The travel market is an intense industry with travel agencies and diverse other companies all vying to provide the best experience, the best pricing, and new ways to boost their sales. With so many different approaches available, what are some of the best travel agent tips to boost your sales while still maintaining that human touch that people come to expect from their travel agents?

Reach out to old clients

One of the best ways to boost sales tips for travel agents is to simply reach out to old clients. Many travel agents and travel agencies have vast data networks available to them comprised of all the individuals who have traveled with them over the years. This massive pool of data is potentially a rich field for mining as it provides you with in-depth information on a wide variety of demographics and individuals which can potentially be profitable.

Part of what made people reach out to their travel agent in the first place is the fact that travel agencies have that human touch that individuals desire. A great sales tip for travel agents is to simply continue that human touch experience by reaching out to previous clients with suggestions and ideas for new trips and new experiences that they may enjoy. Does your data show that one of your clients enjoys a yearly trip to a given location? Reaching out to them shortly before that one-year mark can be a fantastic way to ensure their long-term commitment, as well as make them feel like valued individuals. This also helps with a value-added bonus that many people come to expect from their travel agencies by offering things like discounts, promos, deals, or other specials for your past customers they will keep coming back and continuing to boost your sales year after year.

Upsell

Another one of the best sales tips for travel agents is upselling. The fact is people don’t know what they don’t know and they especially don’t know what they might want. Upselling can sometimes have a negative connotation that you’re trying to sell people things they don’t want but the true success for a travel agency and travel agents is when they sell their customers and clients promotions, trips, or packages that they do want but didn’t know they wanted.

This goes back to the concept of a personalized touch which is required for meeting client needs. Your clients may not know that there is an exceptional local festival. Still, by offering to sell them tickets or get them into the event at the location they are going, you are not only boosting your sales, but you are also endearing yourself to your clients by meeting needs they did not know they had. This has the two-fold positive effect of both increasing sales profit while simultaneously helping clients get that added benefit from using a travel agent.

Use advanced technologies

This one may seem like a given but the fact is that improving your business performance by using new or successful legacy technologies is a fantastic way of being able to improve your efficiency, thus allowing you to spend more time on the things that matter like reaching out and giving clients the personal touch.

Solutions like Travelport Mobile Agent allow you, as a travel agent, to be available 24/7 to your clients and answer their every request no matter where you are by allowing you to access your Travelport GDS on your smartphone or tablet, or at the comfort of your home through web-based access through your home laptop or desktop by using TTS WebAgent.

Another option to improve your image as a professional travel agent is to use TTS WeBook Booking Engine, an integrated booking engine that allows your clients to book their trips 24/7 even if you’re not available.

The fact is, the better a travel agent understands the market and can use vast databases and innovative tools, the more effective they will be at their true task of reaching new clients while simultaneously giving them the experiences that modern travelers crave.

Use goodwill

Assuming that travel agencies and travel agents have done their jobs, then clients who are either on their vacations or returning from them are going to be on cloud nine. This is an excellent time to ask them whether they would be willing to give a travel agent positive reviews, pen a testimonial, or do a social media review for the travel agent or travel agency.

This might sound cliche but word-of-mouth is going to be the strongest methodology for gaining new clients. Certainly, there are large online advertising campaigns, television or YouTube advertisements, email lists, and possibly even mail leaflets you could use, but none of them have as high a success rate as positive word-of-mouth feedback from individuals who personally benefited from the services of a travel agent.

When real customer relays a real personalized experience that they truly enjoy, their friends, family, and even strangers will take notice. Not only do the testimonials help their friends and family become interested in using the travel agency but the reviews can help tip the balance of whether even strangers will use one travel agent over another.

Read Referrals and User-Generated Content: the power of these tools in travel

This is why it’s important to use your customers’ goodwill and euphoria before it finishes wearing off. While they are at their most happy and most excited they’re also most likely to write that review or pen that testimonial which can help win new clients and boost sales.

Conclusion

Boosting sales and working to win new clients can sometimes feel like it is an uphill struggle but using proven and tested technologies like Travelport Mobile Agent or TTS WeBook along with the goodwill of your clients to help gain positive reviews and testimonials, and to encourage them to tell friends or family about their trips, can be great ways of gaining new clients and improve your travel agency’s productivity.

On the flip side, upselling clients or customers with great packages, tips, or deals and reaching out to your legacy customers with promotional offers and items helps give a value-added which is an essential element of the travel agent and customer relationship. Clients both new and old crave those experiences and when travel agencies successfully deliver on that experience, new customers are made and old customers keep coming back.

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