What are your clients buying?

What are your clients buying from you? The simple answer is, of course, travel, but is that the right answer? They could buy travel from any travel agent, or on their own on the internet, or from an ad in a magazine. Yet, for some reason, they turn over a large percentage of their annual earnings to you. What are they buying and why?

Certainly your clients are are buying your expertise, your presentation, the confidence you instill. They are buying your business relationships, your consortia memberships, your vendor connections. They are buying your inside knowledge, your ability to use the resources at your disposal to find exactly the right trip for them. Here's the really good news: YOU are not available anywhere else but you. If YOU are the key ingredient of the experience, you can not be bought cheaper online.

But remember this: your clients buy their travel through you the first time for any number of reasons, some of which is nothing more than luck. They buy through you the second time, however, because of their first experience with you, because you developed a relationship with them, and that relationship demonstrated that you valued them as individuals.

Because as much as anything, our choices in travel reveal something about us as individuals. And that is the other half of the relationship. Just as YOU can not be found anywhere else, neither can any of your clients.

As individuals, you have to spend time with them to know them as people, to assist them in better understanding what they want out of the travel experience. As a facilitator of that experience, you have to understand that even the client does not always know what they want. They need you to help them to understand the possibilities.

With that in mind, one of the best ways of getting to know you clients is to spend some time interviewing them. Where have they been in the past? What do they enjoy most about travel? Least? Where do they want to go this year? Next year? Ten years from now? What are their travel ambitions?

Is it too early to work on a ten year, a twenty year, travel plan?
That little bit of extra time spent getting to know the client as an individual will prove to them that their interests are at heart. Because what your clients are buying from you is not travel, but a relationship - and that is a two-way street if it is to be a long one.