Happy New Year! I hope that everyone had a fun and safe holiday and that Santa was good to all of your loved ones!  The final two weeks of each year, we take a break at TRO to rejuvenate and refresh. It is a much-needed respite from the weekly deadlines. But, once that is over, it is back to the grind. I was thinking about topics for the first column of 2020 and was struggling when my girlfriend handed it to me on a silver platter—is 2020 the year of the travel agent?

Perhaps. And here’s why.  President Trump.  OK, well not really President Trump, but the status of the economy during his administration and a shift in consumerism that is starting to come full circle.

First…

This is a column from 2015, and a key lesson from our new course on travel marketing.

I admit to being one of the few people who liked The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty. The movie is a reminder of the importance of travel to the human psyche. Travel is not just a mechanical act of movement from one point to another. On occasion, it helps to be reminded of this small and obvious truth: travel is often an outward expression of something happening internally.

"We discover people are the same everywhere we travel. But we discover we are not." ~ e. dawson…

Cutting right to the chase, the term kaizen is a Japanese word roughly translating to “incremental improvement.” I suppose you can think of it as the principle behind the phrase, “A Journey of a Hundred Miles Begins With a Single Step.”

Biting off more than we can comfortably chew is a common practice for those wanting to make some form of change. The truth is that giant leaps rarely hold up over time. One doesn’t lose 20 pounds by wishing, hoping, and praying. You do it one pound at a time – by following a sequence of events. Caloric intake must be less than caloric burn. Every 3500 calories represents one pound. By breaking this down to 500 a day your mind can more readily grasp…