Richard Fain on the Importance of Intentionality for Travel Advisors

After more than three decades at the leading edge of the cruise industry, Richard Fain, the former chairman and CEO of Royal Caribbean Group (and current chairman) has learned a lot about running a business. Travel Market Report recently caught up with the semi-retired Fain to chat about his new book “Delivering the Wow” and what travel advisors can learn from his experiences.

In “Delivering the WOW,” Fain talks a lot about being intentional, especially in the early days of the mid- to late-1980s when Royal Caribbean hadn’t yet developed a clear identity.

“We had to seize the opportunity to become something no one had seen before. We had to be transformational, and we needed to be intentional about it,” he wrote.

We asked Fain what travel advisors need to know about intentionality.

“Intentionality is really key to accomplishing what you want,” Fain told TMR, adding that he believes this is especially important to travel advisors.

“Everybody is so pressed on immediate urgency. You have a client, you have an employee… you have whatever it is and it’s very much urgent. It may not be important in the long run, but it’s urgent.”

That urgency can rob advisors of their focused attention, and that’s where intentionality can help.

“If you really want to accomplish something, you need to define what that something is and say, that needs to fill up a lot of my focus and I need to go at it with a deliberateness, with an intentionality. That’s my long-term goal.”

He added, “So yes, I have to satisfy this client today and yes, I have to satisfy this employee, but I can’t allow that to overwhelm my longer-term goal. I have to say to myself, how does whatever I’m doing advance me towards that goal?”

Going back to “Delivering the Wow,” Fain first referenced intentionality during the time he worked for Gotaas-Larsen Shipping Corporation, which at the time was part owner of Royal Caribbean. He was assigned the job of steering a committee that would look into the feasibility of lengthening the Song of Norway in order to increase its capacity from 720 passengers to 1,040.

From its inception, the committee was intentional about everything it did, taking a full six months to complete its work.

“Just to be clear,” Fain told us, “That project took six months, but it wasn’t that I quit my job for six months and devoted it [his time] to this. That is the quintessential problem every business person has, frankly, every person has, is how do you allocate your time? And do you allocate it to those things that are urgent or do you allocate it to those things that are important?”

Both need to be attended to, he said, but advisors (particularly agency owners and independent contractors) need to make time “to go after the important things.”

What Fain did during those six months was to separate out “sufficient time” to do both.

“If you really expect to accomplish something, you have to find a way to devote that time to accomplish it.”