From Writing about Travel to Selling Travel: How One Advisor Built Her Unique Business

Like many travel trade journalists, Stacy H. Small thought about using her knowledge of the travel industry to sell travel rather than write about it. Unlike most travel trade journalists, Small followed through on that thought.

In her last job as a writer – editorial director of Elite Traveler Magazine – Small said she was exposed to ultra-high net worth travelers, which got her thinking.

“It opened my eyes to this whole audience of people that were out there wanting to know more about luxury travel, spending a lot of money, calling our office, and asking for more information,” she told TMR.

Often she would refer the caller to Abercrombie & Kent or a similar luxury travel company. In the end, she’d get thank you notes from the CEOs for referring them hundred thousand dollar clients.

“It just sort of set off this light bulb. Maybe I should be selling travel… I realized I wanted to have a business and ultimately make more money selling the luxury travel I’d been writing about all those years.”

From the start, Small had a vision of what her company could be, and while it took several years to get her agency off the ground by 2020 she was doing $20 million in business.

Building a business, her way

From her earlies days, Small didn’t do it the usual way.

“This was early 2000’s, so people weren’t really yet working from home, but I kind of knew I could,” she said. “I had a vision that I could start a little home-based travel business and I called it Elite Travel International, because I’d been at Elite Traveler Magazine. People knew me as that.”

For several years, Small supplemented her travel business with writing, first out of necessity and later for fun. But with lots of tech-industry clients and a tech boom in the early 2010s, it wasn’t long before business was booming.

Small told TMR she also had a bit of an unfair advantage, because during her time at a different travel trade magazine she’d been introduced to Bill Fischer, a pioneering travel advisor in the luxury travel niche.

“I had this taste of if I’m ever going to do this, I want to do it that way,” she said.

Her earliest days weren’t all luxury. She did a little bit of most things including some corporate travel and some honeymoon travel.

“Back then, to me, a honeymoon for $10,000 was doable and I enjoyed doing those and really learning how to work with people and how to sell travel,” she explained.

Eventually she built her agency up to 30 ICs. By 2020, she had more than $20 million dollars on the books.

COVID’s silver linings

Like so many other agencies, Small saw everything on the books for 2020 vanish. But also like so many other advisors, Small emerged from the pandemic with a better idea of what she wanted for her life and her business.

“I wanted to grow my business, but I’d also, after the pandemic, realized that my health and my peace and my sanity are equally or more important than being stressed out all the time,” she said.

Prior to the pandemic, she’d been too busy to stop and think about the future of her business. The pandemic gave her the time to do so.

Stuck on Maui during the pandemic and the only Virtuoso advisor in the area, Small was inundated with one-off requests for Hawaii trips. They required a lot of work and she rarely heard from these clients again. While she did start charging a $500 planning fee, she didn’t enjoy any of it.

(Prior to COVID, Small had been averse to charging fees, telling TMR “Everybody was making plenty of money on commissions. It really was never top of mind.”)

Instead of continuing in a direction she wasn’t happy with, Small decided to do something completely different – and a bit unorthodox.

“I sent out a couple of feeler emails to some really good clients saying, if were to create more of a membership model and give you a lot more bandwidth and really focus on you and a few other clients, is this something you’d be willing to pay me for? And the ones I asked, said yes.”

She told TMR it wasn’t the easiest decision to make, but once she made it, she said she had fun going all in. She put together an invitation letter and marketing. She changed her logo, closed her old LLC, and opened a new one under the name Elite Travel Club.

“It was a fresh new post-pandemic start,” she said.

Today, three years after sending those initial emails, she operates a one-person, membership-based agency with a focus on quality over quantity. She keeps the numbers capped at about 15 families.

“Scaling it back and really focusing on keeping the clients I have and working really closely to keep them happy is more important than always bringing in new clients,” she said.

And her clients are more than willing to pay. On top of the $15K her clients pay her for membership, they collectively book $5 to $10 million a year in travel.

“After 18 years of doing this and 15 years of writing about it, that’s three decades of experience that I’m giving to people. That’s a lot of time and money, and at this point, being paid for my knowledge feels really aligned,” she said.

One of the benefits of having a membership-based clientele is that her clients trust her advice. They’re paying her for her expertise and so there’s little second guessing when she tells them what hotels to stay at or which activities to participate in.

“They listen to my advice and I’m not just giving it to them because it’s more expensive… I enjoy turning people onto ways that they can invest their money in these better experiences… it’s just saving them so much time and stress.”

The wizard behind the curtain

Small refers to what she does for her clients today as being the wizard behind the curtain.

“I know how to put the puzzle together,” she said. “I’m pulling a lot of strings and doing a lot of magic tricks.”

Part of her ability to do all that magic is her relationships with DMCs and hoteliers around the world.

“Over the last 18 years, that’s something I’ve done really well,” she said. “In the beginning, I went to all the shows and built relationships in those early days… looking for relationships that are going to be long lasting instead of having to shop that around. Years later, I f I need something, even if it’s super busy in Italy, my Italy DMC remembers that I was giving them business 12 years ago.”

Small has relationships with DMCs in most destinations that she books a lot, as well as with hotel general managers, head concierges, room directors, and revenue managers.

If she doesn’t already have one when sending a client to a hotel, she digs around to find the right person.

“I find people on LinkedIn if I have a challenge. Nobody minds hearing from you when you’re sending a high level client to their hotels.”

Relationships with her clients are also important and working with so few allows Small to get to know them more closely than before. She talks to her clients on a regular basis. They text her when they have a question. She has an open WhatsApp group for when clients are traveling and they can reach out to her at any time.

“I’m in regular touch with them. It’s not like we only talk once a year when they’re planning their trip… it created this much more of an all-around relationship.”

While there’s been some turnover over the past three years, most of her clients want to stick with her.

“It’s like having a really good CPA, you don’t want to lose them,” she said.

Journalism skills that helped

Small attributes some of her success to skills she picked up as a journalist, though she readily admits she made lots of mistakes in her early years.

“I didn’t know what I didn’t know. It was years of making mistakes and having to learn to bite my tongue,” she said, adding that advisors have to go through the learning curve even though it’s not easy and it’s not for the faint of heart.

She said she’s seen lots of ICs come and go over the years for those very reasons.

Naturally, her writing skills are something she told TMR have helped her grow her business.

“I can whip off any email. I don’t need AI. I don’t rewrite anything. I did a Constant Contact newsletter in 2007 when nobody did that… I’ve always used my writing skills as a sort of bonus and a way to communicate well with my clients and my suppliers.”

Her reporter’s research skills are also highly useful. She knows how to find answers and she’s not afraid to ask for them.