend to draw others to their ideas) are those who already have a following: college professors and presidents, football coaches, museum curators anyone who is charismatic, has a particular field of expertise and loves to travel makes a good group leader. But a travel agent who possesses those qualities can fill in just as well, experts say.

In the travel business for more than four decades, Engel is outgoing, affable and comfortable talking to anybody about just about anything. Clients sign on to his group trips year after year because they enjoy traveling with him and trust his judgment. Usually, he’s the only Pied Piper he needs.

When Auerbach got into the travel business, she thought she was too shy to lead groups.

“I found out that I wasn’t,” she said.

To find out if an agent is equal to the task, Auerbach suggests this test: “‘What if this was a group of your friends and they came to your city? Would you feel comfortable showing them around your favorite places?’ If the answer is yes, they’re probably fine.”

Sell Value, Not Price

Engel puts together about a dozen trips a year for alumni from small liberal arts colleges. His clients aren’t looking for the cheapest price they’re looking for a fabulous experience and good value for their money.

“The message we got early on from the traveler was, ‘Look, Horst, what we’re looking for is top of the line. Give us a really good trip, don’t mess around, include the gratuities, include the drinks, and don’t try to make it look cheap. Make it good.’”

Engel recommends taking the time and effort that you might have spent trying to keep the price down and focusing instead on offering value that will keep clients coming back year after year.

“I have people who say to me, ‘Horst, this trip is so expensive. I don’t know where we can come up with the money,’” he said. “Then they come back and say, ‘We’re amazed it didn’t cost more!’”

If your target group is worried about breaking the bank, you may be going after the wrong type of traveler, says Engel.

“Think of yourself as the local Mercedes dealer,” he said. “Nobody is going to accuse a Mercedes dealer of ripping them off for selling a $30,000 car.”

Know Your Clients
One of the biggest mistakes that agents make is to pitch packaged tours to travelers looking for a one-of-a-kind experience, Engel said.

“Rather than walk in with our big portfolio of 200 trips, we’ll walk in with a blank sheet of paper and say, ‘What do you guys really like to do?’” he said. “Then we do a totally customized trip. No two are the same.”

Retin books most of her group trips on cruises. Long before the ship sails, she and her husband, Ron, also a travel agent, host an informal dinner at their Northridge home for the entire group. Over coffee and cookies after dinner, “we talk about what they want to do and what they expect to see, what are their priorities, their hobbies, their interests.”

The Retins use details from these relaxed conversations to create meaningful shore excursions that they offer clients in place of the mass-market side trips offered by the cruise line.

When planning excursions, use your imagination, Engel added. On a trip to Thailand, Engel got his group of cooking buffs invited into the kitchen at a Four Seasons.

“You’ve got to go at it from the idea that, ‘We can do anything that you guys want to do,’” he said.

Stick to a Marketing Plan
Developing a marketing plan is easy; following it is the hard part, Auerbach says. After pitching a group trip, Auerbach recommends at least five “touches” in the form of follow-up letters, E-mails or telephone calls.

“Sending out the same screaming yellow flyer five times doesn’t count,” she warned.

Use your imagination and put your writing skills to work, she adds. Bring your destination alive by passing along photos, postcards and testimonials from visitors. Don’t mention Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple without telling potential clients why this architectural wonder is a must-see.

Do something to make your “touches” stand out in a crowded inbox, Auerbach adds.

“I was the organizer for a convention here in L.A. About every five or six days, I would send out a short piece full of interesting facts about Los Angeles. One was ‘Fifteen Things to Do for Free in Los Angeles’ and another was ‘Things You Never Knew about L.A.’ I call it my teaser tactic,” she said.

Partner with a tour operator to advertise your trip. After receiving an initial deposit ($500 for land only or $1,000 for land and air), CIE Tours International will split advertising costs 50-50 with the travel agent. The firm also supplies free of charge 6- by 9-inch postcards.

Travel With Your Group
Retin never sends a group out alone. On a recent cruise of East Asia, two disasters engine problems and the suicide of a crew member caused the ship to miss a port call in Vietnam. It happened to be the country that her group was most excited about seeing.

Retin swung into action. She sent E-mails to the cruise line, her shore-excursion wholesalers and her office back home. She made sure the group stayed focused on enjoying the remainder of the trip.

“If I hadn’t been there, they would have been lost,” she said.

The missed port and the crew member’s death could have cast a pall over the group. Instead, “they came back and said, ‘When are we going again?’” Retin recalled.

Accompanying a group isn’t always possible or practical. In those cases, it’s especially important to find a good tour operator.

“The best ones are the ones that just don’t show you the sights, they show you what’s going on behind the scenes. They’ll sit down at breakfast with you and say, ‘This is what is going on in this country,’” Auerbach said.

Surprise Your Group
Auerbach recently led a group to Cambodia and Laos. In the trip’s waning days, as the group relaxed after dinner, Auerbach presented each traveler with a small gift that she had purchased on the sly that afternoon during a visit to a weaver’s workshop. The intricately woven weavings were worth every penny in terms of good will created within the group, she said.

Engel rented an entire aquarium in Cape Town, South Africa, for his group to celebrate the last night of their trip. He hired a flautist and harpist to perform in front of a giant shark tank. The image of the harpist plucking the strings as the seaweed swayed in the tank behind her was one that his travelers won’t quickly forget.

“You’ve got to make it special,” added Engel.