Spice up Your Romance (Business)

PHOTO: Bringing people together is a rewarding career. (photo via Pixabay/Werbe Fabrik)[IMAGE CAPTION]

We caught up with Lisa Sheldon, executive director of the Destination Wedding & Honeymoon Specialist Association (DWHSA) and a long-time travel agent who is home-based in Janesville, Wisconsin.

We wanted to pick her brain on the lucrative romance travel market:

Travel Pulse: In a nutshell, what is DWHSA?

Lisa Sheldon: It is an organization that concentrates on training and networking for agents who focus on the romance niche or are interested in getting into that niche.

We have agents with multiple years of experience who may have booked honeymoons but now are seeing more requests for destination weddings and they want to learn how to handle those. Some members are new to travel and have decided they want to get into the romance niche from the start and not be a generalist at first.

We launched February 1, 2013, and have about 840 members now.

Our Facebook group has almost 800 members. They can ask a question about a particular beach setting, which wedding department is good to work with, how to handle their group lists or any question. Our agents are really open and helpful, and always offer suggestions.

Our philosophy is: We don’t see other agents as competition. We want everyone to succeed.

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TP: Do suppliers belong to DWHSA?

LS: We have vendor members who are our allies in the romance travel niche. We do not provide our list to any vendors, even when they are paid allied members.

If they have information to put out, they give it to us and we distribute it.

They’re allowed to do a couple of webinars a year and get first priority for our Romance Travel University, which is held annually. In 2018, it will be held May 1-3 in Las Vegas at Embassy Suites on Paradise Road. (More information is available at www.TheRomanceTravelUniversity.com.)

We bring in speakers and work very closely with the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, which has a special division that works with niche groups. We have some sessions at area wedding venues, and we have gone out to Lake Las Vegas to see some of the properties there that focus on romance travel.

One thing that sets us apart is that our sessions—whether they’re roundtables or breakouts—are conducted by our members. We don’t have any vendor presentations; we have a trade show for that. All our speakers—other than keynoters—are agents who have been in the trenches because learning from your peers is one of the most helpful [strategies] in this business.

Annual agent dues are $159, although we do offer discounted memberships with some consortia and host agencies

READ MORE: Top Romantic Getaways

What is key for at-home agents who want to specialize in this segment?

They need to be organized, especially when dealing with groups. Some people say it’s very easy—if you’re booking one or two couples, you might as well book 10 or 20!

So, we help agents learn things they can do to work smarter, not harder.

Don’t reinvent the wheel, because someone else has probably already done it. Our agents are really good about sharing ideas, sample forms and advice on [such issues as] whether a new agent should charge a planning fee.

We have an online course and also do two or three webinars a week. And they’re all recorded and stored on our members-only website. If agents want to learn how to create a proposal for a destination wedding, or if they want webinars to learn about a specific destination or resort company or tour operator, we have those.

What are some of the key trends in the wedding and honeymoon markets?

They call them ‘buddymoons’ or ‘groupmoons’—when a group of couples go to a resort for a week. Maybe it’s one couple’s honeymoon and they have some friends who never took a honeymoon, so they say, ‘Why don’t we all just go together?’ It may be four to six couples. Millennials like to travel in smaller groups.

There are ‘volunteermoons,’ where couples help out at an animal shelter a couple of times during the week or maybe go to a daycare center to help with kids, or pick up trash along the highway. These couples feel very strongly about a particular cause and want to give back.

My daughter and son-in-law were just in Maui, and they went to the Boys & Girls Club there, where they helped scrub the kitchen floor to ceiling, did some outside painting, picked up trash and did repairs. She said it was very gratifying.

How did you get involved with DWHSA?

I’ve been focusing on romance travel since 2000. I owned a storefront agency and was seeing the trend growing. But after 9/11, when travel shattered a little bit, one segment that really didn’t get hit hard was the romance travel niche.

In 2005, I closed the storefront and focused on romance travel and totally rebranded to I Do Island Weddings.

I met John Hawks, a former president of the Association of Retail Travel Agents, casually at a one-day event and a few years later contacted him. I started with a group on Facebook, and we began talking about conducting training [sessions] and how it’s so important to agents in this niche. I jokingly said, ‘There needs to be an association for this.’

John said, ‘Funny you should mention that.’

We formed the association, and he is DWHSA’s administrator based in Nashville, Tennessee.

For more information on DWHSA, visit http://joindwhsa.com.