For those who want to establish themselves as luxury travel advisors, it's important to set up parameters and boundaries. To attract luxury clients, one must establish a luxury environment.
In this video, Luxury Travel Advisor VP/Editorial Director Ruthanne Terrero speaks with Eleanor Hardy of The Society of International Railway Travelers, who shares her life lessons on how to create a structure for new clients that lets them learn exactly how your agency works. She provides some great tips on weeding out clients who will take the best of your time and a good strategy on how to decide which suppliers you'll work with.
“My recommendation to you would be to think … ‘What in the world can I choose that I love [and] be the best in the world about that?’ That is what I recommend,” Hardy says. “I don’t recommend that you try to sell up every little person who calls you. I think from the start, you need to make it clear—and you can make it clear in a document—this is what we do, we do not go outside these boundaries.”
You can start with a 15-minute appointment to see if the client is for you and if you are for them. If you move onto a second appointment, Hardy recommends collecting a professional fee. “If the person balks at a professional free, ‘bye-bye;’ we just don’t worry about that person,” she says. The same goes if the potential client is looking into three-star hotels. “That person is not your client,” Hardy adds.
In that conversation, Hardy says it’s important to determine if the client would enjoy whatever your specialty is—train travel in Hardy’s case, but it could be beach vacations or a specific destination. That type of travel might not be for everyone “and it’s your job to figure out, ‘Is this person going to love this?’ Because the last thing we want is for people to come back from a trip and say, ‘It was alright, it was fine.’ We want people to say, ‘Wow, it was the best trip ever.’”
Watch the video above for the full conversation.
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