In Selling Travel, Old School Ways Still Work
by Robin Amster /We may all be online 24/7 these days, but there’s still plenty of room for doing business the old-fashioned personal way.
That’s the message for travel sellers from Mary Stachnik, executive vice president and co-owner of Mayflower Tours, whose “old school” maxims for doing business have served her well. (See sidebar.)
Stachnik and John Stachnik, her husband of 48 years and president of Mayflower, founded the tour operator in 1979 and have been running it ever since.
Only a tool
“Technology is a fantastic tool,” said Stachnik. “Word of mouth is now done on social media, and it’s the biggest tool to spread the word.”
But technology is only a tool, she added.
“The Internet has become the principle behind everything, but the reality is that the face-to-face in how we interact, the human touch, is never going away.
“It shouldn’t,” Stachnik said. “That’s what people are so thirsty for.”
Travel is personal
Stachnik said she’s concerned that travel sellers today no longer return calls let alone write thank you notes on paper.
“When people get into their office, the first thing they do is check email,” she said. “The first thing they should be doing is returning phone calls, writing thank you notes.”
Those things are key to establishing relationships, and relationships are key to travel where the “personal is everything,” according to Stachnik.
This is especially true in the escorted tour space that Mayflower and other escorted tour companies occupy, she added.
‘Touchy-feely’
“It’s a really touchy-feely segment,” compared to independent travel, said Stachnik. “They have to feel that we know something and that we care about them.”
“We have an intangible product,” she added. “If I tell you about a Mont Blanc pen, you can see it and feel it. With travel, people don’t know what they’re getting.”
So while branding is today’s buzzword, building relationships is what works. “Once you have the relationship, you will get the business.”
The relationship-based approach has helped Mayflower earn a 70% repeat business rate.
The company’s competitors “wouldn’t have the business they have” either, if they didn’t understand the crucial relationship factor, she said.
A hiring challenge
The challenge today is hiring staff who understand the human – as opposed to the technological – aspect of travel, Stachnik added.
“The Millennials haven’t been raised with this way of doing business, so they don’t understand that the traveler is the priority,” she said.