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Jamie Biesiada
Putting together a group trip during the pandemic is not just possible, it s something agents are working on today. Here are the stories of three advisors who have successfully gotten future travel on the books.
All three employed what Gifted Travel Network (GTN) co-founder and chief sales officer Vanessa McGovern has dubbed the come with me strategy: Advisors are leading the trips themselves, and advertising them as such, giving consumers the confidence to pull the trigger and book. As McGovern acknowledged, the strategy isn t a new one in the industry, but it is new for GTN. The host previously encouraged advisors to use the pied-piper strategy, wherein the advisor finds a group leader and does not travel with the group themselves.
Jamie Biesiada
In recent years, the Mooresville, N.C.-based host agency Gifted Travel Network (GTN) has preached a group sales strategy of using a pied piper: Find a group leader, and the group will follow.
But in the time of Covid-19, GTN has backed away from that in favor of a different approach, what co-founder and chief sales officer Vanessa McGovern has dubbed the “come with me strategy.”
It’s not new in the industry, but it is for GTN.
“It is counterintuitive to how we’ve been teaching group strategies for the last couple of years at GTN,” McGovern said. “We’ve been very emphatic about an easy way and a hard way of the group strategy, with the easy, previous to Covid, being find a group leader. Find a pied piper, craft a trip around their interests and have them promote it.”