Using an Incentive Travel Company to Increase Sales

Sales representatives can easily accomplish improved company profits when the appropriate incentive is supplied. Travel programs have become an enticing way to motivate individuals or entire groups to meet desired goals. While this type of compensation setup can be performed internally, an experienced company has the necessary resources for offering tailored rewards sales personnel will strive hard to acquire. An incentive travel company assists with both the planning and monitoring of the program. These professionals have the capabilities to negotiate pricing for a set budget along with the experience necessary to put together one of a kind destination packages. A unique and memorable opportunity is the goal of a program with this magnitude. Those who meet the outlined transaction goals in the defined time frame get to experience the trip. Incentive plans have been a long standing resource in the world of sales; however, travel options up the ante by providing a reward truly worth the time and effort of each employee.

Incentive Travel Tips: Creating a Heightened Desire for Successful Customer Transactions

Travel rewards have proven to be a great tool for both large and small companies seeking increased sales. These programs may target staff members only or can also be set up for customers. Some companies offer a trip to their top buyers as a prize for making consistent purchases and being a dedicated customer. Professionals can offer many incentive travel tips to ensure the program is in line with sales objectives. This factor is not as highly important when other goals are being pushed. How this approach is organized, communicated to the group, and managed affects incentive plan success. Sales professionals are more likely to surpass profitability aims when a motivational reward is offered.

Professionals assemble a well-planned program geared toward set goals by learning about the reward objective as well as the hiring company prior to creating a travel plan. Research allows the service provider to choose a suitable destination, create a memorable itinerary, and set up management processes to provide needed help throughout the program execution. Acquiring organizations typically view this approach as a cost when they should be considering it as an investment. While cash rewards or promotions can be used for the same purpose, trips create anticipation about the possible upcoming experience thus inspiring individuals to increase acquired sales.

Those who accomplished company goals remember the incentive for a longer period of time and work harder if another trip is offered the following year. Anyone who did not get to go the first time around will strive to receive the experience as well. They receive motivational feedback from those who met the required goals. Expert incentive travel tips or advice can help a business make realistic profit targets, choose an interesting destination, and make the program high interest. Interest may be gained by launching an event based around the proposed reward, supplying a keepsake unique to the destination, or through visual enhancement items like videos. An incentive travel company provides the resources needed to make this type of reward program highly efficient for improving sales totals on a quarterly or yearly basis.

Why Choose a Travel Company Franchise?

There are numerous reasons why you should consider using a travel company that is a franchise. Think about it, when you use a travel company franchise, you are using a company that is well-known, that have the reputation you can count on and you know that they are working to high quality standards, so that you can use their services with confidence.

The one main reason to choose a travel company franchise for your next holiday is that they provide professional advice. You need to remember that the people that own and operate these franchises have a passion for travel. Most have travelled throughout the world and want to share their experiences and the opportunities with their own clients, helping them secure the holiday of their dreams.

In addition to this, the majority of travel company franchises offer you outstanding value for money. They secure the best deals from top hotels, resorts, airlines, car hire companies and more and share these with you. In most instances, you can find your dream holiday within your travel budget, so that you know that you aren’t overspending and you get to enjoy the city, seaside or even snow holiday that you deserve.

Most of the time when you are looking for a holiday opportunity, you are still working. Working all day, juggling children and home can be exhausting, so it’s good to know that relying on a travel company franchise with an outstanding reputation can save you time, as you don’t have to go searching anywhere else. You simply choose the company you want to deal with and then go through the opportunities on their website, finding that one perfect deal that meets your holiday needs and budget. You can even book online, so that you save even more time and don’t have to sit on the phone for hours until it’s all sorted out.

Of course, using a well-known franchise isn’t only convenience to save you time and money, but it also provides you with complete safety and peace of mind. Some of the better known and more reputable companies offer one hundred percent protection on their deals so that you can book and pay with confidence, knowing that if anything goes wrong, you are covered. This isn’t something you want to consider, but when you think about it, it’s always best to be safe than sorry when spending a couple of hundred or thousand on your dream holiday.

A great reason to choose a travel company franchise is that you receive a personalised service and the deals available are tailored to your unique holiday needs and budgets. They offer only the best hotels and resorts, giving you a host of options to choose from. You can choose a destination anywhere in the world and take advantage of the fabulous deals, including all-inclusive deals which are available.

Always ensure you read up on the company’s online reviews to ensure that they have the reputation that you need so you can book with confidence. Don’t rely on the reviews you find on the company’s website alone, do some research of your own. Go online, type the company name in and go through the independent review sites to see if you are happy with what other people say about their experiences.

Finally, this is your holiday. You have probably been saving up all year for your family holiday to the seaside this summer season. Take your time with your selection, phone the company if you have any questions and when you find your dream deal, book it to avoid disappointment.

Let’s Talk Travel is a leading online travel specialist company based in the United Kingdom. This company provides clients with tailored holiday solutions that they can rely on and trust. The company opened their doors in 2014 offering an extensive range of holiday packages, guaranteed to meet each clients unique needs and budget. Let’s Talk Travel ar

Three Strategic Planning Tips For Travel Companies and Travel Affiliate Marketers

As the travel industry meanders through the dog days of summer, many strategists in travel companies far and wide are already beginning to think about the strategic planning season that lies just ahead, and ponder about the profound differences this year’s process is likely to entail compared to years past.

Faced with arguably the most uncertain and volatile economy since the Great Depression, many corporate executives and strategists now realize that the ‘game’ is on the line, and that there will be real ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ – not just in terms of market share, customer ownership or profits / losses, but rather the near-term survivability of their firms. One doesn’t have to look far to find travel companies being run by their management teams more like corporate turnarounds rather than on a ‘business as usual’ basis – British Airways, American Express, Hertz, RCCL and Travelport are just five of dozens of similar examples.

The business landscape facing the travel industry today is one that has undergone a radical and wrenching change from that of just 18 months ago. Most of the ‘winning strategies’ that worked then don’t work now. More importantly, tomorrow’s competitive environment will also most assuredly be different from that of today, and that future environment will bring with it huge upside rewards for those who are properly prepared, while also peppered with huge downside risks and certain catastrophe for those that are not.

Even in such profoundly uncertain times, strategic planning doesn’t have to be a ‘hit or miss’ proposition for travel companies. Single-point strategic forecasts based on trend analysis, or strategy formulation based on past / current linear trend-extrapolation that produces base, upside, and downside cases, among other methodologies, simply do not work when the travel industry – and the world’s economic order – is in the throes of radical (and likely permanent) restructuring. While such traditional, ‘tried and true’ strategy formulation methodologies fail in times like these, there is another strategy tool that actually helps large and small companies alike develop a clear map to help navigate uncharted waters – scenario strategy planning.

What scenario strategy planning is – and isn’t

At its essence, scenario strategy planning is about identifying and understanding the forces that are sculpting the world around you; qualitatively and quantitatively assessing the potential inter-play among these forces in a structured manner; delineating from these forces several probable and highly plausible ‘future completive worlds’; and – here’s the most important element – unlike the aforementioned single-point or ‘case’ related strategic plans, scenario planning enables the design of a fluid, ‘multi-dimensional’ strategy that effectively enables companies to better manage their core business irrespective of the future competitive landscape that may evolve.

In the force identification phase of this process, some forces are determined as certain and others classified as uncertain; it’s the interplay of the uncertain forces that drive differences in the future scenarios. Altering the combination of those forces renders different future scenarios, which while one may be more or less probable than the others, each is qualitatively different.

Each future scenario paints a picture of a distinct, but plausible, business environment 3-5 years into the future, and each is written in such a way that the scenario has ‘decision-making utility’ – i.e., the future world described provides enough detail and specification so that alternative strategic courses of action can be effectively tested.

Generally, most scenario strategy planning methodologies suggest that strategists craft 3-4 future scenarios, as fleshing-out 5 or more scenarios results in a very laborious process, with derived value decreasing as the number of scenarios goes up. Together, the 3-4 scenarios span the realm of plausible future competitive worlds.

In a nut shell, travel companies and travel affiliate marketers will derive three major benefits by incorporating scenario planning into their annual strategic planning process:

Understand how the travel industry’s competitive landscape may evolve and what impact and implications this future may hold for your business
Recognize the real possibilities and significant impact of discontinuous industry change driven by exogenous or endogenous forces and events
Crystallize steps management should take to successfully prepare for these potential future worlds
While the fundamental precepts of scenario planning are relatively standard, there are several approaches to scenario strategy planning, and each has strong and weak points. Here are three planning tips that travel suppliers and travel affiliates should consider incorporating in their scenario strategy planning process regardless of the methodology they decide to use.
Tip Number1: Look beyond the past…and today’s crises

Given the depth and scope of the economic, societal and political change now under way, it is easy for travel companies to be overwhelmed by the intensity of the current situation. Focusing on just the current reality can be devastating, as it sets-up the possibility for a company to be blindsided by other forces or dynamics that lie outside its traditional competitive landscape.

Think about this point from the following perspective: If management at the world’s airlines were looking closely at what was going on in the credit markets between 2003 – 2007, perhaps many would have noticed that the plethora of M&A, privatization and other financial transactions were being fueled by the enormous leverage investment banks, private equity firms, hedge funds and others were piling-up on their balance sheets. They would also presumably have realized that maintaining leverage of that scale was fundamentally not sustainable long-term in any industry, not just the financial sector.

For airlines dependent on premium traffic, a fall-off from those heady times in the financial markets would translate into a meaningful drop in the number of premium travelers the airline would carry, and that in turn, would have a rather detrimental (if not very devastating) effect on yields. This is what happened beginning in mid-2008 – but in spades – and as a result, today many of the world’s largest airlines are reeling, and in some cases, a step or two away from insolvency.

Tip Number 2: Refrain from parochial thinking

Parochial thinking (i.e., believing that because of one’s sheer size, market clout or abilities, an enterprise can singularly drive and determine its or its industry’s future) is where many companies go wrong in their strategy formulation and ultimately fail in the marketplace – Pan Am, US Steel, the US automobile manufacturing industry (and indeed many of the ‘too big to fail’ companies) are good examples of the calamitous results engendered as a result of parochial thinking.

So, when developing end-state scenarios, strategists in travel companies should assure that each future competitive world that is constructed has been done so independent of the firm’s actions or control; this forces organization to not only recognize the possibilities of exogenous discontinuous change occurring, but more importantly, it also helps to guard them from sharing the same fate that befell the formerly iconic brands mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Even if your travel company has Google-like market share or power, failing to heed this scenario strategy planning axiom can quickly lead to market share losses or competitive erosion as other, less hubristic companies and players out-flank you.

Tip Number 3: Intensify monitoring and refinement

The effectiveness of any strategy depends on the organization’s ability to implement it and make adjustments nimbly and methodically when needed. This is even truer for scenario strategy, as by definition, scenario strategies are not static plans; they require continuous refinement and recalibration based on what’s happening in the market and the world at large.

In addition to formulating a core multi-dimensional strategy, scenario planning also calls for developing ‘hedge strategies, i.e., strategies that are developed to enable the company to rapidly adjust its strategy should an alternative future scenario occur. Some of the hedge stratagems address less probable, but nonetheless plausible, scenarios which are triggered by a sudden and disruptive industry event. Hedge strategies are typically ‘put on the shelf’, to be used only if one of the less probable scenarios evolves.

Knowing when to turn to hedge strategies requires that the travel company or travel affiliate marketer closely monitor and measure the competitive playing field. Only by diligently and relentlessly monitoring the performance of suppliers, customers, and competitors, as well as understanding the subtle shifts in the company’s other key market indicators, can any company succeed in making ongoing, real-time adjustments in their strategy, compete effectively in the marketplace and avoid being subsumed or eviscerated by disruptive change.

As we’ve all witnessed during the last year, even the most entrenched incumbents in an industry can plunge into a financial abyss literally over night because of a sudden but drastic discontinuity in the competitive playing field – hello Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG. It’s fair to say that, given their size, resources and clout, none of these firms foresaw a world where they were not in some appreciable control of their destiny, and none had hedge strategies in place should an event of enormous discontinuous change befall them. Drawing parallels from the devastation wrought on these and other firms in the financial markets as a result of discontinuous change is reason enough why hedge strategies should be a critical element of any travel affiliate’s or travel supplier’s strategic plan.

Moving Forward

In closing, while the travel and tourism industry’s long-term prospects remain promising, all of the various players in the industry’s value chain will be challenged in the short-term. Scenario-based strategy development helps company executives better understand what the future may hold for their business and anticipate many of the required changes to their value-added focus. Incorporating these three strategic planning tips outlined above will help assure that your company’s ‘multi-dimensional strategy’ is robust enough to successfully navigate a profitable path to the future when the recovery finally arrives.

How Online Travel Companies Use Press Releases for Effective Marketing Tactics

Press release distribution has always been one of many effective marketing tactics for online travel companies around the world. However, in the recent years, this method have proved to be more potent than any other marketing tool used for promoting services across the global travel industry.

Online marketing gurus in travel industry have been inventing and reinventing News release distribution as an effective vehicle to not only drive messages to the potential customers but also allure them to sign up for lucrative tour packages.

Contrary to the conventional practices, many online travel companies use press releases in a clever and creative way to promote their business and services towards many potential customers round the year. Here are a few ways to use press releases to gain optimum mileage from online PR distribution.

Promoting Tour Packages

News stories are a great tool for travel companies to promote their tour packages. The announcement of some attractive tour packages can make a great headline and entice popular attention toward tour services during peak vacation seasons. Informative press releases on tour and travel packages generate decent revenues for online travel companies.

Connecting to Prospective Tourists

Apart from informing new customers, online travel agencies can also try to fortify their customer base by distributing attractive news releases. There are many frequent flyers who demonstrate keen interest in products and packages offered by various travel companies. Travel agencies can create specifically tailored press releases to inform and connect with those potential customers for service promotion. Writing such content and spreading them across the web brings attractive tour packages to the attention of interested customers.

Helping Information Circulation

There are a good number of online and offline PR agencies that circulate interesting and fresh information to their readers. Online travel agencies can take advantage of this by crafting their press releases for better circulation. Skilled and experienced writers can be deployed to help maximize the chances of your news story circulation for optimum exposure of your service packages.

Educating Aspiring Visitors

Online travel companies, today, are adopting innovating and effective marketing techniques to create loyalty amongst their customers. They use press releases to share travel-critical information with their prospective buyers. For instance, many online tour agencies have published stories to help their customers with protecting their finances during the travel.

Ambitious travelers tend to look for useful financial information to ensure a happy and hassle-free experience. Therefore, press releases with an informative dimension can help generate interests for your tour services among your potential customers in the travel industry.

Creating Social Awareness

Smart online travel companies are beginning to use press releases as a tool of creating social awareness, bringing classified customers closer to the possibility of using their services. Such textual content that include interesting data and survey statistics about the tour experiences can create potential impact on buyers’ behavior when they look for travel reviews online. Therefore, contrary to conventional marketing tactics, PRs are going way beyond the dissemination of practical information.

Thus, online travel companies can do well to write good press rel

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