Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 269: Refreshing Your Travel Service Packages for the New Year
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome back to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, travel agency owner, helping you for $3.99 become the CEO of your travel agency. if you are feeling the burnout and you are so sick of investing your time and money in all the trainings and feel like you're getting nowhere, this podcast might be a real help for you. If you'd like to know how I can help you further, We do customize one-on-one mentoring and group cohorts in the success circle on a quarterly basis. Everything's limited spots and it's not psychotically overpriced. Anyway, head over to elevatewithrachelk.com. if you're interested. Today is day 269 in the travel agency in a year. Since we're heading in to, we are just days away. my gosh, just days away from the end of the third quarter. Well, shoot. This year's pretty much done. which means we are wrapping up the third season of the travel agency in a year. Let's talk about refreshing your service packages for the upcoming new year and the wave season. Having everything prepared now for when you're psychotically busy during wave season, fingers crossed, is a very smart strategy so you aren't overwhelmed or feeling confused and you are confident as a travel agency owner. So, in past episodes, shoot, back it was good thing I got my notes here. Back on days 198 through 200 in the Travel Agency in Ear podcast, and then again on day 206, we were building the case for tiered service packages and how to price them for your business. Now, I'm gonna write this down so I don't forget, which I probably will. There is a free guide called Know Your Numbers. It is linked in my profile. It's free for you to sign up and it will show you should you charge a fee based on your niche and your cost client acquisition costs. Should you have should you charge a fee and what is the bare minimum fee you should charge based on your ideal hourly wage? And in the know your numbers course thing, it's like a mini course. I recommend a minimum $40 an hour as like your base hourly wage. Okay. That is free for you to figure out if you even need to charge a fee. And then from there it'll also tell you yesterday we were talking about working backwards. I believe it was yesterday. Nope, it was day two sixty-seven, I believe. We were talking about working backwards from your goal. So you can also input in this know your numbers. Input your average booking value, your average commission, and your cost, your client access acquisition costs, and it will tell you how many trips you need to book a year and conversely how many trips you need to book on a monthly basis to hit your ideal revenue goals. Anyway That if you're like, I don't even know how to start charging a fee, that would tell you here's your base fee that you should charge. And I always recommend tiered service packages, like an essential one, mid-tier, and a higher end. If you go on any software platform that has multiple service packages, they almost always have three, right? Anything that has like service-based like subscription models or upfront fees, they tend To have tiered services and the lower cost one's gonna give you the least amount of time one-on-one with the owner of that business. Okay. Anyway, you're like, I don't care about any of this. You should because if it works in every other industry, why would it not work in travel? Duh duh business is business is business. As the year winds down to its end, which is kind of making me cry, not really, but kind of, this is exactly the right moment for you to revisit any tiered service packages you have with fresh eyes. And if you need to, you can use the Know Your Numbers spreadsheet. Learn how to use that. And follow along with this later on, or when you're revisiting your packages. If you're like, I need to increase my hourly rate my hourly wage, then you can plug in all the numbers and it'll be like here's your base minimum fee, right? So your packages were built based on your business, your pricing knowledge, your capacity at a specific point in time. A year later, all three of those have likely shifted. You've learned more about what clients actually value. You may have had costs change, and your own capacity and expertise may have grown. A package structure that made sense a year ago can quietly become slightly misaligned with where your business actually is now, without ever feeling like an obvious problem in any single client interaction. And I'm I seriously had no intentions of plugging know your numbers. The how-to guide for travel advisors. And that's happening because it is so helpful because if you determine I have to bring in more than 40 hours 40 hours. $40 an hour. I now have to bring in $60 an hour, and I'm still roughly in the same booking value. But you can also make the decision to increase your booking value as well as increase your fee, or keep your fee the same and increase your booking value. There's so many different factors you can play around with. And please don't think. That your value is instantly $250 an hour when it was only $40 an hour a year ago. Please do not make that giant leap into your hourly wage. Okay. Anyway. So, what are you actually reviewing? Pull up your three tiers. For each one, ask: Has this converted the way I wanted it to go over this past year? Are clients consistently landing in the tier that I designed for them? Or is there a pattern of confusion or hesitation at a specific tier that suggests something about how it's described, how its price isn't quite right? And if you had a lot of clients in a specific tier, did you learn over time that the clients are like, we really didn't need this service, or we would really like to have more of this type of service? So are there any inclusions in that tier that you rarely, if actually ever needed to deliver? Because they tend to not use them. Or were you informally adding to the tier so often that it probably belongs there officially and therefore you need to raise the price? So I found this when I was doing my service packages back in 2020s when I developed them for destination weddings. And one of the first things I added was a private Facebook group. And I've talked about this in several episodes because I was like, private Facebook group. I know my ICA isn't going to want to find me on Facebook, but I know that they have a Facebook. And I know that everyone in their family and all their friends has a Facebook group. And that quickly got shut down. Probably within Let's see, I wouldn't set up the Facebook group until about three months prior to travel and nobody wanted the Facebook group. Hardly anybody wanted the Facebook group. Some of would be like, Yay, thanks for signing up and starting this Facebook group. We're so excited for it. And then two weeks later they would message me or email me or text me, whatever. And they would be like, Can you please take this down? My friends I just realized are posting inappropriate content that I don't want my great aunt to see. And I was like, good point. So To quietly remove the private Facebook group option is what I'm saying. And that was like in my base tiers. and then also, I think around 2024, I decided to completely revamp my tiered services packages based on how much capacity I had for all of the extensive actual event planning. So I would limit on my high tier packages where I was there how many groups I would. Take on a year where I was actually in destination because that's tough, by the way. If you're listening to this and you've decided you're gonna offer week of coordination, you better have an assistant. You better have seven days off from work doing nothing else, and you better charge appropriately. So you can't be doing very many of those a year. I've always limited those. But then the full service planning, I started, I made the decision I wanted to limit those to no more than eight a year. So those two combined, the full service event planning plus the in-destination, like week of coordination services, those are no more than 12 groups a year. But I wanted to do more simpler groups, so with my lowest tiered service package, I actually lowered my fee and took away a lot of the general planning for the events. So you can do it that way as well. Anyway, that's just an example. So if you built out your numbers using the know your numbers process that we talked about a little bit, referenced on day one ninety-nine, or if you went ahead and downloaded the freebie, revisit that calculation now with a full year of real data behind it rather than the estimates you may have started with. Now we're only like two months away. I think the know your numbers guide is only about two or three months old. But maybe you can be a little more realistic, or you can go full on That's fine too. I prefer going the full on Dolulu, and here's why: a little bit of a tangent. If you have a goal to make, let's say, half a million dollars in gross revenues in your travel agency, and you strive towards that goal, you may not hit that goal your first year, but you're gonna go well past. 200,000, most likely. You know? So I'm always a big fan of saying, hey, be delusional. Be like, I'm gonna make a million dollars a year as a travel advisor, minimum, and then scale. Because if you have a goal of making a million dollars in revenue, you're gonna work smarter, not harder, because it is a lot of work. So you're gonna find the fastest way to get to that million dollars a year in revenue. And W whoopdy freaking do. You don't h hit a million dollars a year in revenue. You're certainly gonna do better than the braggars who say I made a hundred and fifty K last year by my three thousand dollar course. That's not even a business. That's not even a business amount of revenue. Ugh. Sidebar again. I rec recently joined a mentorship program and their requirement is you have to show you've made you have generated something like half a million in capital. Like they don't even consider you a business until you're at that point. Please, if you want this to be a business, take it seriously. Anyway So you might have a better idea now of your actual goals. You might have been like, you know what? I've done the Know Your Numbers guide. My booking value's low. I'm gonna increase that. I'm gonna move to this other supplier, or I'm gonna move towards offering this other brand that's in the same niche, but they have a higher ticket slash booking value. Air go, I get more commission, and then I have more revenue in my business. And then you might want to increase your service package fees. I don't know. But you should have your actual time investment per tier, your actual costs, your actual desired income. That may have shifted. Use the know your numbers guide. Your pricing should reflect your current reality, not a year old projection or two-year-old projection. And don't just throw a number out there because someone said you're worth it. Just make up a number. because that's not real math and people will catch on very quickly. So When it comes to that, not just the structure of your tiered service packages, but also the messaging. And this goes back to a couple episodes back. I thought it was yesterday. Two sixty-nine I believe. As you refresh your packages, apply the same clarity test that you did with your messaging, which is the challenge, the client, and the covenant, the three C's. Challenge, client, covenant. Your client is the hero of the story. You are the guide to help them become the hero of their own story. So, could a new client of yours with the messaging on your service packages understand in a few seconds exactly what differentiates each tier and who it's for? If your packages have accumulated like vague or like overlapping descriptions over the year, or maybe they did originally, and you're like, set it and forget it, this is the moment to tighten up that language. You don't need to do full refill, rebuild, just a light refresh, okay? Most years this should be a refinement, not a demo, and start all over. Small adjustments to your inclusions, to your pricing, or just the wording based on the real data from the last 12 months. Now, if you're a new travel agent, just stick with your service packages for now and revisit it. In a year, right? If your review, if you're experienced and your review genuinely reveals your entire structure needs to change, that is worth doing very carefully with the soft launch approach that we talked about on day two twenty two in the travel agency in a year, rather than rolling out a dramatically different structure to your entire audience all at once. Also, the time suck. Okay? Sorry, I went on a couple weird tangents in this episode. I really want you all to let's all make $250 next year. At a minimum. Come on. Maybe not next year, but close to it. In two years, it's doable. Alright. So whether your current three tiers for your service packages are converting. And you can serve them the way they're described, the way you intended. Everything's going smoothly. Just review that. review your actual pricing with real data. tighten up any messaging that's become vague or overlapping. Refine, remove things if you want to remove certain services from your lowest service package. and make it simpler and then lower the fee. You are allowed to also lower your fees, by the way. Because if you think about it this way, stop. Before I end this episode. You don't have to constantly increase your fees. If you do lower your fees Then you should be doing it expecting a higher volume of individual bookings or individual group bookings because the fee is lower and you are doing less to serve each individual group, airgo, you can do a higher volume of business. And you might find that you if you just do basic group travel management. I had this discussion. Gosh, I think it was in the success circle, and I don't remember what agent I was talking it over with, but we're no, it's in know your numbers. I do all the math for you for group travel versus FIT budget groups, mid-tier groups, and high spend groups like per person spend. And there is a reason why the top group travel performer like agencies often don't even charge a fee up front and it's all in know your numbers. I break it down. It ends up to being maybe a three dollar an hour to ten dollar an hour difference in the end. And the ROI is much higher. So, with that being said, if you do specialize in group travel and you have a bare minimum fee and you have three service packages, you have the option to go with the free and do the exact same thing that very, very large travel agencies are just doing and they're just turning and burning group after group after group after group. You have the ability. To start offering that without a fee up front as well, potentially. But if you're in a phase where you need to generate a lot of revenue and kind of like build your business up, you may not want to eliminate that fee and those basic additional services that a lot of travel agencies that do a lot of volume in travel don't offer because they're not as boutique. I hope that makes sense. Anyway. revisit your pricing numbers. Like I said, you can eliminate your fees if you want to on the lower end. You can increase your fees across the board. It's all up to you and how you wanna want to run your business. You also want to make sure that you tighten up your messaging. So if you've been refining your messaging from the last few episodes, has your hero slash the client changed? Has the overall challenge the hero in the story is facing, has that changed? And has your covenant or your promises to help guide that hero to fulfill the prophecy of an amazing vacation? Has that changed? It should be reflected in your messaging. Man, wouldn't that be crazy if we all just like Comic-Con life? By the way, just like dressed up as wizards and fairies and be like, I'm your guide for your next vacation. Ugh. Yep, I went there. It's fine. Tomorrow we're gonna turn something practical for like staying sharp in your niche, which is the trainings, unfortunately. before the year gets busy again. I hope you enjoyed this episode. It was pretty weird. Pretty weird. Well God. Wow God episode. Have a wonderful day. I'll see you tomorrow.