Is This Missing from Your Website?

Your website may be missing a very important element. Chris has the details on what he sees missing from many travel agency websites.

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SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome to Beyond the Handbooks. Practical insight from the minds behind the manuals. Your hosts are the authors of the best-selling Travel Advisors Handbook Series. Hall of Fame Cruise Counselors, Michael Lakana and Chris Grump, Elite Cruise Counselor Scott McAllister, and accredited cruise counselor Danielle Gogne. It's time to go beyond the handbook.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

And once again, you've got Chris flying solo this week on the podcast. And this is one that I can kind of do by myself because it's something that I encounter frequently as the person who makes all the phone calls for our seminar C, and it's something that is it's almost like a pet peeve for me, and I wanted to share it because I don't want you to make this mistake that I see fairly regularly. So let me kind of set the scene for you. When people apply for R Seminar C, they fill out a request for a quote. Usually one of the things that I will do is go and look at their website. I want to learn who they are. Uh, where what state are they from? Are they new to the industry? Are they veterans in the industry? Just to kind of get a feel for who I'm talking to when I call them back. And I can't tell you how often I go to a website and I look at the about us section, and nowhere on that website does it have an agent's name. Nowhere. And I will tell you that I think uh if I'm coaching you on your website, that is a huge miss for you. Now, unless there's a reason that you don't want to have your name on your company website, and I I personally can't think of one unless you're in the witness protection program or you don't want business, you know, or you're hiding from somebody, but people want to know who you are, and it also lends a legitimacy to your business and your website. Now, what I would recommend is that number one, when I click on the about us or about this agency section, I want to know a few things, at least I I think most people do. I want to know who the owner is. Is this owned by uh a company? Is it local? Are they national? Who are the people that own this company? And if I don't see that, I start to get a little suspicious. Then I want to know who are the advisors that work for this agency? Are there two people working there? Are there 20 people working there? Is it a team across the nation of a hundred people? I want to know who these people are. And again, if I don't see faces and I don't see names and I don't see phone numbers, I start to get a little concerned. I think all of us have seen those Facebook ads or their internet ads promoting a certain product, and then you click on it, when you go to the website, there's no you have no idea where this company is based, you have no idea if it's legitimate, and you look around trying to find any trace of a phone number or an address where this company is based and you can't find it. That to me is a big red flag. And I think nowadays customers are pretty savvy, and if they don't know where you're based or who you are, they may not even contact you. So I would highly recommend that somewhere on your website you have at least the owner's name or a lead agent's name or something like that, so people know that you're a true actual business, and it can benefit you in other ways. We had Charlie Silvia do a presentation on our seminar at C earlier this year, and one of the things he talked about was putting your photo in your email signature, and a lot of us do that already, but some don't. And he said it's a lot harder for a customer to consider you a commodity and to consider you just an order taker or somebody they don't care about when they actually see a photo and connect you to being a human being. It's harder for them to treat you as just somebody working for them when they see that photo and it humanizes you. And I think the same is true for your website. And when they go, they go, oh, okay, that's who I'll be talking to. We can put that face with the name, right? How many of us have listened to the radio and we've always wondered what that DJ look like? And I can I can tell you from 25 years of radio experience myself, it's not always pretty. And I'm one of those not always pretty people. Uh, you know, you've heard the phrase a face for radio, but in all seriousness, being able to connect that face with a name creates that relationship. And you want that relationship when you're selling travel. You don't want to be anonymous. And so I would highly recommend if you're looking at your website and your photo is not on there somewhere, and your biography is not on there somewhere, and it's not easy for me to find your phone number or your email address to contact you. I would highly recommend that you fix that as soon as possible. If you look at the website for my agency, all of my agents have a photo on the main contact page. Their contact information is right there. And then if you click on it, you can see their biographies, you can go to their social media. All of that is available and easy to find. I don't want to make it difficult for you to contact me. I want to make it as easy as possible, and I highly recommend that you do the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 5:14

Thanks for listening to Beyond the Handbooks. Visit tahandbook.com to order our books. See our upcoming schedule of seminars at C, and listen to episodes on demand. We'll see you next time when we go Beyond the Handbook.