I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving—well, except the Brits amongst us, I know you are all still a little sore on that subject. But on a more serious note, I do hope that you took the initiative to touch base with your prospects and clients. The holidays (and many others) are perfect times to touch base and (as Mike Marchev says) remind them that you are alive.

I have mentioned before to take advantage of the obvious holiday to touch base as well as some offbeat ones.  And I also suggest to never sell. These are designed for building the goodwill of your business—period. Hard stop.

Let me ask you which message you would like to see in…

Developing and marketing a niche area of expertise is one of the best possible ways to differentiate your travel practice from the competition. As an expert in a particular theme or destination, you can quickly establish your travel agency as the only reasonable resource to which consumers should turn when considering travel in your niche venue.

​But the concept of adopting a niche is often misconstrued. Niche marketing is a way of helping you focus on locating new clients, not a set of restrictions on your business offerings. Niche marketing is not necessarily about gearing your entire business to a particular type of travel. It is about segmenting your marketing efforts to focus on particular groups of people, however. Properly executed, niche…

There’s nothing like an industry get-together to pump you up, ease your worried mind, and remind you how much we have to be thankful for. So this Thanksgiving, I will be counting my blessings for the bounty of good news and good people I have come across in the past two weeks.

At CruiseWorld in Miami and then aboard the gorgeous new Celebrity Apex, where 800 Dream Vacations and CruiseOne franchisees gathered for their annual conference, the travel advisors and suppliers I met were uniformly hopeful and optimistic, excited about the future and, above all, happy to be together again.

If there’s just one story to tell, make it that a cruise ship is the safest place on earth, says Celebrity VP Dondra Ritzenthaler. “I love how…

I recently got home after speaking at a conference in Orlando, after months of inactivity. It felt good to get up in front of a group of eager professionals and share my personal experiences with a bit of panache. (Flamboyant confidence of style or manner.)

Regardless of how hard I try, I still find myself resorting back on the tried-and-true strategies and tactics that work year-in and year-out. As most people are drawn to the latest flavor of the week, or lured toward the latest magic formula, I know after over 35 years in the business that it is the basics and fundamentals that will make your business work.

One of the formulas I have been touting over the years still hold water today. The Rule of…