Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 211: Batching the backend tasks in a travel agency
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency in your podcast. Of those of you subscribed, thanks for returning. Those of you who are new, thanks for finding this podcast. We are on day 211. My name's Rachel Kay, by the way. I'm a travel agency owner, helping travel advisors become the CEO of their travel business. Alright, today's 211. Yesterday we talked about task by task for content batching. Today we're gonna do task by tack, tax, task, for batching the back end of your business, the operations of your business. Payments, emails, trip audits, etc., etc. etc. So we're gonna be batching the less glamorous but arguably more important side of your business. The operational tasks that pile up the fastest once you're handling higher volume or group travel. You might be thinking, this doesn't apply to me. I'm so hyper-focused on each individual trip. That's great when you have like one or two trips a month. When you're doing 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 clients that you're serving a month, you can't do that. It's a big Time suck and inefficient. Why scattered admin tasks quietly cost you the most? If you're processing payments the moment they come in to your inbox. Answering client emails the second they arrive and reviewing trip details whenever you happen to think of it, you're living in a constant reactive mode. We have an episode somewhere back in back in the there's too many episodes. 211, are you kidding me? I don't know where. All about reacting versus responding. If you are running your travel agency like this, you are in reactive mode. And I know there's a lot of like disagreement with certain Advisors who are like, no, you should be on call 24-7 and you should respond immediately. And there are some host agencies that charge their advisors $150 if they don't respond right away, and their clients have to call the main host agency center. Also, this host agency does not allow advisors to charge fees. Make that make sense. Anyway. Like reconsider your life if you're like, I work for a host agency like that. Anyway. That is such an in that you're not running a business. You are a, in that case, you are making money for the host agency. You are not actually running your own business. Anyway, because you're stuck, you're forced to be in a reactive mode. You cannot set up your model the way you want it to be set up. That's a question of are you truly an IC or are you an employee? I'm not gonna get too controversial with that right now. Every notification though that you respond, react to, not respond to, pulls you out of whatever you're actually doing. And when you have something interrupt what you are doing, even if it's like a three, this only takes like three minutes, Rachel, it's not that bad. That three minutes adds twenty minutes to the rest of your day because you have to switch in your brain. What you were doing. And so when you're done with it, then you're gonna be like, this is how squirrel brain develops, everybody. Then you're gonna be like, okay, what was I doing? maybe it's over here in my email. I got a new email in. I better answer that question. I don't know the answer to this question. I better research this. it takes me 45 minutes. Now I've got this email answered. I'm so efficient. What was I doing again? I got another payment coming in. You cannot have your business running this way when you start to get higher volume. If like I said, if you're doing one or two trips a month, it's honestly it's more of a hobby. No shade, no offense. It's more of a hobby and you can do it however you want. If you actually want to make an income, you've got to be more efficient with how you manage your time. This is especially costly when you're doing group travel or higher client volume. A single day might involve a dozen payments coming in, twenty emails, and several trips that all need final reviews before their departure. Like If you have a group of 70 people or 70 rooms, not 70 people, 60, 70 rooms going, you can't willy-nilly just look at some of them and be like, well, that one's good, well, that one's good. You have to be. Today's the day I review everyone's travel documents. No appointments, nothing else going on. Phone is on silent, no notifications. Because you want to make sure it's efficient and good. And you might have to do this once every other day during peak travel season for your travel. Business. Okay, what does this look like bashed? I just mentioned the trip audits. All payments processed at the same time each day. Pick one window. You could either do first thing in the morning, right after lunch, just pick one window and process every payment that has come in during that window, altogether, done. You stay in one headspace the entire time. You can catch discrepancies much faster because you're comparing several things at once and you're not interrupting your deep, deep I'm working on my business instead of in my business every time a notification pinks. So for me, in my travel agency, any payments submitted after 12 p.m. Central Standard Time, this is like standard policy for me. Any payments, any emails, that's going to be dealt with the following business day. So they can submit a payment at 2 p.m. on a Friday. It's not going to be processed until the following Monday. Okay? And you can pick up like, you know what, your expiration date, you know, or if there's like a decline or something, and you can just like do it all at once, contact that person, get that payment issue in line. And you still have time to resolve it. And this is like another big reason why you pad your final payment dates with group trips, especially and FITs, so that if there is an issue and you do have high volume and you're processing all these payments, there's no guarantee that the client with a payment issue is going to get back to you right away. So you need to have that buffer so that you can make sure that their payment goes through before they're in penalty with the Supplier or the room block contract. Alright. All client emails answered at the same time each day. What I like to do, and I've mentioned this in past episodes, 11 a.m. I check my first set of emails. Okay. 11 a.m. I answer the emails that came in the following day or the day prior, the business day prior. Then I check any new emails and I answer those as like best I can. If it's anything that's going to require me to do some research, I follow up and say, hey, you know, I'm going to have to look into this. Give me a day or two. You know? At 3 p.m., I check my emails again and I look for anyone that's emailing me. And I just make a note, and that's my to-do list for the following day. Like I gotta reach out and do this, this, and this. Those are the things I need to do for contacting. And you can have your VA do this as well for you. this is so hard to commit to. And this is also why I don't like to text any of my clients unless they are the group hosts. I do not like to have a texting relationship. Because emails always feel urgent. That's not they're for me. I have a completely different method of communication for my clients and travel, so I know emails are not urgent. I will get an an occasional group guest that doesn't follow my protocols and will email me, but I'm just like checking on my emails. most client emails can wait a few hours. For your batched response time window, you know. I like to do two times a day because then you are, you know, responding a little bit faster and you can stay on track because especially when you're at a higher volume, you're gonna get 10 to 20 emails a day, like random stuff. Can I change who my roommate is? I'd like to upgrade my room category. Can I add a day? Like those kinds of things. And then you also have that time to email your supplier or email your group coordinator and get those requests in and then reply and be like, this has been done for you. We're in a holding pattern right now. And if you are doing group travel and you're kind of new to it, a real easy tip. when they have those requests in. For me and my experience, my group coordinators are fantastico. And also I will just let them know, you know, this kind of request, because I've done it often enough, can be about five business days before we can get this settled. If I don't get a response within that time frame, I will follow up and I will send you an email letting you know I still have yet to get a response, I have followed up. And that is a nice way to keep them in the loop for your group travel guests. If you're doing like custom FIT Europe trips, whatever, and you're used to that, I don't do a whole lot of those, so I can't say for certain, but you can say the same thing like this type of modification with This complex complex of a trip can take two to three weeks to get this fully modified. So I will follow up, you know what I mean? Same thing. Like it's gonna take about two weeks if you don't hear, if I don't hear from them by like the 15th, if it's like the first, I will follow up with you and them, and I will give you whatever updates I can. And that gives your clients. Especially when you're high volume and you can set that precedence like it's about this t much time to get this done. it sets that precedence like they know, okay, well, I'm not gonna be like floating in space and feeling like I've been forgotten. It's been communicated, it takes about this long to get done. And he or she, my travel advisor, will follow up. And have either an answer or a hold, please. We're still waiting. I have followed up again. Okay. Trip audits, reviewing final travel documents, reviewing itineraries, all that fun stuff. The email automations. Maybe you need to change the day stuff's emailed out, maybe anything like that regarding trips. Just do it once a week. If you're doing groups, I like to do them once a month. All of the groups, because that's primarily what I do. All of my groups are audited the last week of the month to make sure they're all on track. And I have a spreadsheet of like what needs to be checked and your VA can have that spreadsheet too if you create one, you know. So That's just like up t up la la la reviewing upcoming trip details, confirmations, any timeline stuff before departure, like I mentioned. You need to focus on that. Make sure it's all accurate information. If you're doing this reactively, like, they're traveling next week, I better get this done. Whenever you happen to remember, like at 2 a.m., you're like open your eyes and wake up, be like, shoot, I need to do this. That's how details get mixed, missed, because you're in reaction mode instead of being like, this is my job. A set daily or weekly or monthly audit window means every trip gets the same level of scrutiny on a predictable schedule rather than depending on which ones happen to cross your mind. So let's think about this in terms of Alright, there's a huge debate about how the public education system was set up to have the bell ring and you focus on one subject. You should be doing the same thing in your business. And there's this like weird conspiracy, like, we were all trained to be factory workers. And it creates a lot more efficiency. Why are you not doing this in your own business? Why are you just bouncing around from one thing to the next? If you have a ding, this task is over, ding, ding, ding, time to switch to this task, you can become more efficient. And I've noticed when people start time blocking per task, myself included, you're gonna way overestimate how much time it's gonna take. The first week you might be right on target, but after like two or three weeks, because you learn to just like your brain is just like, this is all I need. doing right now you get so much faster you're making the same amount of money for less time a which also means you have the capacity to bring on more business b which also means you're gonna make more money c why are we not doing this all right Which leads me to the compounding effect at higher volume. As your business grows, a single advisor hand it handling a handful of clients a month, like one or two, can get away with that reactive handling. And being like s t I know a lot of us have like we're all a little somewhere on the neurodivergent spectrum. And this is why it's like super important to like set these boundaries in place. if especially if you have any kind of like attention issues and you might have to set up an entire environment where there are zero there's zero other chance for any sort of distractions, okay? If you really want to scale your business, an advisor handling higher volume or regular group trips cannot be squirrel reactive mode. It's not gonna go well for them. The sheer number of interruptions from reactive processing becomes the biggest hidden cost in your travel business. Showing up as exhaustion, small errors, rather than the obvious line item. people will feel like they're not being served very well if you set the precedence. Of call or text or email anytime, but then you're in that exhausted mode or you're doing something else and squirrel brain and you're like reacting, like, oops, I forgot to do this, oops, I forgot to fix this, I gotta get this done, and then you have another client calling you randomly, and then they get annoyed because you can't pick up the phone like you promised you would, because you are lacking boundaries and set times for things to be done. So if you want to improve on this a little bit, pick one of those three: payment processing, email answering, auditing your trips, or all three. But just pick one for now. Let's make it easy and commit to batching it for one week. Put it on your calendar, check and answer emails, whatever time of day, once or twice a day. You cannot have any other calls. Shut your phone off. Like turn it off if you need to. Shut your TV off. Shut, well, I like to listen to music. shut music off if that's a distraction. Shut the door to the space you're working in if you can, and that's all you're focusing on during that time. And you'll notice how much calmer your day feels without that task constantly interrupting you. Once it becomes a habit, which people say it takes 21 days to establish a habit, once you feel like, like you don't even need to look at your calendar and you're just like, time to check emails, add the next habit. So we've got the last two days, we've got two batching systems, one for your content, one for your operations. Tomorrow, we're gonna shift completely different content system, how to turn one video into an entire week's worth of content. I love this and I talk about it all the time, but we're gonna go into deep, deep detail of how deep, deep, deep detail of how to accomplish this because this can also really help you if you do video or written content. And you want to be able to get it done at an even more efficient level and post more and just get more stuff done, get more leads. Okay. This was is travel yeah, this was, it's gonna be no more. This is the travel agent senior podcast, day two eleven.