How a Travel Advisor Found an Underserved Niche and Built a Business Around It

Finding a niche isn’t always as straight forward as simply picking something that appeals to you. Sometimes, advisors stumble onto a niche they didn’t know existed.

Leslie Coleman had worked part-time as a travel advisor doing friends and family business for nearly 20 years before she began to notice something among her friends.

“Quite a few of my friends were widowed early and never remarried. Some were divorced,” Coleman told TMR. “A lot of women are anxious about traveling with other people. They don’t want co-ed groups. They’re looking for people with similar backgrounds and similar interests.”

Responding to that need led her to the idea for Suitcase Gals, an agency that offers women’s only group travel for women over 40. Shortly after she retired, she began planning for her first group. That was in December 2019.

While the first group had to be delayed, Coleman didn’t stop planning and preparing.

“We developed different ways to get women to participate in the group. We started with a MeetUp group and encouraged women who were interested in travel to join us for dinner, for a happy hour, for an activity,” she explained.

Meetup numbers ranged from 15 to 30 people. Then in September 2021, she ran a practice tour to Italy with five of her friends. In 2022, she launched Suitcase Gals’ first official trip to Iceland. Thirteen women joined.

“The trip to Iceland had a lot of women who joined through Meetup or saw it on our Facebook page. Some of them joined blindly, some of them were friends of somebody who was already in the group… We saw these women joining the group who didn’t know anybody else in the group and most of them are still traveling with us today,”

She added, “Common bonds, that’s really what these groups are about: forming friendships based on common bonds, whether its divorce, whether its being widowed, whether its adult children, things like that.”

Today, Suitcase Gals, which Coleman operates with business partner Gurvinder, runs anywhere from five to seven trips a year, depending on how expensive the trips are.

The age range is also purposeful, though not always strictly kept to 40 and over.

“It is not a strict number, but we found that people in their 50s were friends with women in their 40s. We also found that women in their 60s and early 70s had daughters in their 40s.”

The Biggest Surprise

Coleman told TMR she never anticipated how successful Suitcase Gals would be, but what’s been more surprising to her is the community that’s developed around the trips that Suitcase Gals offers. It’s more supportive than she ever imagined, she said, telling TMR about the first trip to Iceland where some of the women were nervous about exploring an ice cave.

“The encouragement from the other women. I didn’t expect that…It’s amazing to me how gracious these women are.

Coleman purposely keeps the groups small – six to 14 people – to ensure this camaraderie and support doesn’t disappear. Only cruise trips are sometimes larger; her largest was 22 women for a Suitcase Gals fifth anniversary cruise.

“We like to keep it small because it can be intimidating and once you reach a certain number of people, they start to break off in little cliques… Women are afraid of that. They don’t want to be in junior high school anymore.”

Making a Living with a Niche

Coleman still maintains her original travel agency, Travel Design on a part-time basis, but it is Suitcase Gals that’s become her full-time job and accounts for about 70% of her business.

We asked Coleman about niching down so specifically. Is it scary? Can you make a living with such a narrow niche?

“It really shouldn’t be scary because the travel business is booming,” she told TMR. “There is enough travel business to go around to everybody… There are a lot of women’s travel groups out there. There’s some very large groups. Some very small groups. There’s groups for different ages. It’s just finding what the need is in your area and being able to capture that.”

She cautions, however, that new advisors or anyone moving to a more niche business model should not expect success overnight.

“It takes time” she said.

In Growth Mode

With all the success Coleman and her partner have had they’re still looking to expand the business, to offer more trips per year, and eventually bring on new hosts (all Suitcase Gal trips are hosted).

“We want to grow the number of women who participate in trips. That’s essential to keep the business growing. We can’t rely on the same 15 travelers to book five or seven trips a year,” she said.

While she loves that so many of their original supporters are still joining in – sometimes with every trip each year – Coleman knows that won’t last forever.

“We’re at age where we have to travel while we can… We don’t know what our health is going to bring us or what’s going to be thrown our way as far as adult children or caring for a parent.”

Most of Suitcase Gals’ growth has so far been through referral business, but the company still uses Meetup as a platform to bring in new people who live within the geographic area. The company’s Facebook page brings in people from farther afield.

More recently, Coleman and her partner have hired a PR company to do more national marketing and outreach.

“We’re really trying to expand our market. We have travelers from 38 states but we really want to capture all 50.”