No Real Travel Agents??
Since the beginning of the year, YTB has had a new Level One Director with the company. This isn’t any ordinary Director however, and I wanted to share her experience with you to help you and the others who are willing to gain some sort of perspective what a 20 year travel industry veteran saw in YTB.
Candi May has been an entrepreneur all her life, and she actually owned several Brick and Mortar Agencies back in the day. Something came along that caused a dramatic market shift in her industry. That something was the Internet. Very quickly things began to change. Candi soon realized that the masses no longer needed a “travel agent”. In 2006 over $40 BILLION dollars was spent on line, and that was just with 4 of the top Internet Based Travel Companies. (Travelocity, Orbitz, Expedia, and Priceline.)
She made an effort to “reinvent” herself and her travel business. She spent large sums of money on Internet marketing and ads. She started working with large group travel because it was harder for groups to book online. But she quickly realized that there was no way to compete with the HUGE Internet travel companies.
One night at an Industry awards show, she began to ask her peers how things were going, and wanted to find out what they were doing to compete or how they were doing in regards to the market shift. None of them appeared to be phased by what was going on.
“Things couldn’t be better!” was the common answer she got, and she began to question what she was doing and why nobody else seemed to have the same problems she was having. What was she doing wrong?
Then when the awards started to be passed out and when she was the one who was winning all the awards, she looked out to her peers who just told her moments before “Things couldn’t be better” and wondered…
“If my business is struggling, and I’m the one up here winning all these awards, what does your business REALLY look like?”
That’s when Candi started to look for something else, anything else, even a fast food franchise to get out of the sinking ship she was tied too. The others she talked to didn’t want to admit it, but she knew the signs and wanted out.
A former client then asked her to take a look at a business, not for her, but for him.
Here’s the thing, knowing Candi the way I know Candi, I don’t think she even went to Scam.com to see what everyone was talking about there. I don’t think she posted something on Yahoo Answers to find out if anyone heard of this new Travel Company. I also seriously doubt she even went to the Travel Weekly forums to see what was going on there.
What she did do was look at the public numbers, she looked at our Founders, and she looked at what other successful people were doing in this business. She also went up to meet the Founders personally.
Both Candi and I have FREE Newsletters that we offer our teams to help them build a Team or their Travel Business. We both shared the Virtual Home Based Business Expo with our team this past weekend that offers dozens of vendors, tour operators and supplier information and training for those that want to learn more about their Travel Business.
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Tags: Candi May, Travel Agent, YTB Travel Network
December 12th, 2008 at 6:05 am
[...] Caribbean lending a hand to Agents in these difficult times, I couldn’t help but think of my good freind Candi May who was given the same type of lip service when she was struggling, and was told by her peers that [...]