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The Process: How Business Gets Booked

Brilliant Edventures

The travel industry is “very relationship oriented, and we have a lot of great relationships,” said Elaine Moulder, who started Brilliant Edventures about a year and a half ago with her husband, Tim. And when it comes to booking business, “word of mouth and relationships are most important.”

When the tour company the Moulders had been working for closed its office, “we couldn’t picture ourselves doing anything else,” Elaine Moulder said. But they also wanted to work for themselves. The two had been in the travel industry for 25 years and decided to start Brilliant Edventures — the “ed” is because “I’ve always thought that travel was educational no matter how old you are,” she said.

Brilliant Edventures is not a retail tour operator; it usually books preformed groups for other group leaders or does a few trips for motorcoach companies every year. When it comes to choosing a destination, its clients typically already have specific destinations in mind, such as New Orleans, Louisiana; Charleston, South Carolina; or Savannah, Georgia. With the destination decided, Moulder tries to get ideas about experiences they’ve enjoyed in the past, and she especially looks for “things that can’t be done anyplace else,” such as taking her group to the Charleston Tea Plantation, the only working tea plantation in the country. She also looks for events her travelers might enjoy, such as the Tournament of Roses parade, the Portland Rose Festival and Mardi Gras.

Moulder calls CVBs to get recommendations for restaurants and hotels; she also gets recommendations from people she’s met over the years at conferences, such as NTA and American Bus Association events. She also likes to research online. CVB websites are good resources for ideas that are appropriate for groups, and if a restaurant has group dining information on its website, that’s a good sign “they’re a step up” when it comes to groups. Online reviews of restaurants, hotels and attractions are also helpful, although “I always take them with a grain of salt,” she said.

Travel Adventures and Tours

Eleven years ago, Julianne Gorny launched Travel Adventures and Tours, a venture that grew out of her own love of travel and from doing some travel planning for academic associations and international guests for the University of Chicago. But Gorny really got her start when her husband was doing archaeology work in Turkey; she began getting his team there and identifying suppliers “who I felt fit the niche I was interested in,” she said.

Gorny’s agency operates a bit differently than some that do larger bus tours. She specializes in customized itineraries — usually international travel, although she also advises on domestic trips — and her clients range from a single person to a small group. For example, she’s hoping to get 20 travelers for an upcoming trip to Turkey, and she’s leading Phi Beta Kappa, an academic group, to Peru next summer.

She likes to keep her groups small so travelers can go places and gain access that larger crowds can’t. She focuses on behind-the-scenes, less well-known sites and activities because her clients “don’t want to be led around on a tour they can read in a guidebook,” Gorny said.

That philosophy is evident in how she chooses vendors. She often goes with smaller companies, although “there’s good and bad with that,” but doing so means she usually works directly with the owner. And when she’s vetting tour operators, Gorny looks for companies that have in-country staff and that seem to “match my client.” She peruses their sample itineraries to see what demographic they market to, what kinds of hotels they use, etc., then works with them to customize her own trip.

The internet offers endless opportunities to learn. She listens to online webinars presented by tour operators and references the United States Tour Operators Association’s online resources. She uses agent forums on Facebook to get ideas, ask for recommendations and find out what experiences other people have had with certain companies or operators.

“All I have to do is type ‘Who is your favorite supplier to Peru?’ or ‘What is the best hotel in Cusco?’ and I get so many responses. I learn so much from those.”

Travel Adventurers

For 35 years, Jim Lewis was chairman of an Atlanta-based decorative arts society, and for 35 years, he planned and led trips for the organization. Two of the society’s favorites were to the Canadian province of Nova Scotia and to New York’s Hudson River Valley.

When Lewis moved back home to Etowah, Tennessee, about halfway between Knoxville and Chattanooga, he realized that no one was doing any quality trips out of the area, so he and his sisters founded Travel Adventurers about four years ago. Planning trips from eastern Tennessee was an adjustment. Atlanta is in the heart of Georgia, so trips within a two-hour drive of the city were easy to come by, but that’s not the case in Etowah.

Travel Adventurers primarily does day trips, such as a tour of six historic homes in Knoxville, but the company also arranges overnights. It took a full bus to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, last November for the Christmas shows and is planning a trip to Branson, Missouri, this November for the holiday shows. For the Myrtle Beach trip, Travel Adventurers went through Diamond Tours because Lewis had “known about them for years, and they did an excellent job when I was doing the tours in Atlanta,” Lewis said.

He and his sisters visited Branson this spring on a FAM trip. It was their first time in the city, and “we were thoroughly impressed with it.” A travel associate told Lewis about the person he used in Branson to wrangle all the tickets, so Lewis called him and worked with him to choose the shows for the trip. He also used that contact to recommend some hotels and restaurants.

Lewis also prefers to deal with the hotels directly. To help him decide whether to put a group there, he reads reviews online, calls the hotel, and asks when it was last updated and what was done. And when he’s booking attractions and activities, he’ll ask whomever he gets on the phone where they like to eat or if they can recommend a good, affordable place.

“I try to talk to locals to get their take,” he said. “Nothing like a firsthand recommendation.”

Rachel Carter

Rachel Carter worked as a newspaper reporter for eight years and spent two years as an online news editor before launching her freelance career. She now writes for national meetings magazines and travel trade publications.