The World’s Greatest Travel Influencer? You’ll Never Guess.

Who is the world’s greatest Travel influencer? You, the professional travel advisor. Destinations and travel related brands scramble to keep up to speed with bloggers and influencers to ensure their relevancy, and so they should. They will do whatever they must to ensure they continue to drive their individual brands in the marketplace.

But how can they quantify their work in terms of revenue and the transactions associated with their efforts? In Ontario, TICO’s Compliance Officers strive to proactively monitor social media. They see not only bloggers/influencers but other, random individuals who have a genuine interest in travel or who would like to arrange a group of like-minded people together for a trip (photographers, yoga instructors, dive shops, etc.) sometimes crossing the line of advertising and holding themselves out as a travel agent in Ontario. This happens on social media such as Facebook, as well as with personal websites. It’s a very slippery slope and bloggers/influencers need to be careful.

I have spent a considerable amount of my career in the retail travel space, at one point overseeing a national retail organization with combined sales across multiple brands in excess of five hundred million dollars, the lion’s share of which would have largely been leisure, booked on-line, call centre, or storefront, with more than 350 travel advisors across Canada. In addition, I spent a good portion of my career marketing and selling to agents.

What I have learned over the years with certainty, is travel advisors know their stuff, work considerably harder than their clients could ever imagine, and that they will go to the ends of the earth to make sure their clients are taken care of, and that goes for pre-travel, during their holidays and when their clients get home.

If destinations, aviation companies, hotel groups and the like want to target leisure, and even corporate travellers (to a lesser degree), they need not look very far. Dedicated travel advisors are their best bet.

The truth is in the numbers. We went to several of Canada’s leading retail organizations and they confirmed some widely accepted data. It is generally accepted that an average full-time leisure travel advisor will curate annual sales of $430,000, with an average transaction sale price of $2,500. This works out to roughly 173 transactions per year. At an average of 2.2 PAX per transaction, this represents a total of 382 travellers a travel advisor has directly influenced. If you were to use a 35% closing ratio (percentage of transactions completed vs opportunities) your average Canadian Travel Advisor will have had direct influence over the travel decisions of roughly 1000 Canadians per year. (however, only 382 actually purchased travel related services from them)

You with me?

Although the number of active travel advisors in Canada cannot be verified, it is widely accepted by those in the know that there are approximately 22,000 who have direct influence over Canadian travellers buying habits on an ongoing basis. Using those numbers, this tells us travel advisors have direct influence in promoting travel-related products and services to 22 million Canadians EVERY YEAR, driving sales of $9.5 billion CAD. Those are some pretty massive numbers. Take out and deduct the kids, (although in my house they have influence let me tell you ), PAX with multiple trips per year from that 22 million, say maybe 30%, you’re still left with 16 million travellers who were directly influenced by a Canadian travel advisor.

So, there you have it! Although you may not have realized it, you, as a professional travel advisor, are officially a “Travel Influencer”. But…. do you tweet? Do you have an Instagram account? Do you use Facebook as a channel to promote offers? Do you have a blog? Do you post it on your site? You’re going to need followers, which is not as difficult as it may seem on the surface. Look at promoting your social channels on your invoices, your email signature, your on-hold message, anywhere and everywhere. Just ask. Don’t be afraid of not having your own content, you can retweet articles from consumer and trade media, (such as Travel Pulse Canada) or retweet special promotions and offers from tour operators, on a daily basis should you choose.

There is an endless supply of content available for you to repurpose. Make the most of your network and ensure your relevancy. You have the power of influence. Use it wisely.