Becoming a Home-Based Travel Agent, Part 6:
Secrets of Successful Home-Based Travel Agents
Copyright © Kelly Monaghan,
http://www.HomeTravelAgency.com
Everyone is different and each of us travels
his or her own road to success, but over the years (and in a
thoroughly unscientific way) I have noticed a number of qualities
that make for success in the home-based travel agency business. Here
then are some observations about just a few qualities that
successful agents bring to the table when they start
out.
THEY DO THEIR HOMEWORK
If you are not already a home-based agent,
the very fact that you are reading this mini-course suggests that
you like to arm yourself with all the information available before
making a decision.
I regularly hear from agents who signed up
with the first agency that caught their eye. Now they regret it and
wonder if I can point them in the right direction. I explain to them
(hopefully with a certain amount of patience) that I cannot make
decisions for them. The host agency that’s right for me might be
wrong for them. And vice versa. You see, part of doing your homework
is doing it yourself, not having someone
else do it for you.
The thing many beginners (especially those
with no real experience of being in business for themselves) fail to
understand is that the sellers of business opportunities are just
that – sellers. Just as the car dealer won’t volunteer that the car
you have your eye on sits at the bottom of the "Consumer Reports"
safety rankings, the ads for a host agency offer won’t volunteer the
downsides of their offer or reveal
that a better deal is being offered by someone else.
Please understand, I am not saying these
people are being dishonest. They are simply putting the best face on
what they have to offer. That’s simply what sellers do. When you
start selling travel, you’ll do it too. I’m sure that if you are
considering starting a home travel agency you have visited at least
several sites offering such business opportunities and I’m also sure
you understand what I’m talking about.
My approach is fundamentally different. I do
not sell a business opportunity. The value the Home-Based Travel
Agent Resource Center and my home study course bring to the market
is to provide unfiltered and unbiased information about how the
business REALLY works and the MANY, MANY different avenues open to
you. For example, very few host agencies go
out of their way to point out that in many cases you do not have to
share commissions with them. I am free to tell you that and explain
when it’s appropriate to deal directly with suppliers and how to go
about doing it. And whatever the topic I try to be evenhanded in
explaining the pros AND the cons of pursuing any particular
strategy.
If you do your homework properly, you will
be in a far better position to make informed decisions about how to
set up and grow your business. Or you can always do what I did:
learn by trial and error. Take it from me, losing a few thousand
dollars by making a "dumb beginner’s" mistake is a powerful
incentive to do it right next time!
This principle applies not just in the
start-up phase of your business, but throughout your business
career. If you want to sell cruises, learn the cruise business
inside out. If you want to sell the Caribbean, visit the islands and
the resorts, poke your nose into all the hotels, go to the seminars
offered by the tourist authorities and the suppliers. With this kind
of in depth analysis, you can be sure of offering the best product
mix for both your market and your bottom line. DO YOUR HOMEWORK!
THEY GO INTO BUSINESS WITH THEIR EYES OPEN
If you do your homework, you will start your
home travel agency business with few illusions. Another problem
beginners have is that they are dazzled by all the pretty pictures
in the host agency ads. "Be a travel agent," they seem to say and
you’ll spend your life strolling on a white sand beach with your
significant other." Well, maybe. Sometimes I go out of my way to let
people in on the dirty little secret of being a home-based travel
agent. It’s a business.
It’s a job. It means actually doing some (brace yourself) WORK!
If you haven’t read Lesson Five, "Five Good
Reasons NOT To Be A Home Based Travel Agent," do yourself a favor
and read it now:
Yes those great deals and those special
moments exist. I have cruised free to exotic ports and I have stayed
in luxury hotels for motel prices. I also show people how to do the
same sort of thing, whether it’s a $299 cruise as part of their
continuing education or a bona-fide fam trip. But to paraphrase the
old TV ad, "Home-based travel agents get their perks the
old-fashioned way: They EARN them!"
THEY PLAN THEIR BUSINESS BEFORE IT PLANS
THEM
You are what you eat, they say. Well you are
also what you sell. If you wind up selling a lot of cheap airfare,
that’s what you’ll get a reputation for doing whether you like it or
not.
I have noticed that successful home travel
agents go into the business with a clear idea of what they want
their business to look like. This mostly has to do with
specialization but other factors are involved as well.
The home-based agent who says, "I offer
high-end diving expeditions to the Caribbean" is more likely to make
a go of it than the agent who says "I sell travel; where do you want
to go?"
As I explain in the home study course, being
a home-based travel agent isn’t like being a storefront agent in a
different location. (It can be but it doesn’t have to be and, in my
view, it shouldn’t be.) Once the fundamental differences between the
two sink in, a whole range of possibilities open up.
This part of the start-up process is
actually a lot of fun because it starts with big, no-limits dreaming
followed by a period of rational analysis. If you are just starting
out, take the time to envision your dream business. You can pull
some of the elements out of the clear blue sky, but be sure to
balance your dreaming with your own experience. Ask yourself
questions like:
Why do I love travel? What first got me
excited about
traveling? What’s my favorite destination? Where have I always
dreamed of going? What are my favorite activities (walking, museums,
tennis, golf, etc.)? This is just a start; I offer many more
suggestions in the course. The point is that, if you have been drawn
to this business out of a love
for travel, your ideal travel business probably already exists
inside you, just waiting to be discovered, developed, and defined.
The young mother who has experienced the
frustrations of getting good advice for family vacations will have a
better chance of succeeding as a specialist in family travel than in
selling very expensive opera tours to Italy. That’s just one
example. What’s YOUR example?
Obviously, there are other aspects to
planning a business. Just because I have only discussed one of them
here doesn’t mean you shouldn’t think through all aspects of your
travel-business-to-be. The more and the better you think it through,
the better your odds of making a go of it. helping you do that is
just part of what my home study course is all about.
THEY TAKE ACTION
Someone calls it "the paralysis of analysis," the danger that you’ll
spend so much time thinking and planning that you’ll never actually
DO anything.
At some point (and as screamingly obvious as
it sounds), you have to do something to enjoy success. If you are
already up and running as an agent, that could mean making the leap
of faith to promote that pricey African safari without being 100%
sure you can pull it off.
To be successful you can’t be afraid of
failure. You must do your homework (see above) and do everything you
can to insure success, but ultimately every promotion carries some
risk of failure. Chances are that even if you don’t fill up all the
slots, you’ll fill some. And suppliers know that not every promotion
succeeds. If they see you are actively doing the right things, they
will be supportive and willing to work with you again.
If you are just starting out, that leap of
faith could be
ordering the home study course and arming yourself with information
that could take you years to amass otherwise. If you’d like to do
that, visit :
http://www/hometravelagency.com/cgi-bin/at.cgi?a=305198
But, please, please, please reread Lesson
Five ("Five Good Reasons NOT To Be A Home Based Travel Agent")
first. I have the best money-back guarantee in the business, far
better than anything offered by business opportunities that cost
many hundreds of dollars more than my course. But nothing saddens me
more than people who return the materials saying, "I didn’t realize
how much work was involved."
These are people who clearly would like to
work at home, make some money, and derive some personal
satisfaction, but with that kind of attitude, the cards are stacked
against them no matter what they try. There is only one entity in
the universe that can make something from nothing. It ain’t me. And
it ain’t you.
I hope you have enjoyed this mini-course in
becoming a home-based travel agent and I look forward to having you
as one of my thousands of satisfied students.
Back to Travel Course Index
This mini-course on becoming a
home-based travel agent is brought to you by the Home-Based Travel
Agent Resource Center and The Intrepid Traveler, publisher of a
comprehensive home study course for home-based travel agents.
For more information,
visit today.
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