Travel advisors should be capitalising on their travel expertise and experiences on social media to better sell their skills and knowledge, says Michael Londregan, Senior Vice President of Global Sales for Virtuoso.
Building on his commentary about independent contractors in the travel industry, shared by LATTE last week, Londregan says the ‘experiences’ angle for agencies should be another important focus.
Londregan’s feedback follows his participation at almost all Virtuoso Forum’s around the world earlier this year, hearing feedback firsthand from travel agency owners and managers.
Sharing his observations of one member in Europe at the forum in Switzerland, Londergan said the agency owner had declared he “didn’t understand” social media.
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“It’s never been a harder time to be a parent of a teenager. But it’s never been a better time to be in the travel industry, because social media has allowed you to wear your travel.”
In typical Londregan fashion, he delved deeper in describing the meaning:
“When you buy a luxury handbag, you show everyone and you get to wear it, and everyone thinks you’re doing so well.
“The truth is that social media has allowed you to wear your travel, to not only your immediate friends but an entire audience of followers.”
Londergan said if you rewind several years, think about slide nights, and how no one wanted to do a slide night. “It was really hard, it was ugly, it was boring and it was a limited audience.”
“Social media has changed that and travel is thriving.”“An advisor can get as much ROI out of their experiences for their home call through social media, as you can by carrying your designer handbag around. In fact ,I would say, way more exposure.”
“It was very rare that people would give you a like on your handbag but now you can get 500 likes and 20 comments on travel!”
“The experience economy, especially the travel experience economy, has been put on steroids from this social media aspect,” Londregan said.
“For some time now, there’s ben a shift from buying things to buying experiences.”
“And there will be some people saying that’s because you took them away for a while due to the pandemic when we weren’t allowed to travel. But actually, it’s because it’s the new way of defining yourself through social media.”
“It used to be you are what you eat, and now it’s you are where you travelled.”
“I think people are seeing the experiences and they are relying less on traditional marketing. Afterall, the marketing for all of this is coming from people they know and trust. An advisor,” Londregan said.
