It’s not an ideal time for travel advisors, or any company in the travel industry, right now. Although travel continues to show an increase, demand is still much lower than in years past.
There are still ways for travel advisors to drum up business during these uncertain times though. Even if it’s not for travel right away, it’s still important to work on finding leads for future trips for when travel does make its big return.
One way you can do this is by staying in front of your clients. Since you probably have more time right now, keep up with your social media pages. Create fun and intriguing posts to get your travelers engaged; generate an email campaign, or pick up the phone and spend time catching up with your clients. They’ll most likely be happy to hear from you.
Even if your current clients aren’t traveling right now, they will remember to refer you to their friends who may be considering a vacation – especially if you’re front and center on their minds.
Another way to find leads during this time is by traveling yourself. Pave the way by experiencing airports, resorts and destinations firsthand in order to help others feel comfortable. Prospective clients will see this and want to ask questions about the ins and outs of your trip. Hopefully they then end up booking their own vacations with you, the expert.
Instead of only producing marketing messages to your clients, consider first gauging their interest in traveling. ALG Vacations has created a new campaign in order to do this easily. The Walking on Sunshine campaign allows agents to send a quiz to potential travelers to evaluate their readiness to travel.
You can visit www.algvacations.com/walkingonsunshine to access the sharable content, which includes the quiz, video testimonials and other helpful resources.
Once you find potential clients who are ready to travel, you can share your own experiences, offer advice and increase their confidence by letting them know about things such as ALG Vacations waiving change and cancellation fees.
Finding new leads doesn’t necessarily mean booking trips right now. A lot of potential clients you’ll come across still won’t be ready to travel this year or even into early 2021. However, making that contact and creating relationships will provide you with new clients to work with and future vacations to book.
It’s never too early to plan travel, so encourage them to start figuring out where they want to go in the spring or even summer of next year.