You can listen directly here. 

Are you stuck using ‘old school’ techniques and tools in your travel business? 

 

“I need more time” is a common remark I hear often from business owners and occasionally myself internally too. :-) 

 

Unfortunately time is one thing that we all have exactly the same amount of. 

 

I can’t give you more of it, but I can share some of the tools and resources we use in our travel business to help reduce stress and wasting precious seconds, minutes and hours in our work day. 

 

As you start booking and engaging with clients, working smarter not harder is crucial.  

 

This episode is just the start of sharing some of the tools we use. Over the coming months, we will share what works and doesn’t work in our business, what we have tried and let go of and what we have tried and continued to use and love. We will also bring in other consultants that use different tools and why they use those too! 

 

Instead of reverting to old school methods or going back to ways you used prior to COVID-19 in your business, I want to encourage you to become more efficient and ensure that you are getting things out of your head. Allowing you to be more creative, have more fun, and get more  joy out of your day-to-day work schedules. 

 

You CAN scale your travel business with just a few tools. You don’t have to spend thousands to be more productive.  

 

These 4 tools are to kick you off and we know will help you. 

 

You deserve to have the travel business you have dreamt about. Now is the perfect time to be putting some of these things in place to help you grow. 

 

LastPass - Your Password Protector & Simplifier

 

CANVA - Graphic Designer in your back pocket :-) 

 

Facebook Creator Studio - Planning, posting and staying native inside Facebook & Instagram

 

Otter.ai - Record voice to text

 

We have seen HUGE transformation with a number of consultants we work with around the world. Getting their travel business organised and systemised. Gaining clarity and having a clear direction with focus on a monthly basis. If you want to know how they are doing it, check out our Achievers Mastermind! 

 

Those already in the group consistently share how being accountable, learning and implementing the tools and resources we share each month and setting the goals, and taking ACTION gives you visible and real WINS. 

Show Transcription: 

 

Announcer: Welcome to Travel Agent Achievers! The place to learn how to grow your travel business and have fun with it. Join Roslyn and her guests as they walk you through proven steps to a fulfilling and profitable business. 

 

Hello there Travel Agent Achievers. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast.

 

I'm super excited that you're here. This week, we are talking about some resources that we use inside our travel business that will help you save time.

 

It certainly helped us save time over the last 10 plus years in having our travel business. And I wanted to share these with you today. Because as we start looking at booking clients again, one thing that I have heard a lot over the last 12 months from travel professionals around the world are some of these things. 

 

I don't want my life to be the same as it was before. I don't want my travel business to run the same way it was before. I don't want my travel business to run my life the way that it was, I want to ensure that my life is not spent 12 plus hours a day working in the business. I want to work smarter, not harder. And another one is I love my clients. But I feel like I'm just going around the hamster wheel over and over again. 

 

So today, I wanted to give you some insight into some of the tools that we use in our travel business that have helped myself and my team work smarter, be more productive and efficient, and ensure that we are also getting things out of our head to allow for more creativity, more fun. And also, to get more joy out of our day. 

 

Today, work schedules, you know, we can spend so much time working in our travel business. But I want to give you the opportunity to get things out of your head, close some of those boxes, to do more of the things that you actually love. Those travel business owners, we have access to a flight booking system like Galileo Amadeus Sabre, that if you booking flights, now, you also might get access to reservation systems and training from suppliers. You might In addition, have a back office system that your host uses or you might be using for your own business. Things like tomada, power suite, cross check, there are more. 

 

But these are generally the main things. And these tools are essential when you're running a travel business. And they're integral in helping us take out the guesswork in our business for the travel booking side of things. 

 

Now, they may also help with supplier education. But they don't always have ways that we can really scale our travel business, nor allow us to remove actions from our heads, taking all of the thoughts and ideas and just putting it into something else. So they are there as resources and tools to help you stay compliant to book the travel and also keep you informed. So these are essential. So your flight booking system, your reservation system, the training systems that you might use for your suppliers. 

 

Now to scale and build a bigger business, not only do you need clients, but you also need some systems and tools in place that allow you to spend more time connecting with people building relationships, and growing your network to allow you to actually build your business. And I believe that you can scale your travel business, and it can be profitable. So the tools that I'll run through with you are just a few. I don't want to overwhelm you. But I also believe that you don't need hundreds of tools and additional expenses to run a successful business. You need just a few that will help you initially. 

 

And the ones that I'll give you are the ones that we certainly couldn't do without in our business. You deserve to have the travel business you've always dreamed about. And now is the perfect time to be putting some of these things in place to help you grow in the future.

 

So let's jump in. And when I started my business, I had a small diary. You know the ones that had like a bounding on the outside and then the pages inside it and you carried it with you everywhere. Now it may have been a date or a page or a few days to a page. It had key telephone numbers and birthdays and addresses in it as well as like a list that you could put all your passwords and notes pages. 

 

Now, each year, I would change the diary pages. But I would leave my password page and telephone pages and those sorts of things in there. Now, those pages just got scrappier and scrap Yeah. And in all honesty that feels like it was an absolute lifetime ago, that I carried this with me everywhere. But in reality, I'm sure that it was less than 10 years ago.

 

Which brings me to my very first essential tech tool that I think every business owner should have. It's also not for just travel business,  I do think that this is for anyone who is owning a business, but even those that aren't owning a business, because it is so super cool. It's cheap, and it gives you peace of mind. That brings me to LastPass. 

 

LastPass, if you have a list of suppliers that you are always working with, and you have to log into their systems over and over again, to book something, you might be a member of a number of different training programmes, or your suppliers training platforms. Let's say your banking records, social media profiles, your school login details for kids, oh my goodness, then you need LastPass. 

 

Not only is it a great storage tool for all your passwords, but it is safe. Now remember, when you initially might have had to set up a password for a supplier, you may have even used the same password for a number of suppliers over a long period of time. I know that you get this because you're like me. 

 

For many years, you may have had the one password for all the different suppliers because it was easy to remember and it was in your head, you may have also had that diary or that piece of paper where you had it all written down. 

 

Now we all know cyber security, this is not a smart thing to do. And this is where LastPass comes in. It'll trigger any duplicate passwords. When you add a new login into the vault, for instance, it'll come up with random passwords, these are then automatically stored, you no longer need to remember. And the key phrase here is getting things out of your head to allow you to focus on the more important tasks in your travel business. 

 

So for when you start hiring contractors, or staff or people to assist you with certain projects, you no longer need to give them an actual password and hope that they don't pass it on to somebody else or they don't share it. Or even worse, you have to remember to change it when you no longer need it right? It's out of your head. 

 

And LastPass in the free version even allows you to share the password with one other person without them saying it. So you can also have this just on one device. So that's a bit of a pain. But it doesn't end there. 

 

Now if you're like me, you might work on a laptop, when you're away from home, you might have your phone with you always on the go you're on a computer at home, sometimes, you might then have your details on a watch or an iPad or something. And you're logging in, right. 

 

So there's, there's just way too many places connected, right? I know that. And I say that all the time. There's too many ways that people can contact me these days. And there's too many ways now that we can remain connected to the internet. 

 

So the paid version of LastPass, which is in all honesty, only a few dollars per month. It allows you to have LastPass set up across many devices. Now you still need one master password to log into it anywhere. So make that a good one, one that you will remember, but you can then share that password with not just one person, but you can share it with several people. 

 

So for instance, we have a web designer or web person that looks after everything to do with our website right now my marketing assistant Diana, she also does work on the website. Both of these people need access to the same tool. So I can personally share the password with both of them. I can also revoke the access whenever I want to as well. It's the perfect sharing tool and one that is that my taken so much stress out of remembering passwords, which we all know is not smart in this day and age. 

 

So I absolutely recommend you check out LastPass. And for all the details that will come from this episode, you can go to one place travelagentachievers.com/episode48 bits where all the details, the links, these tools, everything will be kept for this podcast episode. It's only $4.50 a month, Australian currently for the pro version. 

 

 mean, as long as passed, this is an essential investment. It's one that you won't regret. And I think in your travel business, because we work with so many different people. And we have so many different logins, not just the suppliers and the things that we're working on day to day, but also your social media accounts and banking an those sorts of things.

So grab LastPass. And if you are thinking of outsourcing or getting help inside your business, I absolutely recommend you get the pro account for just $4.50 Australian a month that's like a no brainer, really having last pass has certainly helped me get rid of any of these written notes, it's allowed my brain to focus more on the essential things that I need to focus on. And it's closed off the door, where I've stored all those passwords in my memory before. 

 

Now, don't ask me what a password is now for something because I can't tell you, I just know I've got the one login that goes into my LastPass account. It's great for families as well. So the last thing that I want is for anything to happen to myself, my partner family members, but you can set up a family account so that I have a master password, but I can also share that with my partner in case anything happens to me, he can still access all of our secure information. 

 

That would be horrible if something happened to myself or or him and we couldn't access, you know, social media profiles, we couldn't access banking details, we couldn't access superannuation, we couldn't access other things, because we each only knew the one password.

 

So by having a family account, it also gives you the opportunity to share those things with each other as well for peace of mind for later use as well. 

 

The second essential tool that we use in our travel business, drumroll please. Canva. So if you haven't heard of Canva, where have you been hiding?

 

It is the most easy to use graphic design tool with so many features that have been added over the last few years that personally I've lost count. And I have to rely on the emails that come out saying hey, here's a new feature. 

 

Here's a new tool. There is so much greatness to Canva. Now, I used to have a full time graphic designer on my team. We have a couple of businesses within you know what I do, and my family does. 

 

So our full time graphic designer, Denmark, I absolutely adored him. He was super creative, so helpful. He gave me patience. He brought my thoughts and ideas to life. And I honestly do miss him. He's gone on to bigger things in his corporate career. And I am just so appreciative of him setting up the foundations that we initially had as a graphic designer in our business.

 

Now, when I look at what I then did, so once he finished with us, I had to look at am I going to hire a new designer? Am I going to bring somebody else into our business to try and bring the same sort of vision that I have to life through creative design. 

 

Now, I am no way a creative person, I can think of things but I can't make them pretty. And so I needed something a person or a tool that I could rely on to help bring things to life for me without me having to think too much. And that's where Canva came in. It was fairly new at the time, I've probably had it since about 2018. Now, so 1819. So it has been a few years. And as I said there are so many things that are happening all the time and new resources, new things that are coming into Canva which make our business so much easier to deal with on a graphic design basis. 

 

So thinking back a few years ago now, it was at the time the thing to do was to buy stock images, or source the images from the internet somewhere and then use those images to recreate them The tools that we needed in our business, like, I just couldn't come up with the ideas. 

 

So in Canva, in came Melanie Perkins, one of my heroes, and she made it all completely simplified for non techie, non designer people like me. No, I'm great at travel. But I'm not a graphic designer. 

 

Whether you just want to create social media tiles, or put together a flyer Canva has got you covered, you can easily get the free version. And you'll be able to do a number of things already without having to think too much. So you get access to over 250,000, free templates, hundreds of 1000s of images. And when you're just getting started, it is absolute gold.

 

However, when you upgrade to the pro account, now this is just under 170 Australian dollars per year, like it's it's so cheap for what you actually get, you get so much more, you can and this is what we have added in our brand kit, you can upload your own fonts, upload your own logo. These things are essential right in your travel business, you need to have your logo on your images, you need to have your font to make you stand out. 

 

There's over 420,000 templates with more added in daily 75 million premium stock photos, videos, audio graphics that are free to use, you get storage, you can make your own templates for team members to also use plus so much more. 

 

So when I look at the branding of our travel business, and even with Travel Agent Achievers, I know that we can set up templates that are in our colours, our font, our logos attached to them, but we can add things into them. 

 

So the templates are there as the template, we can then add in text, we can add in different images. But these things are then set aside so that it takes the thought process and the heavy ideas out of what we need to do moving forward. 

 

Now daily, I'm using Canva, my team is using Canva. There are new things to use inside Canva every day. I'm a Canva champion as well. So I'm part of their beta team to help them grow as well. It is such an honour, but it is so great to have an insider's perspective of what Canva is doing. And also have a voice. 

 

So if you've got ideas and things that you want included, when you're using Canva, let me know, so that I can share these with the team as well at Canva and help create a tool that really works for you. 

 

Now, a new thing inside Canva is their ability to design a content calendar for you. So for your social media posts, if you are batching, and preparing several posts at once, which I do recommend that you do so that you're not having to think of this every single day, then you can use their content calendar to populate all the images into for instance. And then in addition, you can schedule them. 

 

So you can now schedule your social media posts from Canva. directly into Facebook, Instagram, like how cool is that right  now inside Instagram, for instance. And this is another little new tool that they've recently released, you only have the one web link right now in the past, I've recommended that people use link dot tree or have a specific landing page on your website. 

 

Now if you don't have a website, that's fine. But Canva have just created Canva links. So you can set up your very own one web link, and then have a tree of links inside that. So it's like you're having a landing page inside Canva with all the different links that you want to direct people to and then behind those you then put where you want to actually direct people to do you want to direct people to your Facebook, do you want to direct people to your website? Do you want to direct them to a landing page that has a free resource on it.

 

So it's just like having a tray of links. But it's a tool that you don't need to leave the platform for. And this is so cool. It's super useful. And I love sometimes, you know, and in this case, I love that you don't have to leave the platform and start something else. And design something else and set up different colours and be limited by the resources of another tool, you can just do it all in the one place.

 

So that's Canva. I love it, you have to try it, grab all the links, as I said, for this episode travelagentachievers.com/episode48. 

 

Now once you've designed your images, you've got your passwords locked in a secure vault, a free tool that we use to keep things once again native, inside our main social media platforms is Facebook Creator Studio. 

 

Now we design our images inside Canva Yes, you can set the content calendar up there, that's also possible, you can also post direct to the platform like a normal third party app would to push the information across. 

 

However, in my experience, and for me, I personally like to keep things native where I can so the platform is designed. And this is where Facebook creative studio comes in the platform is designed you to be able to schedule and post directly from inside Facebook. Now I like this because when you are working with someone or with a tool, for instance, like Facebook, their whole goal is to keep you on the platform for as long as possible, right. 

 

So if you open your Facebook in in the morning, and you start scrolling through your feed, and then you start doing something else and diving into it, and you find a little rabbit hole, I mean, Facebook's algorithm wants you to stay there as long as possible. And for your travel business, it's important that you have people looking at your content. 

 

So this is where engagement comes into place. And we run our five day social media engagement challenge, we will do it again, I'm absolutely sure that make sure you sign up for all of the different notifications. But I think it's important that when you look at social media as a whole, you also see how social media works. 

 

So for us, we set up a plan, we prepare our images, we schedule our posts at a time that is convenient to us. But it's also the best time for our followers. So we can post inside Facebook Creator Studio, and then cross post those images and that content to Instagram. So these are the two platforms that work best for us. And that's where I suggest keeping things native where possible. 

 

So if you post a Pinterest or you post to LinkedIn, have a look at native posting wherever you possibly can. If not, you might need a third party app to help set up and schedule those posts to make it as easy as possible for you. But if you are just using Facebook and Instagram or one of those, then I highly recommend you do check out Facebook creative studio, we'll add the links to it inside the show notes. 

 

But as I said, just go to travel agent achievers.com forward slash Episode 48 to see how it all works, and the links will be in there for you know, we also like to check our stats and the details. We get that everything to see what works and what doesn't work inside Facebook creative studio. It's great for managing our content in a place that we hope. We don't know exactly. Nobody's ever come out and set up. But we do hope that Instagram and Facebook that they prefer to promote and push out the content from where they like you to be saying. 

 

So it's their platform, they want you to spend time on it, I recommend that you do just go with the platform wants you to be but at the end of the day, it's your business, you get to do whatever is right for you use the tools and features, the platform that makes sense to you. Whatever you need to do now, not everyone loves this tool. We do. It's free. And that's one of the reasons why I share it with you. 

 

However, there are many post sharing platforms out there that might suit you and whatever you choose, it's okay. Just make sure that you are getting your content out to the world. Don't overthink it. Start small, but take action. I prefer to plan prepare and batch our content based on the topics that we plan in advance. 

So using a scheduler like Facebook creative studio, it just allows us to upload a bunch of things at once and schedule the posts for later use. So we now have all the passwords organised with LastPass in graphic design means prepared and organised like right down to Preparing quotes for clients, you can do that inside Canva, you could set up a template and then just use that over and over again, whatever is easiest for you go for it, but make sure you check it out. 

 

Now, if you're having a coffee, for instance, let's say you're out, you're driving around, you get a great idea.  You meet with a client, and you forget to bring a notepad with you. You need though, to get all of the information out of your head and into a document so that you can prepare a quote for a client or you can come back to a conversation. There are so many things these days that come up in a flash. And if we don't take note of it, it's like waking up in the middle of the night, right, you've got a great idea. 

 

And then you fall back asleep, you wake up in the morning, and like I'm sure I had a great idea last night, but I really can't remember what it was. So this brings me to my last tech tool for this week. And that is otter.ai. Right? Or just otter, I'm often out driving, I love to be able to grab a coffee first thing in the morning after dropping Jackson at school, down at the beach. I am out and about and often on the flight, though, when I'm having that coffee. 

 

And sometimes I'll actually sit at the beach at my favourite cafe that you'll see on social media all the time salty crew. And I see something that inspires me, I hear something on a podcast that inspires me or I just get this creative burst, right? So I'm thinking of something, what do I have to do? I have to write it down, or I'll forget it. 

 

But that's where otter comes into play. Auto is a free app that's on my phone. It's also a web application that I can record speech, I can record a conversation, my ideas and thoughts. And then it live transcribes my voice into text, the spoken word is gone from spoken into text through smart AI technology. And I can then share that text through a document directly to email. This saves me time, I can play back a conversation at a different speed. 

 

For instance, if I want to, and I can use this as an audio, or I can get the written word. So you can have it as an audio you can have it as a written word, right? It's perfect for coming up with you come up with an idea or a thought for social media quickly recording that having a put to text so that there you might be preparing a quote for a travel client and wanting to get all the details without having to type them all up. 

 

Right you can make notes following a meeting or even during a meeting, have it sitting with you as you are having a conversation with a client so that you don't miss anything, listening to what they require and what they need and what is their essentials for planning a travel vacation, then you're able to come back to this. 

You might also record your husband or partner when you have an argument just so that you can bring it up and let them know that you're right later on. Now, where we here at Travel Agent Achievers, and also inside our travel business, we record videos, even this podcast, we can upload the audio file into otter and get the transcription for other users. 

 

So this is a tool inside the paid version of otter. But when you're recording videos, and you're uploading them to social media or having them on your website, adding captions these days is now essential. And this is just one way that you can easily get the txt file and upload them to your video so that you've got captions on it, right? 

 

It's something that is really important. It's super cool. It's a no brainer. It's easy to use, and of course, a free resource for you. Your travel business doesn't have to be full of fancy tech tools that you may not use when it comes to business. 

 

For me, it's all about simplicity. It's about systems, it's using tech to our advantage. And of course, being able to do the things that are in our zone of genius. Outsourcing or getting help with the things that we aren't so good at freeing up more time to focus on what we love doing less time on the things that we don't enjoy so much. 

 

So to check out these tools, more resources, I want you to go to travelagentachievers.com/episode48. It's time to simplify, get organised and do more of what you love to help you build the travel business that you deserve. 

 

And I know you forward to building. If this has helped you these resources LastPass,  Canva, Facebook Creator Studio and otter, just to get started. If it's helped you, then I'd love for you to share this podcast with a travel colleague, and let me know what resources you love. Make sure you join the conversation inside our achievers in travel accountability Facebook group, where each week I am there to ask you the questions around what you are focusing on that week making sure that you are accountable and assisting you with some things to help you move forward in your travel business.

 

Here's to your success. I hope you have an awesome weekend and week ahead and I look forward to speaking with you very very soon. Bye for now.