Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 100 - The TA's Guide to Referral Program, Loyalty Program & Networking
Transcript
- Rachel K: This episode is all about ⁓ referral programs, loyalty programs, networking. ⁓ my, all the scary things. This is my third take on this because somebody is trying to prevent me. I don't know why I'm like, I just know for the mic, somebody is trying to prevent me from actually getting this episode out. AI will take your job. No. 19999 and I told my dad. So I didn't go down that path back in the day. Travel advisors are still around. is 2026, so 25 years later almost, at the time of this episode airing. Anyway. and it's like, ⁓ this is an AI assistant that's helping you. I can't find your information because I'm hallucinating right now and don't know why this plumber is paying for this. Anyway, enrages me. That's what I'm saying. I've been going through it lately and I'm like, I am not concerned with AI taking my job at all because it's the worst. Anyway. I will say AI is a helpful tool. I don't like the AI assistants or the bots or anything. There are some good things to AI. There are a ton of cons. I'm not the biggest fan of it. And it is new technology. And I'm not gonna like poo poo it. It will continue to upwards. It will become more more commonplace. And I believe the new luxury service, if you aren't watching, I'm doing the air quotes for luxury, will be the ability to even interact with a human being. And I'm talking about like down to, so like fast food restaurants have a lot of computer things where you don't. AI content creators out there and there's now AI scammers pretending to be like sales reps but it's an AI and there's a filter and you don't know who you're working with on video. Don't worry, this is me. This is why I don't use any filters and I don't edit my videos. I'm a real human being full of mistakes. Who laughs at myself too much? That being said, you should probably consider building more. but consider how many people you have served and how many are. but there's a whole workbook and everything on helping you to develop and discern what type of program you need to do for your travel agency. All right, let's move on. I've already wasted half this episode rambling on about how much I hate AI like grandpa shaking his fist at the sun. You can choose to do either or you can do both. I don't care. I'm getting ready to do both. I already have a referral program but I'm not. People trust refer rolls and word of mouth way more than reviews anymore because more and more people understand many reviews are bought, many reviews are paid for, many reviews are not truly sincere information unless they're super angry. Like that's the only time someone's gonna be honest about leaving review in many cases. what I'm saying. How to build it. How do you build a referral? Great question. You decide what you want it to look like. You should have pretty strict terms and conditions. I.e., like in my referral program, they have to book, like the referrals are good for 12 months. So this episode should air April, what day am I on? April 10th. So you can incentivize quite a bit. Now, if you say something like, refer five new clients to me and they all book, I will reward you with the opportunity to pay the difference to upgrade your room to the next available category. If you just say that, there's a chance they book a junior garden suite. They get the referrals. That could be $1,000, $2,000 a night difference. Then you get to eat that. So you want to specify up to X value. Okay? And then you also want to make sure, and I'm not an attorney, but I'm just saying, also make sure in your terms and conditions there's no cash value for any of these things. You know what I mean? It's that kind of thing. So once you have that information in place, you've got to make it easy for your clients to share. Have a pre-built email with the form that's done for them. I'm not sure what travel CRM you're using and what form capabilities. So you want to make sure that's all good to go. Have a pre-built email that they can share or social media posts that they can share, however you want them to share it. Maybe do it in multiple formats so they have a choice. Make it easy for them is what I'm saying. Don't be like, well, I might have this referral program and here's kind of an idea. Could you do this, please? I have nothing prepared. They're not getting there. like, what? No. How are you going to incentivize the new client that's referred to you? Great question. I charge fees upfront. I would either waive or discount my fee if I wanted to do that. Okay. I would also recommend having all this information on like a hidden page on your website or maybe like a published page. It's up to you. I don't care. Send it to your test client. Practice your trips on invoicing, seeing how the payment leaks work, the invoice URLs, approving things, the terms and conditions. Does that all look good? Use your test client. Same thing here. Test it. Test, test, test. Once you have it all done, share it either the loyalty program or the referral program or both. Your most loyal clients first is like a sneak peek, like insider. kind of thing. Then you start promoting it. Set your promotion date right. On the website, the email signature, the link in bio, and maybe work it into your elevator pitch. If you know you're going to be doing like networking luncheons and talking too fast or something to that effect on someone or maybe you have to go to a do how much money do you make? you're boring instantly. But you gotta answer that question. Like who talks about that? Boring. Hi stranger. What kind of car do you drive? Is it a BMW? I have a BMW. Okay well I'm gonna walk away now. I have to go to the bathroom. was great chatting with you. I'll see you around. Incorporate into your elevator pitch. If someone asks you, so what do you do for a living? Or why are you here? I own a travel agency. Or if they say, what's something exciting that you're working on? What's something you're excited to be working on right now? An exciting project. Then you can answer, just launched a referral and or loyalty program for my die hard travel clients. I'm very excited about it because it incentivizes them and it helps keep costs down. Everything's crazy expensive. I'm giving back to my clients. Easy elevator pitch. Okay, let's do the KPIs. ⁓ this episode is long. I'm not happy about that. What KPI's do you need to look for? you don't know what a KPI is, it is a key performance indicator. Numero uno for your referral program. What's your referral rate? How many of the people that you send this out to put it in your workflows, by the way, once you get it all launched? How many people actually share it? You send it out to your top five or ten most loyal clients. Seven people probably. You're just going to lose money. First of all, if you're hanging out with anybody that says that to you, ⁓ ignore them unless they are a billionaire self-made entrepreneur. Maybe take it to consideration. You're just going to lose money. That's stupid. OK, well, I'm going to do it. And it really helped my business. And then over the holiday season from like, gosh, this was like a decade ago, more than that. ⁓ my god. I sold it a decade ago. From October 15th-ish through January 15th, I believe, or I don't remember, around the holiday season, right? Everyone wants a deep clean. It costs so much more money. It takes so much more time. So I would start. Alright, final KPI. ROI, the revenue generated compared to the cost of your rewards. Remember you want to stipulate up to X value for each of your different tiers, okay? Alright, I hope this episode helped you. This is like my third or fourth attempt at recording this episode. Somebody down below doesn't want me... of your students, Odyssey Coaching. We got a lot of people. I like I sound like our current president. It's the greatest program ever. All right, have a good day. Come back tomorrow. Bye.