In a move aimed at reducing the ongoing disruptions caused by the surge in post-pandemic travel and staff shortages, London’s Heathrow Airport has capped the number of daily passengers through September 11th to 100,000 passengers per day. Read the rest of this entry »

“Revenge is like a rolling stone, which, when a man hath forced up a hill, will return upon him with a greater violence, and break those bones whose sinews gave it motion.” ~ Jeremy Taylor

I cringe when I hear the term “revenge travel.” The phrase seems wrong on so many levels. Primarily, it runs counter to the reason I travel…it seems imbued with a bit too much anger. With millions of passengers striking out on “revenge travel,” a certain amount of mayhem seems inevitable. Read the rest of this entry »

Guests can save up to 30% on 2022-2023 travel worldwide when they book by July 18th

Collette, the trusted tour operator since 1918, is celebrating the gift of travel during a Christmas in July sale, going on now through July 18^th.

Guests can sail through the Great Barrier Reef by catamaran, stay overnight in an Irish castle, wander Austria and Germany’s Christmas markets, search Finland’s skies for the northern lights, and so much more on worldwide tours. Now that restrictions are lifting, and U.S. travelers no longer require testing to return home, it’s the perfect time for your clients to say, “Let’s go!” with the gift of travel.

“There has never been a better time for your clients to consider giving the gift of travel to themselves or their loved ones.” said Jaclyn Leibl-Cote, President and Chief Brand Officer of Collette. “Guests can save on the entire world, with special offers on Christmas markets, river cruising, and more.”

On the 9 day Classic Christmas Markets in Europe tour, your clients will enjoy sipping mulled wine and collecting unique crafts, hand-made ornaments and toys at some of the most famous Christmas markets in Europe.  For those interested in river cruising, the 9 day Christmas on the Danube tour, allows guests to explore charming Christmas markets and see Europe dressed in its finest.

Offer valid on new retail bookings only made through 07/18/2022 for travel 9/1/2022 – 04/30/2023. Offer code JOLLYJULY must be used at time of booking for savings. Plus, when your clients add the travel protection plan, they get a full money back refund† if they need to cancel — up to 24 hours before departure.**

As part of Collette’s advanced commission program, travel professionals will also receive a portion of the full commission amount based on type of booking. Collette will not recall the advanced commission payments if a client chooses to cancel.

Terms and Conditions: *Offer valid on new retail bookings only made 07/05/2022 – 07/18/2022 for travel 09/01/2022 – 04/30/2023. Offer code JOLLYJULY must be used at time of booking for savings. Offers can expire earlier due to space or inventory availability. Space is on a first come, first served basis. Offers are not valid on group or existing bookings. Offers are combinable with member benefits only and are not combinable with any other offers. Discount level and availability varies by destination and month of travel. Other restrictions may apply.
**Visit collette.com/travelprotection for full details of insurance policy and benefits.

Those who have never participated in the production of an “event” would almost certainly be shocked at the enormous energy and coordination happening “behind the scenes.” The promoters of any given gathering share a goal with the attendees in wanting more than an “event” – they want an experience. Read the rest of this entry »

I love airports, and I missed them for the last two years. I’m serious.   I still have a kid-like fascination with the very concept of an airport.  The moving walkways, the arrival and departure boards, airplanes taking off outside of the windows. You walk through a door in Seattle, and you walk out a door in Bangkok.

And still, there are people who don’t believe in magic. Read the rest of this entry »

After unrelenting pressure from travel industry organizations and trade groups, the Biden administration on Friday decided to lift the inbound testing mandate that has been in place since January 2021. Read the rest of this entry »

“When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hangups.” ~ John Coltrane

There are many reasons to be grateful for having a career in travel planning, but I think the most important is the impact a travel professional has on the life of the client. Travel professionals assist clients to turn vacations, family travel and even business trips into the best possible experiences. By visiting the streets of new cities, meeting people from around the world, and exposure to different cultures, we are all made better people, citizens of a larger reality. As a travel professional, you have the opportunity to play an important part in people’s lives. Read the rest of this entry »

“For any man of good will, there is work to be done here, effective, virtuous, satisfying work which can give rich meaning to one’s own life and to others” ~ Abraham Maslow

What do you want? It is amazing how difficult the answer to this simple question can often be.  Perhaps it really isn’t such a simple question, and  it’s even a little bit dangerous.  Most of the decisions we make daily revolve around our desires, yet it can be hard to decide what we really want to have, what we want to do, and what we want to be.

The question of desire is not insignificant to building your travel practice.  We engage in what we do, regardless of our profession, because of our desires.  We want to be a travel professional, we want to travel and help others to travel, we want to provide material and psychological stability for ourselves and our families.

Getting a bit of clarity on our desires can help us achieve them. Read the rest of this entry »

Tara Air DHC-6 Twin Otter | Wikimedia Commons

A Tara Air aircraft 9N-AET, DHC-6 TWIN OTTER, en route to Jomsom from Pokhara with 19 passengers and 3 crew aboard has gone missing. Read the rest of this entry »

In its simplest form, marketing consists of generating new business and keeping old. Any new customer may spend money with you once, but a loyal customer provides a lifetime of business! Read the rest of this entry »

In 2009, the comedian Eddie Izzard set the almost unbelievable goal of running all the way around the circumference of England and Scotland, the equivalent of 43 marathons in 50 days,  for charity and again in 2016 for 27 days in honor of Nelson Mandela.

He had never run a marathon before that time. I think it may be possible to learn something from Mr. Izzard. Read the rest of this entry »

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” ~ Winston Churchill

Even at its best, when presented with tact and grace, criticism can be hard to take. When phrased as a complaint, criticism can be even tougher to endure. There is no doubt we have fostered a culture of complaint in our economic, political, and social system.  We have even trained people to complain as a way of getting windfalls in free services and goods.  Complain loudly enough and you get your way, we seem to be saying.

You need a response to criticism, one that demonstrates your company’s no-nonsense ethic.  Here is what I suggest. The next time you are criticized, say this:

“Thank you.” Read the rest of this entry »

Small ship cruise line Windstar Cruises has just announced its highest-grossing week of cruise sales since the start of the pandemic and one of the biggest in company history. The cruise line, focusing on smaller yacht-like ships visiting smaller more remote, and less heavily visited ports, waterways, and destinations that larger ships can’t access. Windstar ran a sale May 3-13 with itineraries to the Mediterranean, Tahiti, Northern Europe, Alaska, Asia, Greece, Australia & New Zealand, the Holy Lands among others. Read the rest of this entry »

Taking advantage of the surge in demand, American Airlines is dramatically increasing its service to Dublin, Ireland with new flights from Charlotte, Chicago, and Dallas through October 29. Read the rest of this entry »

Mistakes get a bad rap.  Experience may be a rough teacher, but you tend not to forget the lessons. My father consoled me with one of his aphorisms: “If you are not making mistakes, you are not trying hard enough.”

When we make a mistake, we are taught to apologize.  Good advice.  If we are not smart enough to admit our mistakes and apologize for them, we implicitly explain their origin all too clearly.  But simply apologizing for mistakes under-values their worth. Read the rest of this entry »

The Viking Octantis just completed its first Great Lakes voyage. The Octantis is the largest ship to cruise the Great Lakes. The 665-foot liner began its itinerary in Toronto arriving in port on May 6th in Milwaukee. The ship carries up to 378 passengers and 256 crew members. The itinerary included Toronto, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Detroit, Alpena, Mackinac Island, and Milwaukee. Read the rest of this entry »

Rochelle Zemke and Stephanie Cavelli are two travel professionals who saw a need common to many, if not all, travel advisors and set out to meet it. The challenges they faced will sound familiar to anyone who has decided to build a web application on their own.

TRO: Rochelle and Stephanie, thanks for the opportunity to speak to you about My Fam Trip. I certainly want to get into the capabilities and functionality of your brainchild, but give me a little bit of background on the two of you. Read the rest of this entry »

The first quarter of 2022 is already a memory. Yikes! The new car smell is gone but we can all look forward to good things for the balance of this year. It’s time to focus on enhancing every aspect of your travel practice, making every point of contact with clients as sharp as possible. As we have said to the point of extreme repetition, travel consulting is all about relationships.

The unique nature of your position as a travel consultant, however, is dual-facing.  Your relationships with clients are of primary importance.  But of nearly equal importance is the relationships you develop with your suppliers.  Knowing a supplier intimately is a very large part of mastering the art of being a travel professional. Read the rest of this entry »

Now is a good time to keep a promise to yourself and conduct a SWOT analysis for your travel business.  The SWOT acronym indicates Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The traditional SWOT looks at Strengths and Weaknesses of a business (internal factors) and tries to thereby ascertain the relationship with Opportunities and Threats (factors external to the agency). Doing an annual SWOT analysis is a good prerequisite to a marketing plan and assists with developing the appropriate goals for your travel practice. One of the most important aspects of a SWOT analysis for travel agencies is very simply the act of planning: the analysis makes you take a good look at your positioning in the market.  Each component of the SWOT analysis bears a relationship to the others. Each of your strengths will give rise to opportunities or the capacity to exploit an opportunity. Likewise, your strengths allow your travel practice to better confront the threats on the horizon or compensate for weaknesses.

Read the rest of this entry »

As business people, it behooves us to think cautiously about any business strategy focusing on price as a way of attracting attention to our services.  We are a “deal” obsessed culture, and the “lowest price” mentality seems to be predominant everywhere. Not only are we training our clients to hone in on exactly the wrong issues, we also deeply damage the integrity of our own brands in the process.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

So what has this to do with the travel industry?

The long-term health of our industry depends on what amounts in many cases to self-regulation. Tour operators and cruise lines operate without a great deal of oversight, even in the face of legal regulation and social pressure. Too often, a bit of excess oil is intentionally dumped overboard in our oceans or fragile environmental systems face the consequences of increasing numbers of affluent tourists. Climate change now hangs heavy over many destinations as ocean levels rise and glaciers melt. The ivory trade threatens the very existence of the planet’s largest mammals as thousands of elephants and rhinos are slaughtered for trinkets and pseudo medicines.   There are still porters in Peru and Tanzania who continue to work under inhumane conditions. Men from the United States travel to Thailand, Guatemala, and central Europe for encounters with underage victims of the sex trade.

As a travel professional, you can ensure your clients are informed of these problems, are aware of the issues involved, the countermeasures, and the travel industry’s responsibility for negating each.

In many cases, the real cost of the environmental impact is “off-balance-sheet” – absorbed by the environment rather than by the traveler. The cumulative effects often show in places where we least want to observe the impact of humanity. But it is not only the environment per se that bears the brunt of tourism’s numbers. Trafficking in human slavery, the exploitation of animals, and of cheap labor are all intersected at some point by our profession.

These are not esoteric causes, but problems at the heart of some of the planet’s most correctable pathologies. Some of the key points worth noting:

• While consumers believe travel service suppliers should be good stewards of their environment, over half (54%) also believe that individuals themselves have the greatest responsibility for preserving and protecting the environment.
• Six out of ten (58%) travelers say they believe that environmental programs by travel service suppliers could have a positive effect on the environment.
• The majority (51%) of consumers will continue to patronize “green” travel service suppliers regardless of an economic downturn. In fact, nearly half (48%) of travelers say that continuing to support environmentally-responsible travel service suppliers is a necessity, even in an economic downturn.
• Less than one-third (29%) say it is easy to find out about environmental policies and initiatives of travel service suppliers

These key findings hold the promise of gradual evolution to a more sustainable travel industry. Travel professionals can be an important catalyst in the transformation of our industry from a 19th-century model to a 21st-century ideal. If fewer than one-third of travelers find it easy to obtain information on sustainable travel, there is a role for the socially conscious travel consultant to play.

Many might argue travel is itself a part of the problem.  The footprint of tourism is heavy and deep and our impact on some very fragile environments is significant.  Yet, it is balanced by the opportunity for millions of people to acquaint themselves with new cultures, new ways of thinking, an expanded vision of being a world citizen. We can only hope. We can certainly do our part in playing a positive role to offset the negative influences of travel and tourism.

Many tour operators have been taking very direct actions toward sustainable travel for years. Companies like Intrepid and G Adventures have blazed a trail for us, but there is so much more to be done.

Collectively, our profession touches millions of people each year. Pick a good cause. Educate yourself. Pass along just a small bit of information to your clients each and every time you engage in a travel planning effort. Help to make us all better world citizens. Make sustainable travel an issue. Because it is. The evidence indicates your clients want this type of information.  Who better to provide it than a travel professional?

We will not always get second chances. Somewhere, a canary just lost its wings.