On occasion, a neighbor or an acquaintance, knowing I am somehow connected to the travel industry, will ask me about a vacation they would like to take. I use those opportunities to refer the person to a rotating selection of travel professionals I know. I tend to use different travel advisors depending on the person’s request. Recently, a neighbor asked me about a trip to Thailand she and her family wanted to take next year. I checked with a travel agent friend to see if he wanted the referral and I then put the two of them together.

Yesterday, months after our original conversation, I ran into my neighbor and asked how the travel planning had progressed. Looking at me a bit sheepishly she said “Well, your travel agent friend couldn’t find us anything cheaper than we could get online by ourselves.”  I explained to my neighbor the travel professional is not about the “best price” but was instead looking for the “best value.” I explained the travel professional was looking after my neighbor’s interests by choosing reliable suppliers, coordinating their travels and acting as their advocates. My neighbor listened, but the lesson was, I fear, arriving too late.

 You have a website, a Facebook page, maybe a Twitter account and you started an Instagram page, but they now languish at the back of your marketing plans going nowhere. Are your efforts disjointed, inconsistent and infrequent? If so, you already understand the symptoms of this malaise.
​Now, let’s explore a cure.​

Here is the truth of the matter: you will get out of your efforts what you put into them. The better the plan with which you begin, the better the results. Getting customers to your website, creating engagement and initiating a conversation with existing and new clients takes focus and effort. Great websites require a plan and resources. 

Every travel agent spending the least bit of time thinking about their travel agency website has heard the truism “Content is King.” I’m here to suggest, however, content is so much more than King, if by “King” you mean it is content bringing visitors to your website through basic search engine marketing. Indeed, it is relevant, original content responsible for most of the organic, (i.e. “free”), traffic visiting your site.
However, merely getting visitors to your site is only a first step. In addition, to be successful you need to also entertain (the Jester) and please (the Queen) your visitors, or they will soon be off to find better content and digital turf on which to spend their time. The Knight – he’s the enforcer, the one who makes you write often and well and with great design on a consistent basis.

Limiting myths are the stories we tell ourselves to justify a timid approach to building our travel practices. Most limiting myths have a small truth somewhere in their origin that over time takes on a far greater importance than their reality suggests. By examining these myths, you can greatly diminish their influence in your travel practice.
Here's a limiting myth we will tackle:  "You cannot compete with the big online travel agencies."

This limiting myth is not true. In fact,  the online travel agencies (OTAs) cannot compete with you! But only if you play to your strengths. Let’s see how.

My father once told me "Never play the other man's game." Smart marketers build their efforts around inherent specialties and strengths. If you try to compete with the OTAs playing by their rules and imitating their tactics, you will quickly find yourself out-matched. So don't do that. Instead, compete with the online travel agencies using your own set of tactics geared to and fueled by your own strengths.

Solid Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not the arcane and difficult to achieve strategy many would like you to believe. You too can be an SEO superhero without spending a fortune on consultants. No matter how many times Google or the other other search engines refine their algorithms, original content and relevance rise to the top in terms of importance to making SEO work. For travel agency websites, however, the challenge is particularly acute.
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Original content is easy: write your own content on topics on which you can write authoritatively. Relevancy is a bit wider topic, however, encompassing a number of factors. The search engines want to display results most relevant to the questioner. Because travel is such a large segment of the transactional traffic on the internet, however, many travel agents feel daunted by the prospect of having to compete with the thousands of other sites for search engine ranking. Yet, with a bit of planning and commitment, a travel agency web site can find itself high in the rankings of the major search engines. The resulting traffic and potential for new sales opportunities can certainly justify the effort and time necessary to accomplish search engine optimization.