5 Common Mistakes that Every Travel Agent should Avoid

Being a travel agent or tour operator is a competitive profession especially since there are 100s of online travel portals are available at the disposal of travellers. In order to run successful Travel Agency, you need to examine every step and ensure that you are making the most of every opportunity. There are plenty of mistakes due to which Travel Company can face growth limitations and to overcome such mistakes we are listing down 5 essential principals that most travel agents either get wrong or don’t implement.

1. Never work on commissions. Instead focus on Net rates.Travel Agents should never work with commission based pricing structure with any hotel or other service providers, unless and until you are home based part time travel agent. Commission based model limits you and do not give control over the rates that you offer to your customers. Working with net rates give you full freedom of top up the price as you like. These also restrict you in bundling up specific service with any of your other services as a whole. Also commission based model keeps you busy post sales to collect your margin and follow up for payment.

2. Never Stop Following Up until you get lead closing answer.Most travel agent or in this case any sales executive does not get sales is because they are not keen or punctual about timely follow up. In this hectic life scenario everyone is busy. Everyone has their own set of priorities. We as a sales person need to politely remind and follow up prospective customers about the importance of vacation and the deals we are offering. And delaying over the vacation and booking may increase price. Real customer value this careful professional approach and puts us on top over the competitions in their evaluation.

3. Never suggest just one tour package option. Always give options to choose from.Many of Travel Agents think that whatever they plan and suggest are the best for customers and they stick to their offerings. But when it comes to customers – they will always prefer to have options to evaluate. Further package, hotel, food and travelling options put control in the customer hands. This approach do not put you in one price range bracket and conveys to customer that you have both cheap and expensive options to offer from which customer can pick as per their preferences and brings you more closer to confirm sale.

4. Never isolate yourself after making the sale. Always remain in contact before, after and post customer trip.Many of us forget customer after their confirm sales or during or post trip. In a highly crowded service business like Travel Agency – we must remain connected with customer time to time. A small packing list suggestion before trip, a simple hello or freebie or small top up during the trip and gentle feedback call post trip will make customer remember us for longer time and provide our reference in their friends and family.

5. Never forget to update. Always go hand in hand with latest Technology.Travel Industry being highly impacted by the internet and cut throat competition – we as a travel agent operate with very slim margins and profits. And this always keeps our hands closed towards even necessary expenses or technological operation level investments. But figure shows that who has taken the advantage of technology and has implemented successful travel agent software for their operation and sales has grown multi folds. For sales who takes the benefits of Tour Operator CRM has increased their sales prominently. And if one research over internet then they can even find many free tools like TripControl.net which definitely help in getting though the competitions.

Orthodox business approach is defunct in the Morden Tavel world. Till dusk to dawn a travel agent give their sweat and blood to make a sale and it would worth only when they focuses on the bigger picture of the travel business rather be satisfied with the small margin of profit. Since, a small scale tour operator has very narrow line of success in the very cut throat competition, being up to date, ticking all the boxes and keeping the eagle eyes on the travel business is their only way out. Log on To Tripcontrol.net for more tricks, tips, and find out where your business opportunity lies.