Agents Step Up Tour Sales, Operators Add Tools to Help

This is the second installment in a two-part report about agents’ growing focus on selling tour packages.

As growing numbers of travel professionals recognize the profit potential of tour sales, some agents and agency groups are taking proactive steps to cultivate the tour side of leisure sales.

Agents are attracted to tour sales in part because the product has grown increasingly sophisticated and suits the needs of far more travelers than in years past.

There’s a compelling bottom line appeal, too: Agents earn commissions on the entire ticket price of tour packages they sell, which is in marked contrast to their experience on sales of mass market cruises.

For their part, tour operators are adding sales and training tools designed to help agents identify potential tour customers and match them to the right product.

‘Concerted effort’ by AAA South
One retail travel seller that is working to boost tour sales is AAA Auto Club South, which is headquartered in Tampa, Fla., and serves AAA members in Florida, Georgia and most of Tennessee.

“We have made a concerted effort to educate our frontline travel agents on touring,” said Jim Sweat, managing director, AAA services, for the club.

Particularly in Florida, where cruise lines are highly visible, clients are more apt to ask for a cruise than a tour when they first consult a travel counselor, Sweat said. So the club has focused on making sure frontline counselors are qualifying customers carefully and introducing a range of products, not just cruise.

Qualifying questions
“We ask questions: ‘Is it really a cruise you want or a tour?’ and explain the difference. We talk about the other options. We don’t necessarily sway people away [from cruises],” Sweat said.

“Even when there is a cruise involved, we encourage our customers to explore more of the land by doing pre- and post-tours, and some of those are more than two or three days.”

The focus is always to understand the needs of the customers and to recommend trips that match their lifestyles and goals – not to secure the highest commission, Sweat emphasized.

Bottom line logic
But, Sweat added, “From an agency owner or manager’s point of view, it makes more sense to recommend the right trip for the customer that is also going to secure the most bottom line dollars – and fulfill all the needs, not only of the customer, but also of the travel agency.”

For AAA Auto Club South, the effort has paid off.

In the last few years, tour sales for the club have grown considerably, and its tour-cruise ratio has shifted toward tour. Sweat declined to specify by how much, but he said, “It has been quite a few percentage points, which is significant.”

Sweat said he anticipated more growth in land-based packages, in part because of improvements in the tour product itself, including programs that appeal to consumers’ desire for more experiential vacations, inland touring and more inclusive packaging.

Tour operators’ delight
Clearly, that kind of shift in sales mix is exactly what tour operators want. Some are working intently to make it happen at more agencies.

Richard Launder, president of the Travel Corporation USA, parent company for a number of tour firms, said at a presentation in New York not long ago that his company intends to be more aggressive in pointing out to customers the advantages that tours offer over cruises, especially in Europe.

“There is a role for cruises,” he said, “but there is a bigger market for escorted tours and packages than the market is given credit for.”

‘Cruise or tour?’
Late last fall, three Travel Corporation brands – Insight Vacations, Trafalgar and Brendan Vacations – launched a training program encouraging agents to redirect would-be cruise passengers to tour vacations.

Agency trainings emphasize the profit potential of tour sales. They also provide instruction in qualifying clients and in explaining how a cruise can end up costing more than a land tour.

The trainings also cover how to listen for “triggers” indicating that a would-be cruise client might be open to a land-based vacation, Insight president Marc Kazlauskas told Travel Market Report.

Agent handouts feature a step-by-step qualifying process, including questions such as: “If you had to choose one priority over another when traveling to Europe, understanding that both may be important to you, what would it be – to cruise or to see Europe?”

Kazlauskas said growing numbers of cruise-only agents are “reaching out” to his firm because they are interested in selling more tours.

That’s a shift, he said. “Four years ago, if one of my sales managers walked into a cruise-only agency, they wanted nothing to do with tours. Now, every cruise-only organization, agency and the big sellers are seeking us out, saying, ‘How can we sell more tours?'”

Nick Verrastro contributed to this report.

Please see Part 1 of this two-part report, “As Agents Turn To Tours, Will Cruise Sales Suffer?“