Eleanor Hardy of the Society of International Railway Travelers believes in communicating house rules to potential clients right up front. This puts them into a five-star selling environment from the get-go. She does this, she says, because her agency is small and her advisors do not have a lot of time. They specialize in train travel as well as FIT, but it’s all five-star and the goal is to never sell below that level. Hardy is also adamant about not including suppliers in an itinerary that might fall short of client expectations.
“In the beginning we tell our potential clients, ‘This is what we do. These are our boundaries,’” she tells Luxury Travel Advisor. “We will not do an FIT shorter than seven days, for example. We only book five-star everything: Five-star hotels, transfers, trains. We do not do anything that’s not five-star.”
She suggests putting that into a document so the client is clear on those parameters; the consultation process then begins during a complimentary 15-minute conversation where “you will find out if this person is for you or not, and if you’re for them,” says Hardy. “If the relationship clicks, the next step is to collect a professional fee and schedule another appointment.”
If that person balks at the fee, it’s “bye-bye.”
“We just don’t worry about that person. Or if the person wants you to book all these three-star premier hotels, no. You just don’t worry about that. That’s not your client,” she notes.
A luxury travel advisor’s mindset has to be that you cannot be everything to everybody. If someone requests a vacation Hardy’s agency would not advocate, the response is, “You know what? I cannot add any value to that booking. We can’t add value to that.”
How does her agency deliver value? “We’re adding Virtuoso amenities, we’re adding fabulous plane-side meet and greets. We’re doing all these things. We’re getting them in the right cabin on the train. Even if they ask for the biggest cabin, we’ll get them in the right cabin because the biggest one may not be for them,” she says.
It’s always important to set boundaries with clients throughout the entire relationship, she says. For example, appointments are a must.
“Set an appointment for everything. Who can go to their doctor and just barge in there and say, ‘I want to be talked to right now?’ You can’t do that. If you’re trying to sell up, and you’re trying to sell luxury, you need to set appointments.”
The Society of International Railway Travelers uses HubSpot as a meeting scheduler; that allows advisors to send a link to the client who can select a time to speak to them. “If they don’t do that, they don’t talk to us,” she says.
Her office also does not take bookings blindly. Clients must speak to an advisor about the trip they want no matter what. In Hardy’s case, that potential client might ask for a train itinerary but that person might actually not like trains; that can only come out in a conversation. Advisors should follow this policy no matter what their specialty is.
“It’s your job to figure out, ‘Is this person going to love this?’ Because the last thing that we want is for people to come back from a trip and say, ‘It was all right. It was fine.’ We want people say, ‘Wow, it was the best trip ever!’ That’s the usual response we get — truly, it is,” she says.
If you don’t set boundaries and if you don’t speak to people up front, you and your advisors will end up spending most of their time on those one or two problematic people who should have been called out at the start, says Hardy.
“So, I believe in that 15-minute conversation. You can tell a lot right then if somebody’s going to be a real pain in the neck, and if it’s going to cost you time. It’s going to cost you money, and also it increases your liability to take on a client like that.”
“If a person says, ‘I don’t want to talk to you,’ or ‘I don’t want to set an appointment,’ they have to. If you could imagine going to your lawyer or anybody — any professional person — without an appointment, it’s just insulting,” says Hardy, who also advises you “go with your gut” when you assess a potential client.
She’s been in the business for 40 years and remembers the instances when she did not do that, that cost her. One time a client insisted they wanted to stay in a very bare-bones hotel next to a train station. His wife didn’t like the hotel at all and complained about it afterwards, bitterly. “We lost that woman as a client for the future,” she recalls.
Other times, the agency will be approached by those saying they “just need a train pass.”
“When anybody says, ‘I just need,’ you need to say no to that,” says Hardy. “I found out the hard way that we couldn’t make a living on a booking like that, for starters. What it took to advise them about a rail pass took hours. So, just remember when your clients are trying to ask you to do a bargain-basement anything, it’s just a big ‘no.’ You’re not going to do it. They’re not going to love it. If they don’t love it, then that hurts you — not just now because you’re going to have problems with it, but in the future, because they’re not going to come back to you.”
The Society of International Railway Travelers is a small agency based in the Lexington, KY area. A member of Virtuoso, the agency has five employees. When the decision was made to go full on into luxury, Hardy and her husband, Owen, who is a co-owner, began honing in on the agency as a real business. They also began benchmarking with Virtuoso, sharing their numbers and strategies with a team within the network. Once they underwent that training, they realized how valuable their time was and that they couldn’t afford to work with everyone.
That went for suppliers, as well as clients. The agency stopped working with four-star train programs in Europe that weren’t sending out final documents in a timely manner. It also stopped working with Amtrak programs because the level of service wasn’t high enough. In short, if their clients weren’t thrilled with it, the agency wasn’t either, and so five-star only became the exclusive strategy.
As a result, it now works only with a list of the world’s top 25 trains that have been reviewed and inspected by the agency.
“We know the good, bad, and the ugly about every single one of them,” says Hardy.
The agency has similarly narrowed the list of suppliers it works with across the board.
“We have a very strict policy. We have very, very few partners that we allow to come into our office and make presentations because we cannot afford the time unless it’s one of our top partners. So, you need to narrow your vendors,” says Hardy.
Her advice to luxury travel advisors? “You need to know your product, and you need to respect yourself and your own worth, and your time. Because, after all, that’s all we’ve got to sell: our time and our experience. The internet is just a mess of stuff people could choose from. Anybody with any sense, if they could afford it, would want somebody else to do it,” says Hardy.
Charging fees is also an imperative, she notes, and that’s what she discusses with clients right up front. “We talk about our fees, what our retainer is going to be, and what we charge by the hour. You have to figure out for you and your business what that is. But have it be something, otherwise, people will think, ‘Well, that person’s not that valuable.’”
Hardy says that might be scary for those just starting out but setting these practices up early on will help new advisors narrow down their list of clients who will return year after year. “Just listen to your gut and believe in yourself,” she says.
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