Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 141 - Giving Your Travel Clients the VIP Experience
Transcript
- Rachel K: Welcome to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K. Thanks for stopping by. Thanks for coming back. Today is 141, day 141. I have it titled, Give Your Clients the VIP Experience. I also have slash, Do What Your Suppliers Do. This is very similar to a loyalty program. It could be your loyalty program if you choose to accept the mission and develop a loyalty program. This could also just be a VIP program that you create and this is aligned with like client retention that we discussed yesterday. Somewhat, but it's like a digression in a big way. All right. How do you do a VIP experience for your clients? Great question. I have some tippy-toes here. Tip number one, make sure it's your most loyal segments of your client base. Don't just offer it to anybody. because this is VIP. So think about this when I say do what your suppliers do. They treat the people who register the most bookings with them with special bonuses and cash payouts and gifts for their clients and come to our award ceremony. You get a free trip and you're featured on our website. That's the VIP experience. Every single cruise brand, resort brand is attempting to build with you. So you have that loyalty. Do you see how this makes sense that you can apply this to your own clientele? and you only give it to the most loyal segments of your client base. If you create, I don't know, okay, I don't really sell cruises, but I have a Virgin Voyages account and I did do their training, right? Because I was considering it and I had an agent on my team who really wanted to specialize in it, like specifically Virgin Voyages, like two or three years ago, probably three years ago now. So I was like, well, I guess I'll learn about this too. And I've... never sold a I don't think I think pre-covid I sold a few cruises I don't think I've really ever sold a cruise and then pre-covid was like it was like 2020 sailing so they didn't even go so I know nothing about cruises really ⁓ virgin doesn't send me anything because I don't sell it but other like resort brands are like hey here's this bonus hey Here, you get a five nights stay complimentary. Hey, come to this award ceremony. You get four nights for free on us. Send us your flights. ⁓ Hey, you can give this to your clients because you produce so much with us. Same thing. Same thing you can do for your most loyal clients. You wanna have thresholds before the invitation. What does that look like for you in your business if you do want to create these VIP experiences? Is there a minimum total spend per client? Like say they've got to hit 25,000 in spend or 10,000 in spend. ⁓ I don't know what you sell, so I don't know what the average price of your trips are. But does it equate to like three to five trips booked with you over time? Or is it a specific number of trips? Is it a specific number of referrals? ⁓ Is it a combination of all three that qualifies them to be considered a very loyal client that has the opportunity to join your VIP program or get your VIP experience? ⁓ And then from there, you want to create the VIP experience treatment that they're gonna get. So you want to do this in tiered benefits to help gain more loyalty from them back to the suppliers. The more you produce, you get these special tier levels with them, which means you might get higher booking bonuses or you might get longer free trips from them. You might start out like, you get three free nights once you ⁓ prove that you've sold, I don't know, like 100 room nights in a year. You get a free three nights stay plus one free massage. And then once you hit 101 to like 499 room nights, that's the next tier, right? Then you get booking bonuses plus everything else cumulative, right? So you wanna have tiered benefits and you can create them using like gemstones, precious metals, or whatever. You could just be like level one, two, three, four, five. I don't care. Also, if you've ever owned a vacation club timeshare thing, they do the same thing too. The more money you spend with them, they'll be like, ⁓ I'm double platinum. ⁓ So you want to have tiered benefits as they do more business with you, however you have it structured for them to get into your VIP program. Then you provide more and more exclusive access, more personalized rewards, maybe priority service or dedicated support. If they're booking enough trips, you might be able to hire someone to just be like your 24-7 concierge for them. Like when they're traveling. Don't hire someone 24-7. All right, have Benny's. Benny's of a VIP experience will typically increase the average spend of your loyal clients once they're like, ⁓ you mean if I book five trips, I'm gonna get a four night stay somewhere for free or something crazy like that? They're gonna book five trips in a year. You know that. So they can be like, I did it. Now give me my free four nights. That's a very dramatic example and it's an example. ⁓ Clients will receive a greater experience. You better deliver what you promise in these VIP experiences. And that leads to positive brand advocacy because they have such a strong emotional connection. Think back to like the reason you are niched in what you're niched in is because you've developed an emotional connection to the brand. You've probably never spent time with the owner one-on-one. That would be a dream. Like that's how emotionally connected you are to that brand. You're like, I would just die if I met the founder of this company, right? And you get very, very excited. So you become an advocate for this brand and you're also making money selling their trips, whatever, but you do become a personal advocate. Trust me, I've been in that boat. And then when they crap all over your heart, you're like, why didn't I even do this? No, I'm kidding. I mean, it could happen. So don't outwardly promote the VIP experience. If you really want it to be like a VIP and luxurious thing, now you can have your loyalty program. and you could have like the tiers of your loyalty program and then you could have like a quick little blurb for the ultimate VIP experience, contact us for more information. Then they have to make more of an effort instead of just saying, ⁓ I get these benefits. But that's gonna allude to you get even more than this loyalty program, but there's requirements. You don't have to say what the requirements are on your webpage. You don't have to actively promote it. In fact, I wouldn't promote it like VIP experience. ⁓ I would do it more of like a soft launch with those loyal clients personally and ask them to help you develop the program because then they're really going to be like, I'm in this to win this. Now with that in mind, if you're like, I don't know what to even offer back to what I mentioned earlier in the episode with like priority service, things like that. What do people like in VIP experiences? ⁓ Across the board, regardless of the industry, if there's anyone with like a VIP program, those people as clients invested in becoming VIP members typically, ⁓ Prefer the following benefits. Priority service. Personalized concierge access. Automatic upgrades. And they want it to be in a tiered structure. Just like you are like, I'm gonna be double platinum, Ruby 6 this year with Norwegian Cruise Lines. Because then they'll put a really bad picture of me that I sent in on their website. I don't know, sorry. Or I'll get this crystal thing in the mail. I'm wondering if I should just put up my awards. I have like seven or eight awards on my bookshelf in my office. And I'm like, those are all done and done in vain. Do I even want them out anymore? Should I just put them up? But again, you want that status because you get that extra stuff. And it's kind of like little bragging rights. You should do the same thing for your clients when creating a VIP experience. Okay, that was day 141. I hope you found this episode somewhat entertaining and please come back tomorrow. Hit the subscribe button. Save this if you were like. I need to create a VIP experience and I don't want to forget, you can always save these episodes people. You can always subscribe and you can save the exact episodes because there's 365 of them just in this podcast. And once this podcast is don't worry, I got another one in the pipeline. Have a good day.