Every holiday is a special holiday, a longed for holiday, a holiday clients have worked hard for… However, no holiday is more special than a honeymoon. Planning honeymoon travel requires delicate care on the part of the travel agent to ensure he understands the most detailed wishes of the newly weds and fits those into the most compelling experience.
The following are a couple of tips to perfect your travel consultation and planning process:
1. Build rapport
Building rapport is essential in all travel agent’s initial conversations with clients, however it is even more important when it comes to honeymooners. Honeymooners want to feel that you are not just there to quickly book them an off the shelf package… They want you to take the time to truly get to know them, understand their wishes and assure them that you will personally do everything you can to make their trip a dream trip. Honeymooners want you to spend enough time to get to know them, chat about their travel plans and show the same excitement for their trip as they have.
2. Paint a picture of the dream trip
In order to build a great experience holiday, you will need to find out a bit more about the couple’s dreams, wishes and preferences… Are they vivid travellers that have visited many places or are they new to travel? If there were no financial or logistic limitations, where would they like to go and what would they like to do? Do they prefer an European romantic city trip or would they like riding elephants in Nepal? The more you get to know your clients, the better you can help them realize their dreams!
3. Provide the honeymoon proposal
Don’t worry, I don’t mean to say that you need to actually make a wedding proposal to the honeymooner… Rather, the proposal is the exciting stage wherein you provide your clients with possibly their dream holiday plan. We call it the proposal stage instead of the quotation stage due to the fact that quotation focuses more on giving a price whilst proposal is more about proposing the plan and painting the picture of the experience first. Price, albeit important, is secondary to that. It’s recommended to have a clearly written proposal but to make the delivery more personal. It’s recommended to have a face to face chat or at least a call to make your clients feel that the proposal is specially crafted for them and not just a ready made off the shelf package.
After the chat or call, you can send them the proposal via email for them to review. To add a personal touch to the proposal, add some design to reflect the honeymoon theme and include a personal message to further reinforce that the honeymoon travel plan is specially crafted for your clients.
4. Set up a follow up meeting or call
After you have sent the proposal, it’s best to agree on a follow up call or time to meet. It’s best to suggest that you will call the clients back so that the ball is in your field. If you leave it to the clients, they might not get back to you after which you will need to follow up which may sound pushy. To avoid that, it is best to suggest that you will provide them with a call back and give them plenty of time to review the proposal and have had the time to think about it.
5. Seek a commitment
In the follow up meeting or call it’s important to let your clients share their thoughts on the proposed itinerary. If they dislike portions of the proposal, make sure to listen to them attentively, summarize their dislikes and find out what they would like to have instead. If you do this well, you will make your clients feel heard, respected and appreciated and it will reinforce that your agency is out to help them and not just to make money!
After listening to your clients, summarizing their dislikes and likes and establishing what they would like to do, make sure to commit them. Asking for a commitment means that you get your clients to commit to a price or arrangement, so that you ensure that your time is spent wisely. If you don’t commit the clients in time, you might end up spending a lot of time and effort revising proposals that never get accepted and sold which will affect your agency’s bottom line.
There are different ways in which you can commit clients. You could ask, for example,: ”If I get X and Y for you within your budget of Z, will you go ahead and booking the trip with us?” If they say yes, they are psychologically committed to agreeing if you truly give them X Y Z. After the clients commit and you get them X Y Z, it’s time to commit them even more by asking for a monetary commitment. This usually takes the form of asking for a % deposit that’s either refundable or non-refundable or making a hold reservation. Which option is best depends on the context and that judgement can only be made by you.
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