Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 106 - A Travel Advisor's How-to Guide to Group & FIT Audits
Transcript
- Rachel K: Welcome to the Travel Agency in a year podcast. My name is Rachel K and I am your host and we are on day 106 and, and, and I said and, and so many times it's fine. I hope you're having a wonderful day today and thanks for stopping in to listen to my crazy ramblings. Today's episode is a how to guide for group slash FIT audits. No, I'm not gonna, I'm not going to show you exactly what I do. I'm just going to give you some tips and consider that this is something you need to be doing. It's super helpful to maintain consistency in your services because you can pick up if you have six groups, you can be like, oops, I need to do this. ⁓ I need to do this by this deadline. So if you don't know anything about me, I am a travel agency owner. I have another company, Elevate with Rachel K that has courses, mentoring, coaching, consulting services for travel advisors who are like, I don't know what I'm doing. I know how to book a trip. I know how to close trips, whatever. You might know some things, but you're like, I don't know how to run a business and I don't know how to do this. So that's kind of like the whole purpose of Elevate with Rachel K. head on over there if you want to. And I am a travel agency owner, like I said, and my focus used to be primarily destination weddings. I still have a heavy group travel focus. However, it's not that I'm saying destination weddings are dead. Don't think that. And I'm not saying destination weddings are terrible. They are just no longer aligned with how I want my business to look. for my own personal reasons. So I still do group travel management. just, ⁓ I love weddings and I just don't, I've put an end to the destination weddings they are facing out this year. Okay. ⁓ Why do you do audits? More discipline. Remember this is like kind of tied to my little discipline series. If you haven't. Been listening and you just found this episode day 104. So two days ago is when I started talking a lot about discipline. And we're going to expand upon this. Let me look at my notes quickie, quickie, quickie. I think just through tomorrow. ⁓ in regards to like developing discipline. And I do the wax on, wax off. If you're watching this on YouTube, this is a lot of wax on, wax off, hand movements. I don't know why, it's fine. Neither here nor there. So if you are tracking for your SOP, standard operating procedures with your group or FIT audits, you're gonna remain disciplined in what you need to do and you're gonna develop the habits of... your workflows that you have like dreamed up in place. You know what I mean? Cause you can create your workflows however you want. You can buy templates. You can write them all yourself, however you want to do it. And it helps you make sure everyone's getting the same thing. If you've never taken any of my courses, I referenced the McDonald's franchise method. Like they took a machine who was at Ray Kroc took, found these like, I believe they were Swedish brothers in California. and they had developed this machine of making the exact same burgers and fries every single time, whatever. And he's like, this is genius. You want to do that same thing in your business, have the same exact process. Your French fries take three minutes in the fryer. Okay. Period. The end. And then they sit in the basket for about a minute and then you dump them and salt them. Your burger has these ingredients on it. And this is your Mac sauce or secret sauce. Like you develop that, but you want to maintain consistency. So every time your clients come back to you, they know exactly what to expect, how it's done, and it just makes it easier for them. You can do these audits weekly. I like to do these on a monthly basis. You can run CRM reports, check your travel CRM to be sure that it has this capability to help you with your group audits in their reports systems. I like to use Trello because it has an added layer of accountability and deadlines for me. Instead of just looking at what the CRM has, I can look at, okay, did I set this up? Check. Did I set this up? Check. Here's a, you know, with Trello, if you don't know, but with Trello, like, specifically I think they're paid plans, you can set deadlines of when these need to happen. So you can have one board for FITs or groups. Again, I primarily do groups, so I've got the group sales board and I've got the group admin board. And it's all one template and I just copy it for every single group and then I just check the boxes when I've done the things and I assign deadlines when things need to happen. Let's see, so I just said that note, sorry. Why do I have two different boards, one for sales and one for administrative? Because I knew going into this that I wanted to scale and that way my administrative side, which is what I don't like to do, I like talking to people, I like sales, I like service side, I don't like the technicalities of things. I'm not, no. So I have my admin board set up specifically for my admin to manage and they don't see the sales side. They just like the sales department quote unquote in my travel agency sends the information that is required to go to the admin side and then the admin side can set it up. So you're creating a division of labor before you even start scaling. And when you do scale, you have it. already divided and ready to go. I think it's a very smart thing. You don't have to agree with me. So when you are creating your audits, work backwards from like the post trip email, whatever, and outline your steps. So the sales side, if you care, can, here's some examples. If you're gonna do two separate audit type things. The marketing, lead generation, consultations, the follow ups for consultations. And. The sales side can be like practice on painting the picture in your proposals. That was a phrase I heard so much when I first started as a travel agent and BDMs would just be like, you know, you just paint the picture. I'm like, what the heck does that mean? So what I have learned it to be just from years, like it just clicked one day in my brain. Painting the picture is ⁓ showcasing the value and the feeling behind the trip that you know that your ICA wants, I guess evoked would be the right word there for this trip. So as an example on a DW consultation, and I'm listening to the bride and groom talk about their dream wedding day. And so I'm like, okay, well I have this in mind and it sounds like you want a beautiful ocean backdrop. but you don't want to be in the sand. So let's picture like a rooftop terrace. There's only a handful of resorts that have that available. And then it sounds like you really want the ocean and the Caribbean to be the backdrop for your ceremony rather than having all these flowers everywhere, so on and so forth. So ⁓ that's what painting the picture means. As an example. Okay, the administrative board. or workflow or audits, however you wanna do this. This is payment processing, payment deadlines, client data, like their emails and phone numbers are correct, their billing address is correct, travel documents or the travel documents correct, and like the general workflows that you want to implement. Because once you have that copy written, like you could make it the sales side. because it is your copy and it is part of your branding. However, once it is written, the administrator of your CRM or even if you're wearing that hat temporarily, you're the one clicking. It's not really making you money. So admin tasks or anything that doesn't really bring in revenue, processing payments doesn't, mean, yeah, once they've traveled, you'll get the commission because they paid for it. but the client already agreed because of the sales side to pay that price, right? Okay, you can even add service as a separate, like how do you handle client communication and services separate from sales and marketing? You can do as little or as much as you want for these like audit steps that you want. Now, if you're still like, why did you put this idea on my brain and now I have to go do this? Well, If you are a student of group travel made easy, these are done for you already. You can request access to my Trello boards for groups. You can make it for FITs if you want and change the deadlines because groups are different from independent trips. But it has like everything I do on the admin side, everything I do on the sales side. Just let me know. It should be in the course itself, the links, but sometimes I have to give people access. And that's just a small part of one of my courses. I'm not trying to make this super salesy. So. That's the group in FIT audits, the quick and dirty how to gad. This is a very short episode today. Every once in a while, if it's under 15 minutes, I'm like, well, that was short. Maybe you should listen to an older episode if you haven't already. All right. I hope you all have a great day and I hope this gives you some ideas on how you should be maintaining your discipline. by having the audits to make sure that you are hitting the metrics and doing the things that you promised you would do not only for your business but for your clients. So have a great day, come back tomorrow, share this with anybody, I don't care. But I do care that you have a great day. All right, bye.