Planning the dream adventure for a client, however knowledgeable you are, takes a lot of research and meticulous planning. To really stand out as a travel agency, you need to make sure you’re fully up to date on all the recent developments around the globe and can offer your clients a truly personal service that suits their specific needs or interests. This is where a virtual assistant can help. Outsourcing your administration and “behind the scenes work” to a highly skilled professional can help your organisation’s productivity whilst saving you a huge amount time and money. Here are 6 ways to get started:
Instagram and social media
Visuals are the best way to sell a destination, but running a successful instagram account requires constant management to ensure photographs are good enough quality, regularly posted and accompanied by appropriate hashtags to ensure that people are actually seeing the content. Your virtual assistant can take responsibility for all of your social media campaigns by gathering content from members of your team and setting out a well-timed schedule that interlinks all of the platforms you use. They can even write blog posts and source images for you if there’s a gap in content or help you set-up accounts if they don’t already exist. Then, when you want to take things to the next level, your PA can introduce you to our sister company, Deeply Social who can plan an effective long term social media strategy.
Database management
Updating a database is a hugely time consuming and tedious task that can feel like a huge block to your productivity when you’re trying to sell a holiday. Hand over the management to your Outsourcery assistant and you can rest assured that your client information is expertly organised and regularly updated with any useful notes or preferences such as birthdays, anniversaries, what a client did and/or didn’t like about places they’ve travelled in the past, their dream destinations or plans for future travels. Instead of having to trawl through scraps of paper and documents, you can find everything handily stored in one place when you need it.
Customer Service
Superior customer service is key for referrals and client loyalty. This could be ordering a fruit basket to await your client’s arrival at their destination, a birthday card and cake, a special anniversary treat or simply a well designed itinerary package. Your virtual PA can take care of all these little extras to ensure your client’s stay is truly one to remember.
Destination Research
Outsourcery assistant are expert researchers. They can put together information packs for your clients so that they know key tourist spots for different destinations, currencies, time zones, visa requirements, cultural traditions, useful phrases in the local languages, cool spots to hang out for drinks or lunch. Or you can ask your PA to research any destinations you don’t know that much about so that you can decide if it’s somewhere you’d like to promote.
Newsletters
Newsletters are a great way to stay in touch with clients and ensure that you’re the first agency they think of when they start planning their next trip. Your virtual assistant can put together a mail out list and prepare weekly emails with news articles, travel tips, photos and information on new resort openings.
Bookkeeping
It’s absolutely vital for any company to stay on top of their bookkeeping otherwise you can end up with some rather nasty consequences further down the line. Your Outsourcery PA can help to ensure that all of your accounts are in order, prepare invoices for clients, set-up direct debits, manage expenses and even take care of payroll if necessary. If you’re unsure as to how this all works virtually, your PA can introduce you to some of the secure applications we use and help you to find out which services would work best for your organisation.
