If you enjoy researching holiday destinations, talking to people about travel, or putting together fantasy travel plans, becoming a travel agent could be a good career option.
The market for traditional travel agents isn't what it used to be. It's likely your parents or grandparents used travel agents to help them plan trips to far-flung destinations, but today you can book flights online, research hotels and find out about all the must-visit attractions, and build your dream holiday without having to pay a premium to an agent. At the higher end of the market, however, luxury travel agents are still very much in demand for their bespoke offerings and attentive support.
Luxury Travel: What's the Difference Between a Travel Agent and a Luxury Travel Agent?
Luxury travel agents serve people with highly specific needs. Many of their clients are high-net-worth individuals for whom time is money. Why would they do the legwork of planning a holiday when they can get someone else to handle all the details?
Other individuals work with luxury travel agents because they're going somewhere unusual, or they have dietary/mobility needs and want to feel confident those will be catered to.
Personalized Experiences
Luxury travel agents offer personalized experiences designed around the interests and preferences of the travel party. Many agents specialize in a specific niche (such as extreme sports), or a geographic area, offering insider knowledge that someone who has never been to that region wouldn't have. They deliver a white glove service, taking care of every single aspect of the journey from the moment you head to the airport, to the moment you return.
Ongoing Support
In some cases, they offer ongoing support, so if an attraction is closed or a flight is delayed, they'll take care of making all alternative arrangements for you. This extra level of support is invaluable for busy executives who want to let their hair down and not have to worry about organizing things while they're on holiday.
Why Become a Luxury Travel Agent?
Now you know what a luxury travel agent does, the next question is, should you try starting a business as one? The industry is huge, being worth around $1.38 billion in 2023, and expected to have a compound annual growth rate of 7.9% between 2024 and 2030. Given those statistics, it makes sense for anyone with a passion for customer service and travel to get into the industry today, and ride the wave as the luxury travel industry booms.
There are several perks to working at a luxury travel agent:
- Be your own boss: While many people in this industry start out as hosted agents, there are opportunities for self-employment, giving you the freedom to set your own hours, choose your clients and build your own brand.
- Travel and explore: Imagine being able to travel the world in the name of "research". There are many career options that allow you to work remotely these days, but all too often you're expected to work exclusively from home. Travel agents can head to exotic beaches in the name of research, and their clients will love them for it.
- Unlimited income potential: While there's a finite number of clients you can take on for bespoke travel arrangements, you can make extra money from affiliate marketing, blogging or selling travel guides. Your earning potential is limited only by your own marketing ability and resourcefulness.
- Passive income: Get peace of mind that even if you need to take a break from work for illness or family reasons, you'll still have some income. Passive income sources such as digital downloads, communities and affiliate programs can provide a good revenue stream for a resourceful luxury travel agent.
How to Become a Luxury Travel Agent in Just 7 Steps
The travel niche is a highly competitive one. While there are certifying bodies for travel agents, anyone can set up a consultancy and help people with holidays. The job of "travel agent" isn't a protected profession, so the barrier to entry is low, and this can make it difficult to get started as a self-employed travel agent. If you want to succeed, you'll need a good long-term plan.
1. Get Some Experience First
To give yourself the best chance of success, it's a good idea to start your career working as a travel advisor for an existing agency or to become a hosted travel agent.
Yes, working for someone else isn't your long-term goal, but this will give you some experience with booking ordinary trips, help you learn the systems used by travel agents, and give you the chance to work with customers in a low-stakes way.
2. Try Some Luxury services Yourself
To fully understand what your high-end customers are looking for, you'll need to experience luxury services for yourself. Save up for a while and go through the process of booking a luxury trip. Not only can you use this experience to learn what your clients like, you can take photos for your marketing, and make notes so you've got some things to discuss with those clients. It's easier to build a rapport when you have real-life experience.
3. Get Organized
High-end clients expect professional service and tend to know about what they're buying. If you'll be booking travel for your customers, join the Air Travel Organisers' Licensing program, or a body that's already affiliated with, and join ABTA or the equivalent agency in your country, to give peace of mind to your clients.
Start thinking about domain names, logos, business cards, and the type of services you'd like to offer so you can put together a marketing plan. It's worth paying a professional to design your branding for you, as a polished, consistent look will go a long way toward attracting high-value clients.
4. Choose a Niche
Try to identify a niche you know well, whether that's ski trips, nature retreats, or a specific country or region. Resist the temptation to take on all customers and sell any kind of holiday they want -as a luxury travel agent, what you're selling isn't so much the bookings themselves, but your knowledge and time.
5. Build your Network
The saying "It's not what you know, it's who you know" rings true in the travel industry. If you have good relationships with hotel concierges, restaurant owners, or the receptionist at a popular attraction, use that to your advantage. Once you've found your niche, start networking with people in that area so you have people you can contact if you're looking for help making an unforgettable experience for one of your clients.
6. Create your Business Offerings
Now comes the fun part - building those travel packages for your clients. A lot of the work a luxury travel agent does is building bespoke packages, such as exotic trips that might suit someone with limited mobility, or trips to exciting, far-flung places that it might be intimidating for a solo traveler to go to without a detailed plan. You'll want to build case-by-case plans for those clients. Think about the types of services you'd like to offer, and put up some examples.
Give guideline prices for relatively common requests, such as "A weekend in Prague" or "Bespoke honeymoon packages", and invite people to get in touch for more information if they'd like to try one of these offerings.
7. Market your Business
Once you have your offerings prepared, an idea of your pricing, and an understanding of your client base, it's time to get marketing. Depending on the demographic you're targeting, you may find it helpful to advertise both online and in print/flyers, or even in person at local community groups frequented by your target audience.
If you're new to the world of owning your own business, marketing might feel alien to you at first, but it's an essential part of generating an income. Be prepared to have to invest a lot of time and effort into marketing, especially in the early days. If you have industry peers who offer related services, use affiliate programs to advertise each other in a mutually beneficial way.
How to Find Clients as a Luxury Travel Agent
Your target audience is people who have time to travel and the money to pay for a luxury experience. One of the best ways of reaching people like this is through communities related to the niche you serve. If you're selling luxurious gap year experiences, market to students who attend universities catering to that demographic. For honeymoons, target wedding-related communities.
You have a couple of options with this kind of marketing. You can either join existing communities, build up a good reputation in them and start talking about what you offer (without spamming), or you can create your own community and advertise it on social media. You can do the same with travel-related communities, in the hopes of attracting customers who might have been looking for inspiration to plan their own trips. Once they're in the community, you can begin the job of selling the idea of using a travel agent to them.
Create Your Luxury Travel Business on Whop
If the idea of running your own community sounds intimidating, don't worry. It's easier than ever before to create a community with discussion sections, image sharing, group chats, and more, thanks to Whop.
Whop is a free-to-use social commerce platform that enables entrepreneurs to create their own communities, in the form of whop hubs. These communities can be left open for anyone to join for free, or paywalled so you can charge a subscription for access. You can even create courses and upload a variety of digital products to your hub, and make these free to community members, or charge for access to them.
Whop is ideal for service providers because you can arrange video calls with your community members, message them to talk about travel plans, and send over PDFs and images laying out travel itineraries, all without having to leave the platform. You can also moderate the community, so you have full control over who is a member and what they can post.
As a community owner, you also have access to data about members, such as their email addresses, so you can easily import your member database into an off-platform mailing list if needed.
It's free to join Whop, and you can create as many whop hubs as you wish, and upload an unlimited number of products to them. The platform charges a 3% commission on any sales you make, and acts as the Merchant of Record, handling the payment processing side of things for you. Whop only makes money when you make money, so there's no risk to trying out the community features.
Why not join Whop today and make your first travel community for free? Take the first step on the road to financial freedom as a luxury travel agent.
