Finding Your First Ten Travel Clients and Keeping Them

Your first ten travel clients will almost certainly be people who already know you, or people one introduction away from them. They come from telling your network once, clearly and specifically, what you now do, then handling every inquiry well. Keeping them comes from following up the week they get home and asking for referrals by name.

Advertising, a website and social media all help later. In the first months they mostly cost money and time without producing bookings, because travel is bought on trust and strangers have no reason yet to trust you. People who already know you do.

Why the first ten come from people you already know

A travel booking is a large, personal purchase that the client cannot inspect until it happens. That makes trust the deciding factor, and trust is the one thing a new advisor already has with friends, family, colleagues and neighbors.

Most of those people travel, and some already use advisors. The American Society of Travel Advisors fact sheet reports that more than a quarter of all travel is booked through an agency.

That share shows up in a new advisor's own contacts. When new advisors at the Travel Advisor Academy list everyone they know who traveled in the last year, we've found that roughly one in four already books through an agent of some kind.

Those are the easiest first clients, because they already understand what an advisor does. The reason most new advisors do not get them is that they never actually told anyone. Hints, a changed job title online and a vague "let me know if you need anything" do not register as an offer.

How to tell your network what you now do

One clear announcement beats months of hinting. It should say what you plan, for whom, and how to reach you, in a sentence a friend could repeat to someone else. "I am a travel advisor" gives them nothing to repeat, while "I plan family trips to Japan" does.

That is why the niche comes before the announcement. The guide to choosing a travel niche covers picking one, and the community you already belong to is often the best place to look. The Georgia guide and the Texas guide show how local communities, from reunion travel to military families, turn into niches.

Once the message is clear, send it to everyone, once, in a personal form. The list below is the order that tends to produce the first inquiries soonest.

• Close friends and family. A personal message to each, not a group post.
• Colleagues and former colleagues. Many will travel for milestones they would rather not plan.
• Groups you already belong to. A running club, a school parent group, a faith community or an alumni network.
• Local businesses you use. A hairdresser or a dentist talks to dozens of people a week. The business card template gives them something to hand over.

After that, being visibly good at one thing does more than repeating the announcement. Share something useful about your niche now and then, such as a packing note or a change to entry rules, so the people who saw the first message remember you when they plan.

Turning an inquiry into a first booking

An inquiry from a friend is not yet a booking. The first ten are won on how carefully each inquiry is handled, and the sequence below keeps a new advisor from quoting too early or giving work away.

The intake step does the most work. The client travel questionnaire covers the questions to ask, and almost every itinerary that gets rebuilt was quoted before somebody asked the right one.

The second step is where new advisors are most tempted to bend. Do not discount to win the first ones. A booking won on price sets the price for every booking after it, and the client who chose you on price will leave on price. Win the first ten on attention instead.

Why the second trip is where the money is

The first booking with any client is the expensive one. It needs pitching, proving yourself and explaining the fee. The second needs none of that, and every advisor with a comfortable income is sitting on a book of clients who simply come back.

That makes the follow-up in step five the most valuable habit in the business. The week somebody gets home is the week they are most likely to book again and most likely to recommend you. A follow-up three months later lands on someone who has gone back to normal life.

The next trip can be planted even earlier. While a client is still traveling, a short message checking that all is well shows the accountability they paid for. On their return, mentioning a season or a destination that suits what they enjoyed gives them something to look forward to, and gives you the first conversation about trip two.

Keep notes that make you look attentive

Repeat business runs on memory, and memory needs a system. A short client file, kept from the first conversation, lets you remember the small thing that makes someone feel like a client rather than a transaction. These are the notes worth keeping.

• Anniversaries, birthdays and the milestones they mentioned in passing.
• Who they travel with, and who they would rather not.
• What they loved and what they hated on the last trip.
• When they usually travel, so you can raise the next trip before they start searching.

The post on the systems a travel advisor needs in year one covers where to keep these notes so they are there when you need them.

How to ask for referrals people act on

Referrals work like the first announcement. A vague request produces nothing, and a specific one produces names. "Send anyone my way" gets a polite nod. "Do you know anyone planning something big next year?" gets an answer, often on the spot.

Timing matters as much as wording. The moment to ask is when somebody has just come home from a trip you planned and is still telling people about it, not months later in a newsletter. A short thank-you note with two of your cards in it makes the referral easy to pass on.

Over time, this is what turns ten clients into a business. Each happy client brings a second trip and, now and then, a new client, who in turn brings their own. The Small Business Administration's guide to market research is useful at this point, for checking whether the people referring you share the niche you meant to serve.

Where the course covers clients and referrals

Unit 6 of the course, Finding Your First Clients, covers finding your first ten bookings with no advertising budget, asking for referrals in a way people act on, and turning one trip into the next before the client gets home. It is part of the Fundamentals Course.

Unit 10, Scaling Beyond Yourself, goes further, into repeat and referral systems that compound each year and a book of business that keeps earning between trips. It is one of the four extra units in the Fast Track Course, for advisors who want to grow past their own calendar.