Active travel and journey tours are booming markets with massive profit potential for journey advisors. Adventure suppliers say they need to help journey advisors grow their sales, but there are demanding situations.
Fully 87% of journey excursion operators, in a survey of suppliers with the Adventure Travel Trade Association (ATTA), stated they work with travel advisors. However, over half of the suppliers said sellers had generated less than 30% of their 2018 income.
On the plus side, adventure tour operators stated they valued journey dealers’ function as a “sales arm extension” that helps distribute their merchandise and expose them to target audiences, even bringing a non-public contact to customer interactions.
However, providers stated that travel sellers’ loss of vacation spot specialization and adventure product understanding became an obstacle. Another terrible way excursion operators turned into “confusion or frustration” stemming from partial data or misinformation being communicated to the client and the excursion operator via retailers promoting their products.
Those were among the findings of the Travel Leaders Companion Survey Digest, which became carried out online using ATTA in the past due 2018 due to higher expertise journey operators’ dating with travel dealers and growing adventure travel income through the agent channel.
Foundational steps to boom
How can tour advisors promote their merchandise more highly? Suppliers inside the survey counseled that travel advisors take three steps:
Become more familiar with their merchandise, destinations, and activities;
Experience their products and destinations firsthand;
Promote supplier journeys and offerings more efficaciously by using activities, social media, and other online marketing channels, including enterprise websites.
Product and destination know-how is important due to the product’s character and the fact that active-adventure clients will likely have done quite a few studies before consulting you.
If you’re starting, an easy way to familiarize yourself with journey travel products and suppliers is by taking knowledge of opportunities at tour business enterprise conferences, which regularly function periods focused on the area of interest. The following provides guidelines for developing active and journey income through the Travel Market Report at meetings within 12 months.
1. Don’t wait for customers to invite you. Look for opportunities to recommend active or adventure holidays to modern clients. Ask open-ended questions like, “Have you ever considered an expedition cruise?” and then pay careful attention to the answer.
2. To perceive sales possibilities amongst current customers, analyze more about their hobbies. How do they spend their leisure time when not traveling? What reasons do they guide? Clients who like sports like trekking, biking, and kayaking are top applicants, as are nature fans and environmentalists.
3. Don’t overlook your older customers or underestimate their skills. For many Baby Boomers, energetic and adventure journeys are bucket list items, and plenty of 70-12 months-olds are more active than 40-12 months-olds. “We have 70-year-olds doing nine-hour hikes,” one provider stated.
Four. Introduce luxurious cruise customers to adventure holidays by suggesting an excessive give-up day cruise to Antarctica or the Galapagos. One new product in this class is Celebrity’s Flora, a hundred-passenger vessel that became a cause-built for Galapagos expeditions and launched this month.
