PHOTO: Interest in guided vacations is greatest among past travelers to Alaska, the Caribbean or Mexico.

Guided vacations are becoming easier to sell because tour operators are changing their tours to better fit the needs and demands of today’s consumers. Today’s guided tour operators offer a wider range of possibilities than ever before.

The broad panorama tours, the kind that travel through many countries in a single sweep through Europe, are still available and many people still prefer that style of travel. Today, however, there is an ever expanding selection of different kinds of tours, such as tours for smaller groups and tours that focus on a broad range of special interests—such as food and culinary culture—and that focus more on experience rather than just passive sightseeing, more on learning and immersion in local culture, including encounters with people who live at the destination. The product has improved and the range has expanded, making it easier to sell. It’s also more challenging to stay up on all that’s available.

The key to selling guided tours is knowing the product, being able to explain the value proposition, understanding why tours are an excellent way to travel for many people on many occasions and recognizing the advantages they have over other styles of travel.

The principles of selling do not change month to month. Most of the basic principles of salesmanship are enduring and reliable, and generally transferable from one field to another. What changes are the products themselves, the destinations, the market dynamics, the demand. Keeping up with those changes in today’s hypercharged world is a constant challenge.

But it helps to narrow it down when you find a path with heart. If you find something you love and want to share, that’s the easiest way to be an effective salesperson. No one can know everything anyway. It’s too much for even the most dedicated professional to be an expert on the entire travel industry. So it makes sense to focus on things that resonate with you on the higher levels of purpose in your life.

Connecting to Higher Purposes

PHOTO: G Adventures works within local communities.

Ron Fenska, director of sales for G Adventures, has written a sales manual for teaching the tour operator’s sales force how to train agents to better sell the company’s wide range of tour products.

“It’s about how to train salespeople to train travel agents, and how to get them to think a little differently,” says Fenska. “It’s all sales tactical approaches. If you break it down to a sales perspective it’s this: With our job and the benefits that we have in this industry, the approach does not have to be this outlandish thing that people have learned at a seminar. What we do is consultative sales. People want to buy this product. This might be one of the easiest things to sell. The only thing you primarily need to do is to steer people down the correct path, meaning the customers, and help them figure out the areas, or the dreams they want to fulfill.”

In addition, Fenska says, you must differentiate yourself from your competition, “which these days tends to be the Internet. Sometimes it’s hard for agents to figure that out and be proactive in doing it. At G we decided a year-and-a-half ago that we’re not going to go out into the industry and train in what we like to call ‘product dump.’”

G Adventures, though still classifiable as a niche-market tour operator, sells more than 700 different tours, and sells its products in eight categories of tour product, each with its own set of specialties designed for a specific demographic target market.

With more than 700 tour products on the G Adventures menu, tackling the whole thing at once is not feasible.

“For us it boils down to being educated on their business and then being able to fit into the type of training they need,” says Fenska. “Ultimately it comes down to how do they sell to their customers. Is this a travel agent that is waiting for the phone to ring? Or is this a travel agent who has a core list of hot leads or past travelers that they can tap into and be proactive, hosting consumer nights, [which to me is] one of the easiest ways to get people interested in a trip.”

G Adventures’ market research has narrowed down the reasons behind the reluctance of people to book trips to Antarctica to two things. One is the fear of crossing the Drake Passage, which is legendary as a treacherous patch of sea. The other is the price. But when travel agents create an event, the heat generated by the event can melt some of those inhibitions away.

“One of the things we like to do is partner with agents that have a good core list to do specific consumer shows right in their own agencies,” says Fenska. “It can be as simple as teaching an agent to take out the list they have, mailing out postcards, putting an ad in the local paper and getting people to RSVP to come to a show.”

The exercise in promotion may produce 10 or 12 people who want to attend your show, says Fenska. “It may not be a big deal if you’re selling trips to Branson, Mo. (which we don’t do), but it is a big deal when you’re trying to sell a $10,000 trip to Antarctica. And the odds are, once we go through the presentations, and the way that they’re put together in a soft and consultative approach, that it’s going to lead that customer to choose to actually book that trip.”

Some of the cruise lines have perfected their approach to consumer nights, but G Adventures has a decidedly non-mass market approach to selling its products.

“We’re not just focused on ‘book them and get the money and move on to the next thing,’” says Fenska. “Our approach tends to be a little different. We focus a lot on the sustainable tourism angle. The idea behind that is we feel the vacation space is cluttered with resorts and all-inclusive clubs (not that they’re bad) and with cruise ships as well. Guided tours, and with G specifically, can offer something completely different. It’s unique. It’s meaningful. Ultimately, the idea is to try to make this vacation tangible and positive in changing the lives and local communities that we travel to.”

G Adventures backs up its talk about sustainable tourism by setting up foundations around the world to help local communities. Starting with projects such as a women’s weaving co-op in Peru, which sells its products to G’s customers who visit, the company has helped establish a variety of small businesses to create economic leverage for local communities and to encourage interaction between visitors and locals.

“That’s something we try to drive home to travel agents in the training. They can be a part of something way bigger than themselves and just that next commission check. Bruce [Poon Tip, CEO of G Adventures] says it too. This can be the single biggest change that we can make globally to further this planet and to keep communities alive and well – this one thing: travel.”

Mining Untapped Resources

Jennifer Halboth, the director of channel marketing for Globus, spends her days trying to find ways to maximize Globus’ sales through the travel agent channel. She is closely tuned into the businesses of retail travel agents, and if you want to increase your sales of guided vacations, she thinks she can help.

“Want to sell more tours?” asks Halboth. “Do these things in 2015 and I promise you will increase your tour revenue, which pays much healthier commissions than ocean cruises. Remember, our average commission, for two people with air, is north of $1,100. And we are happy to write those checks.”

Halboth offers three fresh tactical approaches to try as the 2015 selling season takes off. First she suggests promoting panorama tours to Europe to certain travelers.

Though the industry may have evolved a long way from the time when the panorama tours were the only kinds of guided vacations available, that doesn’t mean that the panorama tour itself is obsolete. Not by a long shot. Though the style of travel of the modern tour is a far cry from what it was 50 years ago, the panorama model of touring still serves perfectly the needs of many travelers.

“Have clients who have never been to Europe, even though you may have been booking their Mexico, Caribbean or domestic travel for years?” asks Halboth. “It’s time to get them to Europe and we highly recommend a Panorama Tour for their first time. If clients are in their 40s or 50s and for whatever reason have not made it to Europe, they really want to maximize their time there, plus see a lot of things so they can decide where they want to go next. Globus has six tours that are 11 days or less, which give amazing overviews of some of Europe’s most iconic countries and cities. Believe it or not, our shorter Panorama Tours carry our youngest average aged travelers. They like the pace and how much they get to see and do in a short time. Plus, they are awesome for multigenerational travel.”

The place to begin is your database, says Halboth. Pull it out and look for travelers who fit into the any of the following categories. They are past travelers to Alaska, the Caribbean or Mexico. They are from about 40 to 55 years old. They have income of at least $100,000 annually. They have previously stayed at an all-inclusive or at Starwood or Fairmont properties or have cruised on Royal Caribbean, Holland America, Princess or NCL. And they have not already booked for 2015.

Once you have that list, go down one by one and place a personal phone call to each one to discuss the possibility of finally getting them to Europe in the coming year. Later, follow up with an email that explains the advantages of touring (Globus has the text already prepared) and what promotions are currently available.

Another tactical approach offered by Halboth is to try pairing a tour with a European cruise. With the appeal of getting the most possible out of an airfare, suggest taking a seven-night European cruise with a seven- to 10-night tour.

“They will get more vacation variety, spread out the cost of their airfare and you will make a lot more in commission on the same booking,” says Halboth. “And if you have clients who insist on ‘no tour,’ offer them Monograms. It’s a smart tour alternative, that allows you to give them all the support and inclusions of a tour, but let’s them travel independently of a group.”

Halboth’s third tactical approach for 2015 is to try offering your European FIT travelers a tour of an exotic destination.

While independent travel can be fairly easy in Europe, where the infrastructure for travel is well developed, those comfortable with independent travel in Europe may still want the support of a tour operator when traveling to more exotic destinations.

“I know many agents have a nice roster of FIT European travelers,” says Halboth. “You know the hotels they love to stay in and you know how they like to travel. And Europe has become ‘comfortable’ for them. Well, get them out of their comfort zone and recommend an exotics tour. Why? Many European FIT clients are more open to a tour when the distances they are traveling within the trip are far (Rio to Santiago anyone?) and the language barriers fierce. Plus, most exotic tours carry fewer travelers, and we even have some Small Group Discoveries that cap the guests at 20. In an exotic destination, a little more support and inclusions are welcomed for even the most seasoned traveler.”

Database Processing for Finely Tuned Target Marketing

Dan Sullivan IV, director of strategic accounts for Collette, has some fresh tools for agents to help them sell more guided vacations.

“Of the tools we are giving to agents to help them sell more tours, I think that one that is really making headway and helping people is our Partnership Plus co-op marketing program,” says Sullivan.

“There are different ways agents can drive their businesses, through word-of-mouth and salesmanship, or through marketing, whether it’s taking out ads in local newspapers and trying to get people to walk in the door, or marketing to your existing database. The Partnership Plus allows agents to mail to the people in their database who are considered a high Collette match statistically speaking.

“We’ve modeled based on thousands of passengers, and we’ve looked at more than 500 attributes, including age and income demographic. We match up a database against the Collette modeling criteria. If someone has a database of 1,000 people we might come back and say these 200 are a qualified match. You’re going to have a much higher chance of success with these 200 people. With the other 800 people, the chances of a match are much lower. Then they’ll mail based on that.”

The method is producing great success, says Sullivan, and the agents love it because the average commission is $850 per booking.

“And,” says Sullivan, “with 20,000 Baby Boomers retiring every day, there are all kinds of opportunities.”