Does the following vicious cycle sound familiar? You’re so busy that you have to actually turn away travel clients. You would love to take on new clients, but you’re too busy serving your existing ones to expand.
Don’t worry, you’re far from alone. Too many tour planners can’t expand because they’re stuck working in their business, not on their business. And far too many tour planners keep trodding along stuck in the above loop. They may promise to do something about it “someday… when I have time.” However, that day never arrives because any free days are almost always filled with spillover tasks from the previous day or week.
The good news is that there is a way out. And hear us out, it’s actually not the worst thing in the world. If you’ve reached the point where you have to turn away business, this is a clear sign that your existing tools and processes have taken you as far as they can. It’s only a bad thing if you don’t adapt.
When you’re stuck in this loop, you’re not struggling per se. The money is still coming in, but you’ve essentially hit your maximum earning ceiling. You’re not growing, you’re languishing. You’ve reached the Languishing Loop.
Tour Planners + Languishing Loop = Saying ‘No’ to Business
It’s the classic entrepreneurial trap. You’re busy, not productive. And busyness is not good for business. At the same time, busyness causes burnout.
Tour planners stuck in the Languishing Loop will often say the following things.
“We Can’t Grow With Our Current Tools and Processes”
Most travel planners start out working with tools that work “well enough.” Many will start using good old-fashioned spreadsheets to track things. A little later on, they may start using a tour planner software, or something like WeTravel or Rezdy. And when they can’t quite get everything they need from those programs, they may add a few third-party or ‘bolt-on’ programs to do the rest. In this Software as a Service (SaaS) world, this is sometimes called a “Frankenstein Stack” or “FrankenStack.”
Most often, you end up struggling to make this system work, rather than using a system that works for you. At the same time, if anything ever goes wrong, it’s hard to find support. Nobody else has experience with your Frankenstein Stack, which means no single provider will know how to troubleshoot your hyper-specific problems.
“I Have to Respond to Requests Right Away, Otherwise I Risk Losing the Business”
When a request comes in (which could come from email/via website form, phone call, text, or even WhatsApp), you need to act immediately. You feel like you need to prove to your customers that you value their business by responding in a timely fashion.
And you’re not wrong. It’s been estimated that:
- 90% of customers who reach out via text expect a response within 1 hour, while 30% expect a reply in 15 minutes.
- 69% of customers who reach out via social media expect a response within 24 hours, while 16% want a response within minutes.
- 51.9% of customers who reach out via phone call expect a return call the same day, while 23.6% expect a call back within a couple of hours.
- 62% of customers who reach out via email expect a response within 4 hours, while 82% would stop doing business with a company that takes longer.
At the same time, boilerplate responses aren’t good enough. About 71% of consumers expect personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.
Most travel bookers struggle to manage all of these communications across various platforms within their Frankenstein stack, and they have no idea how they would train someone else to do it.
“I Can’t Hire Someone New and Train Them on This Mess”
They say when you double your team size, you break half of your processes. And if you’re a tour planner, growing your team from 1 to 2 people could certainly break everything.
A lot of travel planners would love to hire someone and hand off some of the burden, but they don’t want to introduce a new employee to Frankenstein. They’re aware that their processes are a mess and they don’t want to even try to train someone else on how to make it work. They’re not convinced this type of knowledge transfer is even possible. Too much of the data lives instead of their own head.
The biggest problem is often that you don’t have a single source of truth inside of a tour planner software that you can point a new employee to. Your travel planning information doesn’t simply live in one central place, the way salespeople may use Salesforce or marketers may use Marketo.
As a result, you’re faced with having to train someone on how to do the manual entry (often, double entry) and manage all the communications, quotes, and payments.
At the same time, you’re probably worried about the cost of a new employee’s learning curve. You know your process is full of manual entry, which opens the door for human error. What happens if a new hire makes a mistake when booking a hotel, or incorrectly adjusts the price of services, or misses a flight ticketing deadline?
These mistakes can cost you your business and your reputation. You may decide you’re better off doing it yourself until you come up with a better system.
“We’re Spending Half Our Time Just Building Travel Documents.”
Tour planners can often feel more like professional travel document preparers. It seems to be all they do. Even if they have help, it’s still an incredibly time-consuming task. We’ve spoken to a number of people who have told us some version of, “My best salesperson and I are spending 20 hours a week during busy travel season just building travel documents.”
The most frustrating part is that they often don’t feel the output is worth the input. They don’t feel the end result reflects all their time or matches what the customer is expecting. They often feel like, “This doesn’t look like a proposal for a $10,000 trip. We’re selling high-end experiences and this doesn’t look like a high-end document.”
You may even wonder if your travel documents are actually costing you business.
“I Don’t Have Time to Find New Customers or Build New Destinations”
Having a niche or a specialty is a good thing! When your business specializes in servicing Client A to Destination B, you can really lock into that target market. However, a lot of tour planners have a niche forced on them because they don’t have time to go after new customers or new destinations.
They don’t feel they can expand their business because they’re afraid doing so will cause them to fall behind on their existing business. They would love to expand into corporate travel planning, but they simply don’t have time.
It’s the classic “working in your business not on your business” trap. And it may feel inescapable.
The Solution
At a certain point, you will see that the Frankenstack and the mishmash of processes that are supposed to be holding your business together are actually the very things holding you back. The longer you continue using them, the harder it will be to migrate to something better.
That’s why it’s best to break the cycle. You need to take the plunge and invest in a solution that was designed for tour bookers just like you. You need to stop trying to make a broken system work and invest in something that really works for you.
Switching to a purpose-built travel software such as Softrip can help you:
- Go from 3 (or more) tools to 1: Say goodbye to your Frankenstack. Say hello to a single source of truth.
- Spend Less Time on Proposals: Save 15 hours a week (per person) creating travel documents, while creating better documents that reflect the luxury experience your customers expect.
- Respond Faster: Send those proposals 2x faster.
- Fix Your Processes: Make things easier for yourself and more intuitive for anyone you hire.
“I have tested a bunch of different platforms. I went in and built a trip on Softrip – it was by far and away the easiest and fastest that I have used.” – Pam G., Group Travel Operator
Stop saying no to new customers. Say yes to growing your business and getting your time back!