SuperAgent: Meet Norm Payne, Uniglobe Premiere Travel

A few hours before his flight, Norm Payne is already at the airport, working the crowd. He glad-hands the desk agents; he asks after the families of the baggage handlers; and catches up with his airport friends.  

Next time he needs them to intervene for a customer whose luggage is lost or whose flight is cancelled, they will be glad to help him out. Everyone at the airport knows Norm. 

It’s thanks to the little details like that that Payne’s revenue is up 25% over the past six months, almost 50% from when he first started working at home. His formula is simple: “Working from home, I work harder, I concentrate more, I’m at my desk longer. My clients love it that I am so available.”  

He’s not always at his desk, of course. In addition to his day job as senior consultant at Uniglobe Premiere Travel, Payne is vice chair of the Association of Canadian Travel Agencies (ACTA) and director of its national board, and has been named Canada’s Top Travel Agent.   

Getting started
It was not always so easy. Payne’s first job was in a private club for men in Ottawa, where the wealthy and the powerful “noticed how cheerful and optimistic I always was.” He went to night school to study travel, and as he transitioned into his own business found “I had the best client list in town.”  

And of course he networked, too. “I network in an omni-directional manner,” he says. A bibliophile by nature, he spent hours at the local library—where he made friends with the librarians and asked them to please hand his business card to anyone checking out books on travel. He did the same in Ottawa’s top travel bookstore.  

A natural-born “problem solver,” Payne never paid anyone to do him a favor. Instead, he helped them with any problem they faced, either by solving it himself or by putting them in touch with someone who could. Payne knows politician, doctors, college administrators, he says. He sells cruises to Air Canada pilots and tracks down missing bags for cruise-ship captains. 

Like many good travel professionals these days, is not that he saves them money but that he does the impossible. His customers come, he says, “because I solve complex problems; I enable them to travel worry-free.  

“They come because I am the expert, the protector of their and their family’s wellbeing, the defense attorney and the social worker, the psychiatrist and the guardian angel. I am perched on their shoulder when they travel. And that’s priceless.”