How to get clients as a travel agent: what actually brings enquiries

New clients arrive through three doors: people who already know you, people searching for something specific enough that you can win it, and people sent by a client you looked after well. Almost everything else is decoration on top of those three. If you are starting out, the work is to open the first door this week, the second this month, and the third on your first trip back.

None of it is fast. What follows is ordered by how soon it pays off, not by how impressive it looks.

Start with the list you already have

Before any advertising, write down every person who would take your call: former colleagues, the parents at your children's school, the people in whatever club or association you belong to, past clients from a previous job if you are allowed to contact them. Most people who do this find more names than they expected, because the list had never existed anywhere outside their head.

Then tell them once, personally, that you are booking trips now and what kind. Not a broadcast. One message each, mentioning something you know about them. The mechanism is boring and it works: a trip is an expensive purchase made on trust, and the people who already trust you need no convincing that you exist.

Choose something specific to be known for

"We book everything, everywhere" gives nobody a reason to pick you and gives you nothing to say. Something narrow does both:

• a region you have been to repeatedly and can answer questions about without looking anything up
• a kind of trip, such as multigenerational family holidays, honeymoons, diving, walking routes, group pilgrimages
• a group you belong to, such as a community, a language, a diaspora that travels home every summer

Narrow feels like turning work away. In practice it is the opposite, because it is the only thing that makes a recommendation repeatable. "Ask her, she does Japan" travels between people. "Ask her, she does travel" does not.

You can still book the cruise for the client who asks. The speciality is what you lead with, not a rule about what you accept.

Be findable when someone searches your town

When somebody decides they want to talk to an agency rather than a website, they usually type a town name into a search engine or open a maps app. Two things decide whether you are in that list, and both are free:

• A complete business profile. Google Business Profile and its equivalents put you in the local results and the map. Complete means the real address, real opening hours, the phone number you actually answer, photos of the office, and the categories that match what you sell. Incomplete profiles lose to complete ones.
• Reviews from real clients, asked for at the right moment. The moment is a few days after they get home, when the trip is still vivid. Ask by name, ask once, make it one tap. Never buy reviews, and reply to the bad one calmly, because the reply is read by everyone who comes later.

If you have a website, the pages that bring enquiries are the specific ones. A page on the trip you actually sell, written from having been there, will be found by the person planning that trip. A page titled "Our services" will be found by nobody.

Ask for referrals at the moment they work

Referrals do not happen because you asked in a newsletter. They happen in the two weeks after a trip, while the client is still telling the story at work. That is the moment to say, in plain words, that recommendations are how you grow and that you have room for two more families this season.

You will read a lot of confident percentages about how much agency business comes from referrals. Treat them with suspicion unless the source and the year are named, because the number moves with the kind of agency being surveyed. The mechanism is what you can rely on: a person who has just had a good trip is briefly the most persuasive salesperson you will ever have, and that state does not last a month.

If you set up a formal referral reward, keep it simple enough to explain in one sentence, and give it for a booking rather than for a name.

Be where the trip gets decided

Trips are decided in rooms you can stand in:

• Talks and evenings. A forty minute talk with photographs at a library, a school, a sports club or a company lunch break, on one destination you know well. You are not selling from the stage. You are being the person in the room who knows about Peru.
• Partners who meet the same people earlier. Wedding planners, sports clubs, language schools, choirs, motorbike groups, religious associations, HR departments that send people to conferences. One reliable partner who sends four groups a year is worth more than a year of posting.
• Group departures you organise. A dated trip with a price and a deadline gives people something to decide about. An open invitation to "come and talk about a holiday" does not.

Social media belongs here too, with the expectation set correctly: it is where people check whether you are real and whether you have actually been to these places, before they call. It is rarely where they first hear of you. Posting three times a week to no audience is the most common way for a new agent to feel busy while nothing happens.

What to do with an enquiry that does not book

Most enquiries do not book on the first conversation, and most agents then lose them silently. Two habits recover a surprising amount of that:

• Write down what they wanted and when, including the dates they were considering and the reason it did not go ahead. "Too expensive this year" and "grandmother ill" are different futures.
• Come back once, on purpose, at the right moment. Three months before the same window next year, with something concrete for the trip they described. Not a newsletter. A message that proves you remembered.

Ads fit here rather than at the top. A search ad on a phrase where the person is already looking for exactly what you sell can pay for itself. Broad advertising on words like "holidays" puts you in an auction against the biggest advertisers in the world, and you will lose it. If you test ads, cap the budget at an amount you can lose without flinching, and judge them on enquiries you can trace, not on clicks.

The reason people recommend an agent

People do not recommend an agent for finding a flight. They recommend the agent who removed a problem they did not know they had. That is mostly unglamorous detail, handled before departure:

• the transfer that was waiting, with the driver's name and number already in the client's phone
• the hotel address written in the local script, for showing to a taxi driver
• the warning that the connecting airport needs a transit visa
• the note that the client's card will expire during the trip
• landing with working mobile data instead of queueing at an airport SIM counter, which is also the difference between a client who solves things themselves and a client who calls you from another time zone

We wrote the full version of that message as a pre departure checklist you can copy. Sending it is the cheapest marketing an agency does, because it is the thing clients quote when they explain to friends why they use an agent at all.

Getting a new client is the expensive part

Which is why the two things worth building alongside all of this are a reason for clients to come back, and the practical details that make them talk about you. If you want the connectivity part of that handled without becoming a phone shop, that is what our partner programme is for: you sell a data plan with the trip, and the traveller's support comes to us.

Quick answers

How long before a new agent sees steady enquiries?

Plan for the first year to run on people who already know you, and for search and referrals to start contributing in the second. Anyone promising a full diary in three months is selling you something.

Do I need to be on social media?

You need to be findable and credible. A complete business profile and one page about the trips you actually sell do more for that than daily posting. Use social media to show you have been where you claim, and keep it at a rhythm you can hold for a year.

Should I pay for ads before I have any clients?

Usually no. Money spent on ads before you have a speciality, a review or two and a place to send people tends to buy clicks from people who then find nothing convincing. Fix the destination first, then consider a small, narrow test.