If you’re reading Agent@Home magazine, you’re obviously aware of travAlliancemedia’s print products for travel agents. But you may not be as aware of our other solutions that help you increase profits from your travel business.

Here’s a summary of our products and what they do for you.

Travel Agent Academy

No matter what stage you’re at in your career, education is essential to your long-term success. Destinations and suppliers are continually reinventing themselves to appeal to customers’ changing needs and desires. They recognize that for you to be the best travel agent you can requires life-long learning—whether you are an aspiring travel professional or a seasoned travel executive.

Travel Agent Academy (TravelAgentAcademy.com) offers more than 50 true e-learning courses on top destinations and suppliers. These destinations and suppliers want to partner on a long-term basis with travel agents who take the time to learn about them.

After you complete the programs, you can refer to them, again and again, during your day-to-day communications with your clients.

When you complete each program, consider it the beginning of your education. Build a relationship with each course sponsor. Communicate with the representatives and ask for help when you need it.

Join the more than 100,000 agents who’ve graduated from our programs and come back to enjoy the sales opportunities offered by the frequently added new and updated courses.

Agent Studio

Agent Studio (agentstudio.com) helps you easily create a stunning website—and lets you choose how much you want to customize it. But you can’t just create a website and expect consumers to find it. You must promote it. And here’s the good news—you’ll have the power of travAlliancemedia to help with your marketing.

Once your website is built, it is immediately filled with rich travel content. Whether it’s cruise itineraries, destination insights or travel news, your website can offer valuable information to draw in visitors.

Agent Studio helps you save time, get organized, and win more clients by using the itinerary builder. You can easily arrange flights, tours and accommodations on attractive itineraries, and even become your clients’ virtual concierge while they are traveling. It also helps you send out messages via social media with Integrated Social Media. You can share valuable content from your website to your Facebook page to convert your social connections into leads.

You also will get your very own cruise-booking engine. This powerful booking engine helps bring your customers further down the sales funnel, so they make the right choice. Now you can offer your customers the same travel options the cruise suppliers offer, for a fraction of the cost. Agent Studio also has a hotel booking engine that pays you commissions on every hotel booked.

Every Agent Studio website comes with access to the Marketing Center, so you can choose to create motivating emails—or use our automated email marketing options to do the work for you.

Digital Travel Seminars

TravAlliancemedia also pioneered Digital Travel Seminars, which are virtual versions of real, in-person conferences. Instead of spending money to drive or fly to the conference locale and book a hotel room, you can use our digital expos to participate, for free, from home, on your desktop or tablet. You can virtually walk a tradeshow, chat with the reps at the booths, collect collateral, listen to panel discussions and webinars, and learn from veteran travel agents in video Q&As.

Travel agents love these digital shows. Some reactions:

— “Learned a lot and covered a lot of ground with no aching feet!!! Best part was the chat as you could talk to the BDMs.”

—“Interaction with the various suppliers at one venue was awesome, but I must also add that the webinars were exceptional as well.”

Next up is the Weddings & Honeymoons Expo, which will take place 2-5 p.m. Sept. 19-20. The Platinum Sponsor is AMResorts and the Gold Sponsor is Hotel Xcaret Mexico. Participants include Be Live Hotels, Sirenis Hotels & Resorts, Barceló Hotel Group, Emerald Coast Convention & Visitors Bureau, Bucuti and Tara Beach Resort in Aruba, Palladium Hotel Group and the Destination Wedding & Honeymoon Specialists Association.

Future travel events include the Luxury Expo, Dec. 5-6. Sponsorships are available. Suppliers interested in becoming a sponsor or participant should contact Maura Lee Byrne at 856-505-1451 or mbyrne@travalliance.com. Agents can register for upcoming shows—or view past shows on demand—at virtualtravelevents.com.

HotelRewards.com

HotelRewards.com (hotelrewards.com) is a travAlliancemedia-designed hotel-booking platform created for agents, regardless of their industry affiliations or connections. We partner with the Expedia Affiliate Network to deliver the best room rates at more than 150,000 commissionable hotels in an easy-to-use booking engine. It’s free to sign up and begin shopping our worldwide inventory using filters—search by hotel name, our integrated map view, by star rating and even TripAdvisor ratings.

HotelRewards.com has an easy four-step checkout process—confirm your commission payment information, enter reservation details, review and confirm.

All confirmed reservations are logged under your account, making it easy to manage existing reservations. Commission is processed and mailed in the form of a check the month following your booking’s checkout date. Once your check is processed, the payment details are uploaded to the Commission History section of your online account, making it easy to track what you have earned.

When you book multiple reservations that all complete travel during the same month, your earnings are automatically combined and mailed to you in one lump commission check.

Since HotelRewards.com is a web-based booking platform, you can access your account from anywhere. Our motto is “You Click, They Stay, We Pay.”