Richard Turen
Fasten your seat belts, ladies and gentleman, it's "Travel Transition Time" for travel advisors, the largest personal counseling profession in the U.S. Are you ready to really "change things" going forward?
Here is what we face together in this new year as we try, with all the grace and strength that we can muster, to move from a time of political and medical chaos to return to a world we hope still exists at the end of that multihour flight.
It might be worth a moment to contemplate what we will need to do in Travel Transition Time. Certainly, much will be the same, but it will require more, harder and better use of all the innovation and tools at our command.
We are not the clickers or the order-takers, the purveyors of lies or distortion. We explain to our species how it is that they may best explore their world in a way that will provide meaningful experiences to share with others. We are travel counselors; we are not salespeople, hucksters, carnival barkers or luxury word-slingers. No, not in Travel Transition Time. We must up our game. The largest professional counseling corps must be dedicated to all that is true about this planet of ours. Warts and all. We can only win the battles ahead if we begin this challenging year as truth tellers.
The world ahead, this 2021, has one thing going for it: It can't be any worse than 2020. That gets me excited about this future we will be pondering together.
We now have a responsibility to fight the online glut of ignorance and misinformation about our industry. We will do this by being the best self-educated consultants we can be. Forget everything you know about selling and devote your waking hours to the kinds of expanded knowledge-base that we, as compassionate human guides to this planet, will need to compete with digital algorithms.
We need to begin each day and end each night reading the latest world and industry news, watching YouTube product videos and developing our own online presence that separates us from all of the travel bunko artists who peddle price instead of substance.
If you accept that we are the counselors for those crafty apes who want to leave their small clearing in the forest to explore what lies beyond, then you must share, with me, an amazing sense of exhilaration that we now have access to technology that will place us virtually on the grounds of the world's great hotels or aboard ships for walk-throughs from the comfort of our office.
We can now virtually walk the backstreets of the Marais in Paris and soon, very soon, we will be able to add the realtime sounds and even smell the aroma of fresh-baked baguettes wafting out of the doors of the boulangeries we pass.
We know that our clients have spent the past year using some of the latest technology while they have been homebound. This will make our pivots, our business adaptations, even more challenging. How do we increase our base of knowledge during TTT to a level sufficient to appeal to discriminating travelers? How do we develop a personalized planning experience with our clients that is the envy of every digital travel app programmer?
Are you enough of a rebel, misfit or troublemaker to design a travel agency model that pivots successfully in these Travel Transition Times?