How Technology Can Help with Onboarding: A Case Study with In the Know Experiences

When boutique luxury travel agency In the Know Travel Experiences (ITKE) entered into a partnership with Nicer, a hybrid technology and host agency company, in September, it thought it was just getting a technology platform that would expand its travel planning capabilities.

It got a lot more than that.

By implementing cutting-edge technology, ITKE found that it also improved its onboarding process for new advisors – from the ability to attract new talent to reducing the training burden often put on experienced advisors, and more.

Attracting Talent

Simply by having tech in place can been immensely helpful in attracting new talent, particularly among the younger generation.

“They look for technology solutions,” Angie Licea, president of Global Travel Collection, of which In the Know Travel Experiences is a member, told TMR. “They’re not looking for manual processes. Just getting people interested in the industry is half the battle.”

She added that back in the day of cryptic commands, an agency could spend several weeks training an advisor on a GDS system only to have them decide a few days later that they didn’t want to stick with the job because of all the memorization required.

“A newer advisor to the industry has no interest in that memorization game that we all had to play,” she said.

Licea points to the older cryptic technology as part of the reason why younger workers stopped coming into the industry for a period of about 25 years. Not only was the technology harder to use, but it was also tied to a desktop. That’s no longer the case.

“There was a period where people didn’t go into travel. Now people are realizing they can have an amazing career working anywhere in the world utilizing technology…” she told TMR.

Faster Onboarding

One of the main benefits of having technology in place that is easy to use is that the training required get people up and running takes much less time than it used to.

“That’s what the evolving technology in the industry is doing. It’s allowing us, where it used to take six to eight weeks to get somebody up to speed, you can literally do it in a couple of days now.”

Technology can also help new advisors sell more different types of travel than before.

Air, for instance, can be intimidating for many new advisors, for many reasons, but partly because until recently, you had to use a GDS to do it. The Nicer technology that In the Know Experiences uses lets advisors book air the same way they do everything else – using point and click. But the fact that the Nicer platform is built on top of the GDS means agency owners can still track everything in the GDS.

“There’s nothing that we have to change from an operating perspective on the backend. All we have to do is give them the point and click interface,” Licea said.

Less Burden for Experienced Advisors

A common challenge for agency owners trying to grow their business is the difficulty of needing to pull an experienced employee (or themselves) away from their work to train a new independent consultant or employee. (Licea said more than 100 ITKE advisors use employees rather than ICs.)

“What that’s doing is taking that advisor away from generating revenue,” she said. With technology, she added, “They can get them up to speed much, much faster so they can stay focused on generating revenue.”

Easier Organization

The Nicer technology that In the Know Experiences uses, like most of the technology agency groups are rolling out across the industry, is a single-entry system – meaning users can get to all the systems they need with just one entry into the system. They don’t need to navigate from one program to another to another, with disparate systems having access to different pieces of their travel planning and business management puzzle.

“For advisors it really is productivity. Time is money, so when you don’t have to go from application to application and everything’s in one environment, including your communication tool, it makes it so much quicker to produce a transaction.”

Lead Generation

A unique function of the Nicer technology that ITKE has access to is a lead generator, which takes consumer inquiries and feeds them to appropriate advisors. One newish advisor that Licea is aware of got a lead that led to a booking worth more than $30,000.

(Nicer has its own pool of advisors that have signed up with the platform that can also take advantage of these leads.)

And that gives new advisors a boost to get their businesses off the ground more quickly.