Annual Reports
Educationals
Each year, members receive an annual report which provides them with a summary of notable achievements made and challenges faced in the year just gone and which also sets out a road map for the year to come. These reports act as a kind of blueprint so that members have a clear vision of where the group as a whole is going and the part they can play in bringing such plans to fruition.
When all is said and done, we are in the selling business and good, effective selling is always about product knowledge. Conference calls, cheat sheets, webinars and supplier workshops all have their place but there can never be a substitute for actually experiencing a product or destination up close and personal. That’s why we have always put a lot of effort into securing as many places as possible on as many educationals as possible for our members and their staff. It is not unusual therefore to find that as much as 40% of some fam groups are comprised of Travel Centres member agents.
Marketing Trends One of the many problems that agents face in working at the coalface day after day is that it is often difficult to see the proverbial ‘wood for the trees’. Travel Centres endeavours to address such anomalies by constantly reviewing hundreds of papers, reports and blogs from around the world in order to identify patterns or trends before they achieve critical mass in the marketplace. A perfect example of such deliberations was our early identification of the cruising sector as a major growth market and we put a coordinated plan in place to assist in up-skilling member agency staff so that they could tap into that market and develop sales ahead of the industry in general. As a result of this initiative in identifying an emerging market trend ahead of our competition, we now enjoy an unrivalled position with aggregate cruise sales growing by over 30% per annum!
Technology Digests Technology is one of those things — you either love it or you hate it! Your eyes light up or glaze over, depending on your particular disposition. Our experience has always been that most people (with some notable exceptions) are not generally comfortable when it comes to dealing with technology issues, whether they be in relation to web sites and their marketing, back office systems or software solutions in general. It is a very confusing world out there and we recognise the fact that most agents don’t have the time (or even the inclination) to adequately keep in touch with what’s out there or what’s good and what’s not fit for purpose. For these reasons alone, Travel Centres keeps a keen eye on what’s going on in technology circles — particularly when it relates in any way to the travel environment — and we evaluate these product/software offerings by engaging in a due diligence process in order to identify what we believe to represent ‘Best in Breed’.