By now, you probably heard about the current squabble between Facebook and Apple.  If not, here’s the background. So, why should a battle between tech giants impact the travel industry? Well, it doesn’t directly, but it might significantly affect your marketing and further reinforce the need to own your own sandbox.

The crux of the situation is that Apple is a bit more privacy-minded than Facebook. Lest anyone forget, if there is not a cost to a product, there’s a good chance that you are the product. And with Facebook this is true. Look at anyone’s profile, activity, and timeline and you can get a pretty good picture of exactly who they are. Likes, dislikes, political leanings, and more.  Now couple that with the Facebook…

Travel will return soon, spurred by an increasing number of people vaccinated or simply willing to hit the road after so many months of being shut-in. If your clients haven’t yet made a road trip, that may be first on their agenda, and then as countries open up, that first airline ticket purchase. Already countries like Costa Rica, Belize, Poland, Croatia, and Iceland are accepting arrivals. Is it safe to travel now? That is such a personal question it is unanswerable in the abstract. Everyone has to decide for themselves when they are ready. Certainly, we have seen busier airports and destinations in Mexico are already seeing increases in the number of tourists visiting. But for each of us, the decision to travel absolutely must be…

A question I often ask myself is, “why are some travel agents more successful than others when they are all playing on the same gameboard.?” The marketplace is available to everybody. The destinations are available to everybody. The marketing tools are available to everybody. The fees are more or less competitive. So, why do some agents do so much better than others?

In most cases, the answer is simple. According to me and my 40 years of hands-on experience in the travel industry, successful agents do more, try more, fail more, get up earlier, think out of the box, do what they say they will do, follow-up religiously, be readily available, return phone calls and emails in a timely fashion, treat everybody with respect and find…