Guida Botelho
In January, Guida Botelho was named director of training for the Travel Institute, where she had worked from 1999 to 2007. Most recently she was training manager at Atlas Travel. She talked with Travel Weekly's retail editor, Kate Rice, about her new job.
Q: What will you do in your new role?
A: I am doing more to get our message out. For one thing, content development is time-consuming. It takes six to seven hours to develop one hour of class. My goal is to forge new relationships or strengthen existing ones. A few of the companies and organizations we have worked very closely with to develop training are Travel Leaders of Tomorrow, AAA and Signature. We have several different agencies we work with, and my goal is to show all the different content we have. I think our content is our best-kept secret, and my goal is to open the doors. Say you're a manager of an agency and you don't have a training department. Guess what? Your job is to train a new agent. I understand that person. I understand what they're going through. The first thing you think is, "Oh my God, what am I going to do?" In fact, I'm doing a seminar April 2 called "You Hired a New Person, Now What?"
Q: What's another role of your new position?
A: There are two levels of learning: what an agency wants to do and then what an individual wants to do. My goal is to be an adviser for both and help guide them through this content. For an agency, that means assessing their needs. Do they need training in customer-focused selling or selling all-inclusives? Perhaps your managers need help with assisting or coaching. We can create a track about coaching and mentoring.
On the individual level, we follow up once someone purchases a course from the Travel Institute. For example, recently someone purchased one of our new entry-level programs. I saw the purchase come through and I emailed her to see if I could do anything to help her. She said, "I see a list of host agencies, what do I do next?" And I said, "Call me when you get the books."
Another woman who has been in the industry a few years was interested in the CTA program. I said, "Call me." And in speaking with her, we went through her electives and I asked her who she was targeting and what she wanted to sell. And she got not only the CTA but a combination of lifestyle and destination courses. All of us [at the Institute] are very involved. We're going to help you pick and choose your tracks so you're not left alone in this wonderland of training.
Q: What kind of training do you offer in this wonderland?
A: Our training could be for a frontline consultant, an independent contractor or the owner of an agency. Everyone is going to need some business-skill training, whether it's selling or managing. And it's not just that our content is relevant; so is the way we offer content. One thing I learned as a training manager is that everyone learns a little differently. It is an interactive learning system. You can listen and answer questions and watch videos in some cases. You can't necessarily put a book in front of somebody and expect them to learn from that.
Q: What does your appointment signify about what's going on with the Travel Institute itself?
A: We've really been investing great content in the last few years. ... It just shows how we are the education destination for the industry.