Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 270: Set It Up Now: BDM Meetings and Tourism Board Trainings
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency in the Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, travel agency owner, helping you for free 99 build a business that builds you up. This is 365 episodes. Today is day 270. How else can Rachel help me? Great question, Rando. Go to elevate with Rachel K.com. I offer customized one-on-one mentoring and starting tomorrow. Spaces may be filled. But each quarter, success circle, which is a year-long program, but it's heavily tied to everything in this podcast. Anyhood. setting it up now. Any BDM trainings, meetings, tourism board trainings. Why you need to do it now? Or at least check in your portal if you need to do any refreshers. You know what I'm talking about. Like the Hyatt Inclusive Collection, they used to do it with AMR, but like any new trainings you need to complete to keep your certifications with specific brands, and maybe just do some refresher trainings with tourism boards. So there it's a small practical action item today that's easy to keep pushing off, but genuinely pays off. Getting BDM meetings, tourism board trainings on your calendar. calendar now while things are a little bit quieter rather than once wave season is already in full swing. Mmm so business development managers and tourism boards are generally more available for like the real unhurried conversations during the slower stretch of the year before their own calendars fill up with the same seasonal surge. that we all go through. Now. They also have their own seasonal calendars when they're running around going to conventions, so on and so forth. Reaching out now means you're more likely to get some genuine in-depth one-on-one time with them rather than a rushed five-minute exchange squeezed between their own busy commitments later on. So, BDM, whether it's from a resort brand or cruise line or DMC. is a direct line to current information, any new product offerings, any upcoming incentives, changes to a property or an itinerary that hasn't widely been publicized yet. meeting with your BDMs periodically keeps your knowledge current in a way that generic online research cannot match because you're hearing directly from the people closest to the actual product. You can also spitball if you're refining your niche a little bit, or maybe you want to specialize in a different type of travel that is tied to that brand and ask for input and tips as well. Tourism board trainings I have never paid for tourism board training in my life. Maybe some cost money, I don't know. But they are specifically designed to deepen an advisor's expertise in a destination, sometimes including certification programs that allow you to market yourself with a recognized credential. And again, I've said in past episodes that I'll be like, I'm a Jamaica Tourism Board Certified Specialist. No. But you can quietly put the badge on your website. These trainings also frequently include details, some insider recommendations, destination updates, maybe new DMC partnerships that are registered with the tourism board that you might want to reach out to and connect with. I'm always a big fan of networking. And they they go far beyond what's generally like what's available to the general public. So, you have different knowledge to bring back to your content and your client conversations and your expertise and the fiduciary advice you provide. What does fiduciary mean, Rachel? It means in the interest of the client. Remember, you are Gandalf the Gray. Your client is Bilbo Baggins. You are getting them to their dream vacation. What is it, the Sauren? I don't remember any of them. Why am I referencing that? If you haven't listened to the past few episodes, I talk about the challenge, the client, and the covenant, the three C's in all of your messaging. And if you're riding the struggle bus on understanding that for your messaging, your client is the hero of your story. You are the sage guide helping them to achieve the heroic outcome, which is planning the vacation you offer. And it's fun to think about, okay. It's fun to think I'm the wizard. Okay, don't be a dark wizard though. So what can you do this week or today? Set aside some time specifically to ID which BDM relationships and like tourism boards, trainings that might be available, check them quick. And is it relevant to current your current niche? Reach out. enroll in any trainings. If you already have an existing like BDM connection, check-in message. Like I know a lot of BDMs, well p they all think I died because I got rid of Facebook, but they would often follow me on Facebook. We would follow each other or friend each other and they would follow my TikTok account. back when I was promoting my travel agency in TikTok. But you could just send a DM. Like, keep in touch. Sometimes they're getting married, sometimes they're having kids. Like, develop that friendship. Okay? But you can send a check-in message asking to reconnect and what time works well for them. Reference the outreach principles. We've talked about this day 238 of the Travel Agency New Year podcast. Make it about them, keep it short, and don't be afraid of the silence while you wait for a response. That's basically that episode in a nutshell. Nutshell. Once you've completed a training or had genuinely useful BDM conversation, that's fresh material for your Story Bank, day 216, and your content matching sessions. And if you are doing tourism board training, I want you to think of the hero, the client, and how you, as the sage, guiding them. What bits of that knowledge you are learning in that training would actually be something the hero needs to know to understand they can trust you instead of possibly being a backstabber or something. I feel like I should do a whole episode on like making your travel agency viewing it from like a weird Like J. R. R. Tolkien book. Anyway. So when you're doing the training, like I said, obviously you want to take notes on things, but pay specific attention to what your hero that you are serving will resonate with the most. It's gonna be a lot of information. Like, don't just be like, I'm doing this training on Aruba, and they don't give two rips about Baby Beach. They might. They might need Baby Beach info. They might have a question of why not Baby Beach. Mm-hmm. Anyway, new current insider level knowledge is exactly the kind of specific differentiated content that stands out from generic destination posts, and it reinforces your authority in your niche in a way that's hard for someone without that direct relationship to replicate. And sometimes your BDM will send you like backup like photos and like b-roll content of a cruise ship or walkthrough of a property. I don't know. They might invite you on a fam where you can get that stuff on your own. Who knows? Who knows? Maybe it'll invite you to Bed Bath and Beyond. We don't know. but that can help you with your content creation as well. For example, if you have a really good relationship with your BDM and you have an idea that a resort that you love to sell is shut down for remodel right now, you might reach out to your BDM and be like, Hey, do you have like the what is it? Renderings for what these room remodels are gonna look like? Are there anything finished yet? Is anything finished yet that we can share? And they might send you that information. Alright, reach out to your BDMs. Recap time. enroll in tourism board trainings as needed. Do it now while your calendar is a little bit quieter before wave season, rather than waiting until wave season is already underway, and then you're inundated by your host agency or the brands themselves to join all these special trainings, and then you're just what? No, you don't have the capacity for that. Use these relationships to keep your knowledge current and differentiated and feed what you learned directly back into your story bank and your content to the hero of your story. Alright, we're gonna talk about a refining your niche expertise tomorrow and what that actually looks like. How to do it with genuine confidence. I hope you had a wonderful day. I'll see you tomorrow.