Author Archives: Richard Earls

There are 200 articles by Richard Earls published on this site.


“In five to 10 years it will be “far too hot” to be in countries like Greece in July and August.”
James Thornton
CEO, Intrepid Travel

Traveling off-season is an experience everyone should try at least once.  From all appearances, climate change seems to agree.  It appears the “best time” to visit may be shifting. Traveling outside of peak months can save you money and provide a unique travel experience.  But while traveling off-season almost surely means the trip will ultimately cost much less, there are reasons other than the price to travel outside of peak months that will help to ensure your appreciation of the practice.

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What is Your Unique Selling Point?

Your “Unique Selling Point“ or “USP” is something that makes your agency different from all other companies of its type. Is there something about your business so unique customers would rather do business with you based on that one quality alone? Is there a reason to do business with you rather than the agency down the street or online with Travelocity?  Can you easily articulate the reason? If so, you have located your USP and are on the way to better understanding how to build a smart marketing campaign based on that uniqueness. If you have not emphasized your USP in your marketing, then consumers are likely to pass you over for any number of similarly positioned travel agencies – you are just one of the crowd.

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Phishing attacks have come a long way from the generic spam emails filled with glaring red flags. Today, cybercriminals employ sophisticated techniques that exploit human vulnerability and advanced technology to deceive even the most cautious individuals. As we come upon this election season, the threats will be more prolific and more clever. I myself have come very close to falling from more than one of the attempts to get me to click on a dangerous link or filling out a form filled with personal information. The implications of falling from such a scam can be severe. Your accounts and information can be hacked or your system frozen for a “ransomware” demand. Read the rest of this entry »

Up and Running

I have a work in progress called “Up and Running,” a course on marketing for travel advisors. It is an ongoing project with no end in sight. Here it is for those of you who might want to peruse it. In the lower right-hand corner is “Roxie.” You can ask Roxie about the text, and she’s pretty good with answers. My son, Ryan, created her for another project we have. For example, you can ask Roxie, “How can I market my travel agency,” and she will pull the answer out of the text. Read the rest of this entry »

Wrong Demographic

Over the weekend I was helping a friend with a school assignment involving a marketing plan.  As a part of the exercise, she had to justify her business decisions by taking note of the demographics of Florida’s state capital, Tallahassee. In the outline to the assignment, the key demographics were listed as per capita income, population by gender, and age ranges.

As I worked through the project, it occurred to me how little help typical demographic statistics in reality are for a marketing plan. Certainly such numbers  are important criteria in early decision making.  If, for example, you are setting out to launch a travel practice in any given area, you want to know sufficient population is present with enough disposable income.  Beyond that, however, these are the wrong demographics for marketing purposes. Read the rest of this entry »

ideAtIon

A lightbulb grows from a flower pot symbolizing Ideas
VSCreate Generated Image www.voyagersocial.ai

Where do great article ideas come from? There is a reason to start from your own interests rather than turning to artificial intelligence (“AI“) like Voyager’s Toby for ideas as “Step 1.” If it is important to inject your brand into your writing, it makes sense to begin with you. It really is that simple. Ideation should take root in the human, who then turns to their AI writing assistant like Toby for assistance. Read the rest of this entry »

Travel Channel(ed)

I have always thought of travel as an act as much spiritual as physical. In many ways, a trip across borders is a microcosm of life’s journey. As beings with innate wanderlust, we ignite an internal shift every time we leave home to gallivant across the globe. There seems to be an inherent human need – a primeval yearning – to explore, move, and discover. Evolution made us nomads, and that genetic code is still written in our cells, urging us to seek new experiences and environments. Read the rest of this entry »

An Axe to Grind

“If I only had an hour to chop down a tree, I would spend the first 45 minutes sharpening my axe.”Abraham Lincoln

Louie was one of the hardest working men I had ever met. A restaurant owner, he was up first thing in the morning, worked all day in the kitchen and on the floor and went to bed late at night. The next day, he would do it all again. I was amazed at his ability to put in those hours and I was sure that his new venture would be a great success. A year later, he was out of business. I told Louie’s story to one of my business mentors and he shook his head knowingly. He was not surprised at the restaurant’s failure. “Too many business people have to work hard because they don’t work smart.” Read the rest of this entry »

Cultivating the Marketing Mindset

Have you heard the phrase: “Marketing is everything, and everything is marketing? The ‘marketing mindset’ implies viewing every interaction, every piece of information, and every travel story not simply for what they are but for their potential to captivate attention and inspire travel desires among potential clients. It’s about appreciating the intrinsic emotional power of travel and strategically using those emotional touch points to remind clients that, at heart, they are a dreamer. Read the rest of this entry »

Compassion and Travel

I complained about a post last night making fun of those trapped in the submersible near the Titantic wreck. I was ejected from the group as a result.

I may be mistaken, but here is my perspective:

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Artificial intelligence has made massive strides recently with image generation. AI systems can now generate highly realistic and customized images that will soon significantly reduce the need for generic stock photography. For travel advisors, AI image generation offers an opportunity to provide clients with personalized visuals of destinations and experiences that are hard or expensive to otherwise capture.

Stock photo websites currently offer an array of generic images of locations, landmarks, hotel rooms, and activities. While useful as a reference, stock photos can lack originality and personalization. Stock photography is often easily identified, and finding a wide variety of images of ethnically diverse people can be challenging. In addition, coming up with the exact photo you want, such as a cat in an astronaut suit in outer space, can be difficult or impossible. If you do find such a photo, chances are good that hundreds of other people have downloaded and are using the same photograph. Read the rest of this entry »

What You Don’t Know

Marketing is about winning new clients and keeping old ones: from the first we achieve growth and from the second stability.  The business trinity of marketing, sales and customer service is oriented to accomplishing exactly those objectives. Smart marketing, relationship sales and good customer service should combine to ensure continual growth.

If only it was that easy. Read the rest of this entry »

Artificial intelligence (AI) has increasingly become a much-discussed tool in the travel sector. For travel professionals, AI has the potential to revolutionize their daily workflow by streamlining tasks, improving customer service, and enhancing the overall travel experience for their clients. Most significant, however, has been the promise of increased productivity and time savings for travel advisors who feel the demands of content marketing stretch them to the limit, especially as solo practitioners. Read the rest of this entry »

GPT 4 is active in beta, but is slow!

Give Toby a chance to respond to you when using GPT4. He may appear “Stalled” but he is just thinking hard. If you don’t mind the wait, he will respond. You can also drop back to GPT 3.5 if time is of the essence to you.

Finding Your Niche

Many travel professionals have told me recently they have decided to work on creating a specialized, niche segment for their travel practice. Developing and marketing a niche area of expertise is one of the best ways to differentiate your travel practice from the competition. As an expert in a particular theme or destination, you can quickly establish your travel agency as the only reasonable resource to which consumers should turn when considering travel in your niche venue.

The concept of adopting a niche is often misconstrued. Niche marketing is a way of helping you focus on locating new clients, not a set of restrictions on your business offerings. Niche marketing is not necessarily about gearing your entire business to a particular type of travel. It is about segmenting your marketing efforts to focus on particular groups of people, however. Read the rest of this entry »

Path Logo

San Juan, Puerto Rico – In the ever-evolving landscape of the travel industry, the notion of a Host Agency has undergone significant growth, leading to the emergence of various business models that have caused confusion regarding its true definition. Recognizing the need for clarity and standardization, the Professionals Association of Travel Hosts (PATH) was established to set operating standards and ensure strict adherence among its members. For travel agent professionals seeking excellence in host agencies, the gold standard can be easily found within the list of PATH members. Read the rest of this entry »

Sitting Still?

Like a shark, you know you have to keep moving forward. In business, there is no such thing as sitting still. Clients come and go. Destinations rise and fall in popularity and demand. There is always something new on the horizon. In fact, if your business is not growing, chances are pretty good you are losing ground. No time for sitting still.

Is it too early to talk about 2024? I don’t think so if you are headed in that direction. Here are five ways to keep both you and your travel practice growing and even thriving. Read the rest of this entry »

Self Image

How we see ourselves and the profession of travel counseling has much to do with sales psychology. For travel agents the problem is two-fold: The first aspect concerns societal perception of the travel profession in general. The second deals with the individual travel consultant’s personal self-image. Being consciously aware of the influence of these two aspects of one’s personality and working to place self-image in its appropriate context is a worthwhile exercise in becoming a better travel professional. Read the rest of this entry »

Saturday, April 22, is Earth Day. As late as 1986, coal miners in the UK still carried canaries to detect carbon monoxide fumes in the mines. If the canary died, trouble was afoot. These days, the World Wildlife Federation publishes a “species directory” – a list of endangered, vulnerable, and threatened animals and I find it ironic that the list has not been expanded to include humans. Perhaps it would be wrong to list humans under both threatened species and causation because no doubt there is a self-destructive gene somewhere in the human DNA spiral, and it seems to be expressing itself with increasing regularity. Read the rest of this entry »

We need a bit more naiveté

Continuous effort, not strength or intelligence, is the key to unlocking our potential.” ~ Winston Churchill

What is the calculus of success? Is there a formula to being really good at whatever you most want to do?

One of the really great characteristics about children is their unfailing knowledge they can do anything.  Draw a picture? Hand them the crayons. Play the drums? Give them those sticks. Converse about the universe? Have a seat and lend an ear.

Somewhere along the way, we adults learn to limit ourselves.  We become convinced of our personal borders. We accept we aren’t musical, we can’t draw, we decide our intelligence has severe limitations. We circumscribe ourselves even as to activities we have never tried!  Can you sculpt a figurine out of a block of stone? How do you know? Why are you certain you cannot do something you have never tried?  And if you have tried, how many times? Read the rest of this entry »

Taking it Personnel-ly

A travel professional I speak with frequently called me the other day to talk about an idea for an article. She wanted to write about the need for agents to continually update their skill set in destinations, technology and sales techniques. I told the agent that I was impressed that she was so deeply interested in continuing education, and I asked her if the other travel agents in her agency felt the same way. She indicated that some did, but in general most seemed content to do things the way they had always been done, to service the clients the agency ownership put in front of them and to clock out at 5:00. I asked the agent what motivated her, and I really liked her answer: “I want to be valuable to the agency’s owners. As long as I am bringing in new business and generating loyalty to the agency, I’m valuable. I take it personally.”

Wow. I could not have said it better myself. Read the rest of this entry »