Six Ways Your Mindset May Be Limiting Your Business

At Signature Travel Network’s annual conference last November, noted industry consultant, Nolan Burris, asked a series of questions to the audience, encouraging them to raise their hands when he called out dollar ranges for their typical service fees.

As at most conferences like this, the majority of attendees raised their hands on the lower end of the dollar ranges, at $150 or less. Raised hands got dramatically fewer as he moved up to $250, $500, and $750.

As Burris counseled the attendees – a mix of travel advisor employees, independent contractors, owners of host agencies, and agency owners – on the concepts of service fees, he told them the greatest inhibitor they faced to charging hundred-dollar service fees was their own mindset.

“Success, whether it’s with fees, beating the internet, beating Costco, or marketing yourself on social media, always comes back to mindset. If you have the mindset that your role is to make bookings, that will lead to habits, policies and procedures that limit your business,” said Burris in an interview with Travel Market Report.

Burris believes agents who struggle to consistently charge profitable fees “have some bad habits in the way they market and work, that reinforce an unsuccessful mindset.”

Getting upset with someone when you hear that after you consulted with them, they booked somewhere else, is one way, he said. “Flip that conversation. ‘What didn’t I do to convince you to reward me with the booking?’” said Burris, owner and chief visioneer of Future Proof Travel Solutions, in Vancouver, British Columbia.

A more positive mindset “is available to everyone, to reinvent who you are and what you are about. The first step is stop thinking about where you are right now, the clientele you have, suppliers you deal with now. Wipe the slate clean, and play what if. Paint that dream picture. ‘Who would I want to have as a client? Where do they travel to? What do they enjoy? What is our relationship? Am I still just a booker of travel, or do I want to be a consultant/specialist?’”

Burris encourages professional advisors to think about the following concepts as they examine their mindset and its impact on their business.

1. Think like you’ve never worked in the industry.
What I have found in talking to people individually, is that the longer they have been in the business, the lower their average fee is. The superstars charging higher fees consistently are the newbies, because they don’t know any better. I know an agent, who had just joined the industry, and was in the agency business for two weeks. He called me and said: “I don’t know what direction to go in. Do you think that I could charge a fee, given my lack of experience?” Of course, I said yes, and within 20 minutes of being on the phone, on day one, he set a minimum fee of $200.

2. Understand and believe in your value.
Do you believe that the value you offer is to book a reservation? No. They’re paying you to find out everything about their options, help them compare destinations, find the value added offers they can’t get themselves, and represent them with suppliers if something goes wrong. If you don’t understand and believe in all of the value you create and deliver to your clients, then your clients won’t either.

My very first boss in the travel industry, George Reinke, asked me something during my job interview that stuck with me for 40 years. He said: “Reservations are the result of what you do, it is not the purpose. Never get that backwards.” If your value is about advice, guidance, protection, advocacy, support, relationships with suppliers to help your clients, success will follow.

3. Know exactly who you are selling to.
When you ask a travel agent who their client is, you typically get a superficial answer, “families,” “Millennials,” or something like that. If you don’t know specifically who you are selling to, then your mindset is going to be to respond to every client who comes over the transom. This doesn’t mean that you don’t have many potential clients. But know who you want to focus on, and ensure that they support your business model. Someone booking a $1,500 cruise may not be your ideal client, the one you need enough of to achieve your income goals.

4. Are you aligned with the suppliers that reflect that mindset?
Now that you know your value and understand who values you, choose partners that support that value proposition. If you are advertising them on your website, or through your social media, make certain you describe why that supplier is the best for your client.

When I worked at an agency, and we were rebranding our preferred supplier offerings, we renamed it our “Gold Label” program, and told our customers: “We chose this partner because they have a 90 percent customer satisfaction rate, they are financially stable, and they will stand by you and us if you have an issue. That simple rebranding launched a 400 percent increase with those suppliers.

5. The dollar amount you charge says a lot about what you’re worth.
I know an agent who started charging fees at $25. Most people objected to the fee. Why? Because, that’s Ticketmaster money. That’s what you pay for Stubhub to process event tickets for you. That says nothing about all of the value you deliver. Once he raised his fee to $250, the objections virtually stopped. And now, 75 percent of his income comes from fees, with his average fee being $500.

6. Be consistent.
One of the most fatal things in a fee program is being inconsistent, yourself, and within an agency. Do you waive the fee for some clients and not others, or charge only for certain suppliers or products? Why, and what does that say about the value you create for the clients you charge, and the ones you don’t?