Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 206: What "Premium" Actually Means for Travel Advisors
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency Near Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Kay, and sorry, I just drank some water. Can't really talk, apparently. Today is day 206 of the podcast. It is daily episodes, 365 total, the year it has been launched, 2026. If you subscribe, you get daily notifications. Fun fact like 70% of our listeners don't even subscribe. It'd be really cool if you did, though. Anyway, we're gonna talk about what premium actually means. with regards to pricing any services outside of your fees. Now, if you're riding the struggle bus for like pricing your fees, I have two solutions for you. Head over to elevate with Rachel K dot com and there is a free I'll link it in the description because I don't think I've created the full landing page. It's like I just finished it like a week and a half ago. A free tool And mini course called Know Your Numbers. It'll be linked. Let me write that down. Also, if you really want to get down and dirty and see what your actual value, what your hourly rate is after all of your expenses, all all of them. We also have a little mini course for $97 called Charge a Fee. And that is another fun spreadsheet you get to fill in and then be shocked. And then be like, well, I do need to charge a fee then. So just to differentiate, know your numbers shows you how to properly set like forecasting for your revenue goals. let's see, what else? What's in the beginning? your cost to acquire clients, your lifetime value of clients, or and if what you're niching into. And how much time you're spending on it is something that's even worth your time. And if it's something that you really love, it'll calculate for you if you need to charge a fee and the minimum fee amount that you should charge. So it's really cool. That's what know your numbers is. The charge a fee course is like you probably should charge a fee once you add in all of your expenses. Because know your numbers just starts with. The expenses to acquire your new business. Charge a fee is all of the expenses and what your actual hourly rate is. Okay. And that'll help you determine. And you can also set your goal in the charge a fee course of like what you'd love to for your hourly rate to be. If it's way too high, like let's say, let's say you pick up this course and you're like, I'm gonna do this, and you're like, I wanna make $85 an hour. But you're like selling carnival cruises, that means you'd have to sell like basically one lower category cabin, I think, state room, whatever, almost every single hour to make that. Or you'd have to charge a fee. But do carnival clients want to pay someone a fee to book their stay? Lots of things to factor in there. So maybe you need to get more efficient and or maybe you need to be spending less money. That's what charge a fee is all about. Alright, anyway, rambling on. Today's episode is all about if you have it the ability to create any knowledge based services that don't require you to work as a travel advisor, but aid because of your knowledge and I w I don't want to say certifications, but you know, you are a travel advisor and it's in the travel niche. We talked about that a few episodes back. Little mini courses, digital downloads, paid strategy sessions as my favorito. Is that even a word? As possible additional income streams, not replacing your income, but just there to make a little extra cash. But what I didn't really get into, I kind of touched on it like you could do like this much, you could do like this much. I didn't get into is a question I know if you were listening to those episodes, you're probably like Okay, but what do I actually charge for these kinds of things? We're gonna clear it up today. The first mental shift. There's no universal price tag that makes something premium, quote unquote. Premium is relative. It's relative to the other offers sitting next to it and relative to how much time, access, and transformation someone is actually getting. Not just the copy on your landing page to get them to sign up. This should sound familiar because it's the exact same logic when we were talking about service packages for your booking your clients. If you're brand new, there's so much. I mean literally this is the two hundred and sixth episode. a number in isolation means nothing to a buyer. A number next to other options tied to a clear scope means everything. So before you land on a price for like any single single product, map out where it sits relative to everything else you offer. So you want to think of if you have multiple knowledge-based offers, like you could do the digital downloads. That's going to be a lower ticket one. You could do the evergreen like mini course or like a paid webinar. You could do the strategy sessions and then you have your service fees. Like if you're doing a ladder, that's kind of how that would work. But if you're like, I'm doing totally different things, you want to base your ladder off of two items to consider. Number one, numero uno. I to say numero uno, and I said number one. Number one? Am I from California? Sorry if you're from California. I just thought of the old SNL skit. Anyway. How much of your direct time and attention is required and involved, and how deep the value goes. Those are the two things you need think about. So digital download sits at the bottom. And here's why. Like a packing guide, a budget planning template, destination checklist. Those take no ongoing time from the time you make them and they're created and built. They're an easy purchase on impulse, and they should be priced accordingly. Genuinely low, often in the range of like a cup of coffee, maybe two. Maybe an ice coffee. I don't know. Maybe matcha. I don't know the price of anything. The goal here with the digital downloads isn't maximum revenue per sale. It's volume, easy access, and often functioning as a paid lead magnet, like we discussed a few episodes back. Then you got your courses above that. Maybe the webinars. If you want to do webinars, join my webinar for five dollars, get fifty people to show up. That's 250 bucks, you know? And you might be able to get some trips from it. I don't know. I did that once, it failed miserably, and I think it was more my marketing strategy because I didn't give it enough time. But it's a thing. So courses represents real structure, real teaching, often some video content, and a sequence of lessons. Meaningfully more time invested to build, meaningfully more transformation promised to the buyer. It should be priced higher than a digital download, but it's still self-serve, no live access to you. This is like your mid-tier. Also, sidebar from what I understand about course creation. If you do not have an assessment, like a test that you have to manually grade, you cannot have it be like multiple choice or you do not offer any live sessions with you in those courses. They are not a service, they are a product, and they will be taxed accordingly. Please be aware of that if you like get into this. They're di like Sales tax is different from a service versus a product. Okay. So you could potentially add one at the end of the course, like one live consultation for them to book as part of their course completion. And you might be able to get it taxed as a service for sales tax purposes rather than a product. But keep that in mind. Okay. Sorry, I got into like the tax legal stuff a little bit. I'm not an attorney, I'm not a CPA. This is just things that I have read when I was creating my courses and I was like, hmm, I don't even want to be a product. And also keep that in mind if you're investing in any courses, because if it if there aren't any live QA's and if there's no real assessment where you have to like submit essays to them, they're not providing service, is all I'm saying. All right. Paid strategy sessions or trip planning audits sit at the top. This is right below your planning fee. This is the one involving your actual live time, and this is definitely a service. Your direct expertise applied to one specific person's situation, so it's highly customized and it's one-on-one time. That should be your highest price knowledge offer because it is the least scalable. You can sell an unlimited number of downloads or courses. Without your time being in the bottleneck, but a one-on-one session is capped by your calendar. So notice the logic price should track the actual investment involved, both yours and theirs, not how good the content is in some abstract sense. A brilliant guide is still a guide. A live hour of your expertise is a different category entirely. Okay? And there are two ways to get it wrong, which Everyone does it, it's fine, and everyone does this with their fees. That's why I did the know your numbers free thing tool. Price too low. This shows up as a course priced like a digital download or live strategy session priced like it's barely worth your time. So go get the know your numbers, A. Plug in your numbers. There is video content of me being like, and now this what this section means. But you can at least plug in your numbers and see how much you're making hourly. And you can be like, hmm, I need to charge a minimum of this for my time. And you can I don't know if I have it set up. I might have the I don't think I have it set up to where you can s create your own hourly rate, but there is a goal hourly rate to achieve. Because it's reasonable. Okay. You can go higher. anyway. A course priced at five bucks doesn't read as an accessible deal. And it can suppress sign ups. Because people use price as a shortcut for quality when they don't have other information yet. But it also burns your own time and energy for very little return, which makes you resentful of a product that shouldn't have been or should have been sustainable. I am definitely guilty of pricing things too low. on occasion. Like beside I'm just gonna tell you the truth about my elevate business. I don't believe that ninety percent of what I'm teaching I mean y you can learn all of this stuff on your own. You know what I mean? Like you can learn all of this. You can read all the same books. I don't know. And it's evergreen. But there are lives with most of my courses, so I'm like, mmm. I don't know. But I feel like I want to make it accessible for like startup travel advisors, for sure. But also I don't know. Some of them are reasonably priced, some of them are very low priced. But some of them are like groups of people at the same time, so I don't need to price that much. Anyway. That's my little conundrum. My I have the hardest time with pricing stuff 'cause I'm like, well I go either way too low or too high. I'll be like five thousand dollars. I'm like maybe not. So this shows up when you price it too high as a self serve digital download priced like it includes your personal attention. Like a packing list destination guide for fifty bucks. when it doesn't. If there's no live access to you, no way to customize it, no real scarcity because it's unlimited digital downloads and the price still feels like a significant decision, most people will hesitate and drop off before they buy. The fix isn't necessarily to slash the price. Sometimes it's to reconsider whether that offer actually justifies that pricing tier, whether it needs to be res repositioned at a lower price or built out with more included to earn that higher price. Now then there's also an argument in like the entrepreneur world that you need to provide so much value for free too even with your free lead magnets like as much value as you can because that's like the free sample right okay before you finalize on a price Ask yourself two questions. If a stranger who's never heard of you saw this price next to what's included, would it feel obviously fair or would it need a lot of convincing? If it needs a lot of convincing, that's usually a signal you're either priced too high for what's included or you haven't explained the value clearly enough. Second, does this price reflect roughly how much your direct time and expertise is involved? Relative to your other offers, like your travel general travel planning services. A strategy session should never be priced lower than a course. A course or like a webinar. A course should never be priced at or near the price of a download. Keep that internal hierarchy consistent. You're like Rachel, you said this at the beginning of the episode. Don't worry, let me ramble for 20 minutes. And every offer will actually help sell the others instead of confusing the person looking at all three. Okay. There's never gonna be a universally correct number. There just isn't. There's no like I don't know what you've got, I don't know what you know, I don't know everybody's different. It kinda like with the fees, you can get like a general idea with know your numbers, here's the minimum you should charge to make a reasonable living with your niche and your average like all that stuff. but it's to build a pricing structure across your offers that's internally consistent, reflecting the real value and time behind each one, and doesn't scare off the exact people you built these things for in the first place. Okay. Day 206 of the Travel Agency New Year podcast. We're gonna keep going on with some identity stuff as an entrepreneur, and I'm excited, so stay tuned for tomorrow. Wait here for 24 hours. Or you could just subscribe and, you know, you'll get daily notifications as new episodes drop. Have a great day.