TravelResearchOnline.com Blog

From all appearances, the promise of a much stronger 2010 stands a good chance of being realized.  The TRO Community is buzzing with travel agents talking about how busy they are and asking questions about the projects on which they are working. One agent actually commented that she was having trouble “keeping up with demand.” This is great stuff, the type of turn-around for which we had all hoped. Many of these travel agents spent the quiet year of 2009 steadily marketing and now, those efforts are paying off as their clients begin to travel again. It’s too early to say “things are good”, but not too early to say, “things look a lot better.” Certainly, it’s a good thing to be busy.

Or is it?

We have all heard that “time is money.” Indeed, much of the way we speak of time has a monetary ring to it. Your time has a real value and spending it poorly is a dangerous thing to do. Carl Sandburg once said that if you don’t spend your time wisely, others would spend it for you. If there is any skill that comes to the fore during periods when you are very busy, it’s time management.  In a one-on-one service industry like travel consulting, keeping track of your time can be a very difficult thing to do.  We build our travel practices not on an hourly basis, but on the satisfaction of the clients we serve, so we naturally invest a great deal of time ensuring the quality of the experiences we create. Rightly so.

But there is still a very important lesson to keep at the front of your mind at all times: if you don’t value yourself, you won’t correctly value your time.

This is a tough lesson for travel consultants to accept and to integrate into their travel practice. Ask a room full of travel consultants how many of them charge a fee for their services and only a few will raise their hands. There is the natural reluctance to chase away all of those hard won clients who may not agree to pay a fee. Except if they won’t pay a fee, they aren’t “won” at all.  Your clients are not clients until money exchanges hands. How many stories do we all have about the client who took our research and booked elsewhere? Is there any more common story in that same room full of travel agents?

To be willing to pay a “plan to go” or a research fee, a client must be absolutely convinced of the value of the agent’s work product. If the travel agent is not convinced of the value of the services they are rendering beyond all doubt, they will not be able to convince the client and the relationship will remain on tenuous grounds.

So how is charging a research fee related to time management? If you listened to Mike Marchev’s excellent webinar on 2 Step Lead Generation, Mike told you how to become more profitable without selling a thing: Get rid of your worst clients. That is great advice.

You’ve been allowing too many bad clients to kill your time, and you have been an accomplice. 

Now, it’s killing time. Time to kill off some bad relationships. Let go of the bad clients.  The ones that ask a thousand questions, take up your valuable time – and then disappear. The time waster never buys anything from you, but is always willing to take plenty of free advice.  The client who uses you as a free information resource but never books. The clients who won’t sign documents and who threaten charge-backs. Don’t worry about losing the losers.  We have all taken these types on at some time or another.  When we accept these characters as clients, the message we send is that we don’t think our time is very valuable. We are complicit in killing off our income potential.

If you don’t value yourself, you won’t value your time.

One of the great ways to demonstrate the value you put on your time is to require a research fee.  It takes practice and courage, I know.  More than those qualities, however, it requires a real belief in your inherent value. 

Don’t be anything other than polite and professional, warm and friendly..and firm. You only have a few hours each day to build your practice. You would not waste a professional’s time yourself, so don’t let others waste yours.