Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 163 - The TA Waitlist Strategy
Transcript
- Rachel K: Welcome to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Kaye. I hope I said that clearly enough for all of you. I'm working on it. Sometimes I say that too fast. Today is day 163. The wait list strategy for TAs. What? What are you talking about, Rachel? Hear me out. I got a plan. So if you don't know who I am, if you know who I am, thanks for stopping by yet again and supporting. Elevate with Rachel K. If you don't know who I am, I do have Elevate with Rachel K dot com and we have a lot of different courses. There's like one-on-one coaching, mentoring services, all that fun stuff. Anyhoodle, part of any course that has an investment over like a hundred dollars total, because some of them are subscription based, gives you access to live QA's every week. And I love the live QA's because Anyone can hop on that's a student and ask questions. And sometimes I don't have the answer because I don't know everything. And there are advisors who love to help out. It's really, really cool. Anyway, there has been a lot of talk in 2026 about the changing economy and how we can ⁓ adapt to it. So I'm proposing the waitlist strategy. If you charge fees up front. And if you have a focus on like higher end or you have higher fees, this is a way to generate some revenue now and also manage your capacity so that you can maintain a high level of service for all of your clients. ⁓ again, this could be like higher end or if you do like group focused travel where there is a Pied Piper and that's not just the go with me groups that you're like, ⁓ my god, this group space. Not that. More of like destination weddings is a good way to do that. ⁓ corporate incentives, I would do probably more like a contract on a retainer type situation rather than this weight list strategy. ⁓ but if you focus on like wellness retreats travel, that's another option where you could ⁓ implement the weightless retention and the weightless strategy. What the heck are you talking about, Rachel? Great question, other Rachel. It is like with the Michelin Star restaurants. There's a wait list. Do you call up to try to make a reservation? You're gonna have to wait. Right? And there's some other like higher-end restaurants where you can make a reservation months in advance. And also, many of them have turned to the non-refundable reservation fee so that. They can guarantee you're gonna come eat. And if you don't eat, ⁓ they don't lose that time slot for somebody else. Okay. So I'm gonna go into detail about that strategy with restaurants and how you as a travel advisor can apply it. First, let's talk about what the heck that means. Cause you might be like, I don't go out to eat that often, and I don't nowhere I've ever gone has ever required a non-refundable reservation fee. That is becoming a thing. ⁓ usually in larger cities. And let's say it's just like a hundred dollars fee to guarantee that you and your friend, I don't know, spouse, I don't know, have that 7 p.m. time slot in two weeks at this restaurant on a Friday night. You will you will have that table for two. If you guys decide not to go, get sick, whatever, ⁓ That fee can become non-refundable and they can at least have that if you just no show, right? If you're just like don't even show up, that at least covers the cost of having that table not available for someone who walks in. Okay. Because if someone were to walk in and you were just running late and you could let the restaurant know, hey, we're running late, they won't give that table up. But if someone walks in and they aren't quite sure, they're still not going to give that table up. And that's going to lose them or cost them roughly that much in revenue. That's why they have this fee now in many more upscale restaurants in larger metropolitan area metropolitan areas around the country in the United States. If you are Living somewhere where they actually pay servers and things the living wage. You might be like, what? Okay. And you can do the same thing as a travel advisor. That way you can still serve the proper number of people you have the capacity to serve. And also get that commitment from your clients to, hey, I want to start working with you in the next few months. Okay. So many of us, and I've been here, when you get a large volume of business and you keep taking more and more on because you feel bad, you're kind of in the scarcity mindset where you're just like more, more, more. Yes, I'll do it. Yes, I'll do it, yes, I'll do it. And then you get so busy, you're just like, Well, I guess I'll just work sixty, seventy hours a week now. And you struggle to manage all of it and you won't even have the time to hire. And if you do hire, you make poor hiring decisions because you're just like, I need a pulse running this computer software for me, you know? So let's change it from scarcity mindset to elite capacity management. This is a very good strategy. And I know a lot of the times when I talk about like marketing strategies, you should be like, I have limited availability. I've had it on my website for like Let's see, it's 2026, like four years now. Like I limit how many certain service packages for weddings I do every year. ⁓ so this is like not old news, except you're kind of flipping the script a little bit. So, first off, before you even do this, what is your hard cap on number of trips or number of groups you can reasonably serve roughly in the same area of your pipeline, your service pipeline from the moment they pay their fee to work with you all the way until they get back from travel. What is your hard cap on that? Everybody's different. It could be five groups, it could be five FITs. I don't know. It could be 50. What is your hard cap and how many Like fifty, okay, let's say the five or the fifty. Let's make it fifty, because fifty sounds much more intimidating than five. But if you have fifty trips like all in the same stages of the pipeline, that's a big hard cap to have. And that W at what point in those fifty do you start sacrificing your service on some of them because they're not always gonna be exactly in the same pipeline. So back to the restaurant. Now we're gonna go to the fast food restaurant metaphor. It's just like when you have when you go to I don't Chick-fil-A, McDonald's, Wendy's, whatever fast food restaurant, and they're in a rush and they have like one or two lanes open, whatever, getting people through the process. And then they have people pull over and like pull into certain parking spots or something because they are at max capacity. And they're like, you're gonna have to wait. And then same thing when someone pulls up the window. First of all, most of you, if you pull up and there's like a line like that, you're like going somewhere else, probably. But if you decide to sit there, they will say, one moment, please. You know, thank you for choosing wherever. One moment, so that they can serve the people before them. And sometimes in that pipeline, in the sip fast food example, their service pipeline, someone's gonna not get their milkshake or whatever, or someone's gonna be like, My fries are cold, or someone's gonna have a special order on their sandwich and it's not gonna be right. That tends to happen when you are busier, far more likely to happen than when you are like just really focusing on serving one person. So In your travel agency, how many people in the pipeline from the moment of consultation all the way through post-travel follow-up, how much can you handle before you start sacrificing service along the way? Because post-travel follow-up might be fine, but you might totally forget that they're there, right? Or conversely, the start of it. You don't have a beeping machine like a fast food restaurant does to be like beep beep you haven't taken this order yet, you know? ⁓ but you might forget that ⁓ that client who's like ready to go. And you might forget bits and pieces in between. And that starts to really screw with your service level and you're not being consistent in your experience. When does that happen for you? How many trips before you start to sacrifice some aspect of the pipeline and your service pipeline? I just got really redundant. I'm sorry. Again, I read from my handy dandy notebook. So it's kinda just basic notes. Okay. Telling someone no, I can't take you on right now, I'm very busy, doesn't alienate them. It does signal to them that you are in demand and you are a valuable travel advisor, especially if you're in the luxury market. So think of it as like an attorney or a financial advisor, something that requires like an attainer, ⁓ an attainer, a retainer or upfront fees. ⁓ like a fiduciary financial. A fiduciary financial financial advisor may have some upfront fees. Many attorneys. They'll do the free consultation when they have the availability and then they want a retainer. So think about that when you wanna get, ⁓ gosh, I was about to say Johnny Cochran because I live in the 90s, apparently. If you want to hire Johnny Cochran for your whatever case, no one gets that reference anymore. It's fine. He's gonna have a high he's gonna have a high retainer. And there are many times when you're, if you ever need to speak to an attorney, they're gonna say, I don't have the capacity to take this on. I can't take this on right now. I have too much of a workload, something like that. Or some will be like, you know, this isn't my exact specialty, whatever. And this is why I like to liken a travel advisor, by the way. I'm just going off on a tangent here to like an attorney. No, we don't have the JD degrees. Like, no, we don't have that level of education. We didn't have to pass a bar exam. I get that. And also each attorney is highly specialized in what they practice. They have limited capacity on how many cases they can take on. And in order for them to take on more cases, they have to hire more people at their firm. It's very, very similar. being a travel advisor in that regard. ⁓ also I liken real estate to travel advisor positions. ⁓ real realtors can't take on like dozens and dozens of ⁓ Sales as buyers' agents or sis ⁓ sellers agents, there's no there's only so many they can take on, right? And so they need to get to that broker status so that they can have other people on their team to take on all that business. Travel advisors don't have the capacity oftentimes to just hire out a team. It's highly unlikely that many of you listening have enough financial support. You may, you may. But but to have that financial support from like a spouse or family member to just be like, I will pay all the bills or I will give you tens of thousands of dollars to start your business. That is like few, very few and far between, right? I understand that. So you can't just go out and hire somebody on a whim, right? Okay, anyway, scarcity in the luxury market breeds desire. Not your scarcity mindset, but your scarcity breeds desire with luxury kind clients or people who you want to perceive you you want them to perceive you as high value. You need to be scarce, you need to not be available all the time. So putting a cap and saying, no, I can't take you on right now doesn't mean they're gonna hate you or talk badly about you or whatever. If they do, they're probably not a good client to maintain for as you grow in your business. I don't know, your model, your model may vary. I don't know what you're doing, but if you're like luxury, if you're doing a lot of group travel, like weddings, this is something to consider. So, how do you do this? How do you set this up? First of all, you want to have a general script. ⁓ if you someone calls or texts or DMs, I don't know what your communication philosophy is in your business. But you want to have like a general script that, and you want to have a limit, your hard capacity back here on this previous page. That if you're not watching on YouTube, you don't know what I'm referring to. ⁓ And how many before you start sacrificing your service to everyone involved or s at least one other one client involved and you lose that consistency? So what is that limit? So set your limit for the month, quarter, or the season, however you want to word word it. and you can just say if someone reaches out via email, even if it's a repeat client, we're gonna talk about that. This episode's gonna run over. My bad. But we'll talk about that. Even if it's a repeat client, a friend or family member that you've never charged a fee to before, you just say, look, my limit, I'm at my limit for the trips for this month or for this quarter. If you your ideal client avatar isn't gonna understand the concept of Q3, Q4, whatever, then just say for this season. Okay. For the summer season, because this episode's gonna air right before summer starts. So you can say something along those lines. I will have slots opening up to start planning your trip, blah, blah, blah, at the beginning of the next quarter, at the beginning it, you know, first day of fall. However, you want to word it, or you know, in two months, would you like to grab that spot? And they're gonna be like, okay, that's great. Now, the conundrum with this is ⁓ the last minute trips that are like under three months, under six months. It's gonna be hard for you to take those people on. And 90% of those people, there are some that are higher end clientele. ⁓ that spend a lot of money. I have heard stories. I have had it happen myself. But for the most part, people who want the last minute bookings aren't spending a ton of money anyway. They're usually like, I'm looking for a deal or what's the best price you can get me kind of situation. But again, I have heard stories where people drop like 50K two weeks before Christmas for a trip. So that does happen. But that's not the norm. So just let them know we can get started on your trip next month, but right now I'm really busy. And that's just like setting your boundary. It's communicating with that boundary. I gotta maintain a level of consistency and service, not just for you, but for everyone I serve. And therefore, you you gotta wait. Sorry. Now, you can also implement the wait list retention fee. And this is what I'm talking about that deposit for the reservation on the restaurant. Let's implement it as a travel advisor. Great, let's secure your spot. It's a small $75 fee that's non-refundable. Once that's paid, I will put you on my calendar and we can have a meet or Zoom or whatever phone call to start planning your trip. That $75 will be applied to your overall trip planning fee. You could make it $100. Like, I don't know what fees you charge. So I'm trying to keep it like $75 is a reasonable fee, right? Now, if you charge a $1,000 minimum fee, then you could be like, I need a $200 retention fee. It is non-refundable. But if you charge a $200 fee, don't charge a $200 retention fee. You know what I'm saying? Like make it $75. ⁓ make sure you express and have it in writing that it is non-refundable and it's just to get the appointment secured and to work on their trip. But they still have another planning fee based on the components you discuss on that planning call. This also filters out people who don't want to pay your fee and wouldn't pay it anyway and just would be calling up and be like, I just want to pick your brain about maybe going to the Bahamas. Have you ever been there? Who w who do where do your clients normally like to go? Where do you send them? Like they're just trying to get free information so they can be like, I totally plan this trip all by myself. I'm so smart. When it's gonna be not that great, probably. Anyway. Fight me if you're not a TA. Fight me about it. Y'all can't plan trips. It's fine. I've witnessed it. I've had clients try to like DIY stuff. It's fine. Anyway. That also generates modest revenue. So if you're at capacity right now and you're like, ⁓ I need more fees for my groups or weddings, like I wanna, it's June, end of July is like second wave for engagement season. And that's when I would get like my primo destination wedding clients. It was like July, August into September before the big engagement season. So that being said. Let's say you're like, I gotta take on these weddings. I gotta take on these weddings. I need this revenue. I'm really ramping everything up. I wanna make three times as much money next year. And you're planning for next year and you're like, I gotta, I gotta make money, whatever your goals are, whatever. Or you have like, I wanna do so many groups or whatever the heck your goal is, and you aren't quite there yet. At least you can generate a little bit of modest revenue now by having this retention, like this waitlist retention fee to work with you. Okay, now when it comes to repeat clients or friends and family or like referrals and things like that, you have to be sure you remove the emotion. You need to be friendly, don't get me wrong, when you're conducting business, but you're running a business, not a charity. Okay? That's something a very good an old friend of mine used to say when I had my cleaning business, he'd be like, It's a business, not a charity. Fine. So remove the emotion. You can still be friendly and you can still be assertive, but you can't be like, well, we did go to high school together. Maybe I'll just put them on the books. Well, they have booked six trips with me. Well, they've brought me five clients. Like, don't do that. You can have a referral program. You can have a loyalty program. Keep it separate. When you are at capacity, put that in your autoresponder email. Like if you're like, I'm about to explode from all the work, I cannot answer any of these emails right now. ⁓ I need to focus on people that are traveling now. You can set up your autoresponder, be like, hey, managing the huge wave of trip inquiries, and you can put a link to go ahead and have them pay the fee and schedule the call. All you gotta do is set up. I'm not sure if every because I know a lot of people use like Turn. I don't know if Turn has like paid schedulers, but I know in other schedulers outside of the travel industry have a link where they have to pay for that appointment. And that's a non-refundable fee. And just record that in their profile in your CRM. That'd be really cool if Turn did do that. And also added it to their profile. I don't use Turn, but Yeah, this episode's running long, sorry. So you can have the autoresponder in like setup once you are near capacity. By doing all of this and implementing this weightless retention fee, again, higher end luxury service. You already charge several hundred dollars at a minimum for a fee up front. Don't do this if you're just like doing a large volume of like budget trips because you're gonna lose all that clientele for the most part. I mean, some will pay a fee, but many won't. Anyway. Doing all this is going to help you to maintain your current client satisfaction. So, with all that being said, look at your service pipeline and your consultations that you have coming up next quarter, like where everyone is. Hopefully, you were doing some audits and running reports in your CRM to see where everyone is. ⁓ but take a look at it. How many more trips can you take on? So let's say you know you've got three groups traveling, traveling next quarter. So they're most likely past final payment date for their groups, right? They're in full penalty. ⁓ but you might have some last-minute name changes, you might have some last-minute transfers or flight changes or something. Just depends on how your groups, how you do your groups, what niche you're in. It's all different. ⁓ but say you've got three groups and then you just onboarded two more groups this last month. Two weeks apart. So like one is moving to contract process and signing and depositing on their contract. The other one is just still looking at proposals. So you gotta like kind of like look at where everyone is in the pipeline. It's a lot harder if you have a lot of FITs, and this is why I'm like, do groups. Cause you can have like 50 of the same trip all doing the same thing at the same time versus like 50 FITs all over the place. But anyway, look at how many more trips you could take on. If you l think I could only manage two more groups right now or two more FITs, once you're in like that two to five range, you need to write out this script immediately and start implementing it and get it set up. Okay. So today's episode was a little bit different. I'm just kinda killing time until The third quarter officially begins because I got way too far ahead in the year. So lots of interesting little tidbit episodes between now and day one eighty, I think, is July first. All right. Thank you so much for listening. If you have a friend who is like crazy busy and they implement fees, then like I don't know what to do, share this episode with them. Share the strategies. Okay? All right. Otherwise, have a good day. See ya.