Empower your Travel Agency — Generate the Revenue You Hope For

The 2024/2025 travel market appears strong for travel agencies and tour operators, but are they all too passive and hesitant about growing their businesses and raising revenues?

Some agencies I’ve been watching and studying have similar problems:

• their value proposition isn’t clear, fully credible and unique, and the offers are a little weak
• this makes their marketing and promotional efforts less effective and lead-conversion lower
• they’re very vulnerable to losing the long-term customers they rely on due to competitor’s reach
• they lack a worthy SEO and content strategy — and continue a weak presence online
• their website isn’t all that attractive
• their brand is developed enough so it just doesn’t compete with the slick promise of the big agencies
• they lack travel videos that involve their staff or a key travel ambassador to represent their brand –  they don’t walk the walk
• their content efforts are minimal, ostensibly to stretch out marketing dollars
• their content lacks breadth, depth, richness or interesting travel stories customers can engage with
• they don’t travel enough and report the joy of travel that an agency sells
• their promotion is weak, thus making them look half-hearted at business

⛵ I often use nautical themes in my posts to describe how businesses flounder waiting for market winds and waves to move them. Yet the problem with that is in how it doesn’t flow into the idea of empowerment. I can’t say “get the paddles out and start paddling.” How do you get out of a life raft in the middle of the Pacific theme meaningfully?  We can shift to a jet-powered aeronautical theme!

🚀 It brings forth the big issue with small travel business owners — being stuck, disempowered, watching their energy and money dissipate while keeping the status quo alive.  The metaphors we actually need now revolve around rockets, launching, thrust, captains, confidence, leadership, spending, prosperity and meeting expectations.

Energizing your new success means stimulating confidence to be that captain and taking control of your aircraft. You’re taking your customers on trips to exciting places and the more you bring on board the better. The concept is of you being the leader, leveraging technology and market opportunities to be the go-to agency — the only agency they’ll ever want.

So, let’s get you powered up!

The Perfect Storm of Business Boosting Trends

Americans, Canadians, Europeans and Asians still have the pandemic revenge travel bug. The US domestic travel scene will be growing strongest due to rising American wages, increased US domestic travel, US-powered investment, repatriation of business, degulation, lower interest rates and lower taxes and lower fuel costs. Foreign travelers are already intensely interested in traveling to the new US political environment, knowing this country is launching into something big.

And will you be reaching them all, making an impact and capturing them as your new customer?

The promising US 5-year travel market forecast makes sense. From cruises, to driving trips, to eco-nature adventures and urban recreation vacations, the breadth of this new market is awesome. The more slices of new markets you capture, the better.

Developing a Team that Can Compete Strongly

If you haven’t set sail on next year’s marketing budget, you might consider hiring a freelance travel marketer — someone who is excited about building a career in travel, travel content production, and travel promotion and is willing to live the travel dream — effectively for its marketing value.  You’ll enjoy affordability, dedication, one single point of contact and rare, creative talent, and specialist expertise (in many marketing facets). The key points: expertise and integration.

While “in office” is the current rage, 2025 will see a return to intense competition and lower margins.  Advertising rates will return to normal, wages and staff turnover will rise, and there will be more new startup agencies and travel management software providers arriving. The hunt for exceptional producers will be on.

Reviewing What the Wind in your Sales Is

Market forces may provide the wind in your sales, but it’s the quality of your value proposition that powers your vessel so you can disregard the prevailing wins, making profit in any weather.

Some agency owners’ might say their key to success is great branding, customer loyalty, spirited enduring personal connections with customers along with strong promotion. Others would give the nod to talented, engaging staff — the people who are intimately dedicated to your company’s success.

It’s time to evolve and make content marketing your number one priority. It’s a digital travel world and you need to dominate it.

Keys to Generating New Customers

🔑 So, to cut to the engagement keys, here is how you might encourage creativity and staff engagement to improve marketing:

• create your branding, content and social media strategy document to get all staff focused on your promotion mission
• review your customer/client engagement strategy and objectives
• commit to engagement as both a sales, loyalty and marketing improvement
• review your sales dialogs and find ways to build more color into your conversations but be more brand-focused
• have them more natural and focused on the joy of travel in conversations rather than business communication
• don’t be a transaction tool, but instead a credible travel buddy who take joy in their specific quest
• ask the traveler more about the trip they visualize to learn more about the specifics of why they’re traveling (only a few well-formed questions so it’s not annoying)
  • ask how they found your company
  • ask what they like most about a travel agency
  • ask them, what the perfect trip is for them
  • ask them how you can help them make this trip successful
  • ask them what promotional/marketing content really excited them
  • ask them what their impression of your company is
  • express appreciation for their thoughts and wishes
• record on paper, after customer calls, key information provided to help online marketing strategy
• have staff review traveler personas to get a deeper feel for the people they’re speaking to — and what their joy of travel is

Capturing the Traveler’s Joy of Travel in the Intended Trip

I am not an expert in agent/customer conversations, however, as a traveler, I really like being treated as a person the travel agent appreciates knowing, addresses me by my first name, and cares what my desired trip is all about. It’s not validation. The joy of the pre-trip experience (IMHO) is in how everything in my trip is harmoniously connected, people, apps, itineraries, and that it matches my travel experience intent. — that it’s a certain success.

The Challenge of Human Talent

Generally, but not always, when company owners, marketing managers and CEO’s contact me, they’re struggling with visibility, traffic and leads. That’s the surface issue, but deeper in, it might be they lack engagement and promotional talent. That’s a talent/desire to create interesting content that creates conversations with customers, positions the brand warmly yet seriously, and makes it one that occupies a wonderful part of their life. This is what we need to do: create great travel content.

Dedication, Enthusiasm & Joy for Pleasant Sailing

When you hire a marketing agency, there’s no guarantee they have the drive, interest, industry talent, dedication, and open-ended outlook to add value, to create certain victory or an enjoyable journey.

The advantage of in-house wasn’t about forcing staff to put 8 hours in. Instead, it was about nurturing their expertise, skills and more and bringing people together to share ideas and build skills. In small businesses, key talent carry a lot of weight. That might include the software developer, marketing manager, content creator, agents, or a CEO wearing many hats.   So finding key talent is essential, since it takes the load off of you, and becomes a reliable and powerful asset.

Pivoting on Good Talent

The value of versatile freelance talent is in how they can objectively study and understand your brand, product, customer market, and how to support your whole agency team. Working with a travel marketing specialist helps your staff connect with clarity to one single point of contact. This helps get the goals, content and messaging across better — less confusion and time waste.

With this arrangement, your staff feel more involved (because I make them feel important). There is less confusion and each staff member understands better how they can help the marketing and promotion effort.  Their contribution is very important.  With their engagement increased, this whole theme of “the joy of travel” is better delivered to customers. Because in the end, your agency sells the joy of travel. Joyful good feelings is the deliverable.

Let’s Talk about the Ways Your Company Can Out-Compete Big Travel Companies

Here are some recruiting/selection/managing criteria to help Power up your Marketing:

• Capture and develop your travel writer talent: Yes, acquiring and developing marketing talent with skills in reaching and impacting travelers (Content quality and elite-level SEO are essential).
• Capture a great Search engine optimizer: you can beat big companies on long tail keyword searches (e.g., multiday tours of Tuscany Italy for seniors) and present authentic, real-world immersion with real people including your travel content creator.
• Capture talent with marketing audit and strategy skills: You can never have enough insight and ability to contribute to your marketing strategy (See my 8 in 1 marketing audit).
• Capture and develop creative content creators: whether via stories or travel videos, painting a compelling journey from right now to after they return so they’re fully immersed from beginning to end. (It might be better to outsource video design/creation so you have a professional quality product to share and use in campaigns.
• Capture key niches: identify them precisely then strategize timely, creative content campaigns to dominate audience perceptions and desirability of a destination (build out your own special branded experience for a destination, thus taking control of the destination in consumer’s minds). Many destinations don’t sell themselves well anymore because they try to everything to everyone, thus you can “own the destination” online with your stylish alternative view.
• Building brand:  your content creator/copywriter creates a brand of their own, one that makes your business brand even more irresistible and personally relevant. Find one who wants to create a personal brand, almost like your own travel influencer, and resonates with your brand, as one who embodies your brand.
• Capture hearts and emotions: touch on traveler’s pain points with stories, insights, authentic photos, experiences, from your travel writer who makes destinations a truly compelling adventure. Work with them to capture the spirit and joy of travel, because you are selling the joy of travel.
• Capture a social media enthusiast:  who will spread the enthusiasm, splendor, and value of your brand and your vacation experiences to your targeted destinations. They will start conversations and pull readers into your generated events, stories, and perspectives.
• Support your talent and ask them to improve: evaluate their work with an eye to make it much more effective. Your talent need feedback, and a willingness to help them improve themselves, grow, and achieve market-leading results.

Think Big with Big Picture Thinking!

At this point, winning against big companies is all theory and bravado. However, if you hire well, and picture yourself and staff as empowered travel geniuses, you’ll become exactly that. It’s the power of visualization.

Think deeply about the need to be excellent, ever-improving, and well-supported. Read more about travel content strategy and the tools that power up sales results.

📞 Contact Gord at 416 998 6246 for a free review of your travel company’s digital marketing opportunities and how my affordable, powerful approach will work.