TravelResearchOnline.com Blog

In almost every aspect of both your professional and personal life, you instinctively know the value of practice and being prepared. Actually, it’s not instinct at all. The desire to be ready to handle difficult questions arises from early failures to prepare. Practicing answers has saved many a school boy and many a relationship. At a certain [...]

I’ve not yet seen Eat, Pray, Love and chances are I won’t until it hits Netflix and I can catch it from my couch. But I know enough about the film to think that its real title should have been Eat, Pray, Love, Travel. Once again, we have a cultural reminder of the importance of travel [...]

Mustering up the capital resources and the time to attend a trade show so is surely no light matter. A travel agency’s investment in both travel and accommodations are often significant. Yet, the opportunities afforded by a travel trade show are considerable. Most importantly, travel agents can delve deeply into the tenor of the companies [...]

Last week, TRO held the first in a planned series of webinars. We have titled the series “No Limits” to emphasize that there are no limits to what a dedicated travel consultant, willing to do what it takes, can accomplish. We kicked off the series with Nolan Burris speaking on the topics of fees and [...]

For all of their protestations to the contrary, many travel agents remain firmly in orbit around suppliers rather than their clients. After all, suppliers provide the vast bulk of the revenue generated by travel agencies and also do a superb job of marketing travel products to the public. During the early years of the cruise [...]

Travel agents sometimes find themselves trapped between two masters, the client and the supplier. Earning a fee from the first and a commission from the second, many agents are haunted by a feeling somewhere in the back of their mind that they are “double dipping”. Indeed, this schizophrenic posture can sometimes create an appearance of [...]

Your clients will lie to you. Perhaps “lie” is too strong a word. Your clients will mislead you. Most often, they will do so unintentionally, but they will give you bad intelligence and then expect you to work with it. If you are not careful, you find yourself sending clients off to invade the wrong [...]

Ever catch a cold and wonder where you contracted it? No doubt if you could, you would step back in time and take precautions, avoiding the vicinity of the person that sent the little viral present your way. The person who has a cold feels miserable and soon, unless preventative measures are taken, so do the people [...]

Do your clients trust you? I’m pretty certain that the degree to which you are at this moment successful as a travel consultant has a lot to do with your native ability to develop a bond of  trust with your clients. The mix of the confidence you exude, the knowledge you have and the way you communicate [...]

Don’t we all want satisfied customers? People who are happy with a buying experience, according to business lore, tell three other people about their satisfactory experience. We all tend to “collect” satisfied customers we can point to as examples of our competence and proficiency as travel consultants. Most travel agents who have been in the [...]