Designer Travel managing director says evaluating the results from educationals should be non-negotiable
Hello and welcome to 2024! I hope you all had a peaceful break with your loved ones and are now feeling ready for what promises to be a busy peaks.
Looking ahead, it is clear that training and developing specialists to make them the best they can be will be crucial as the sector continues to face recruitment struggles. One of the best ways to develop the knowledge of your team is by sending them on educational trips, which is a key part of our training calendar at Designer Travel, and I know it’s the same for many others. Indeed, we aim to secure one trip per year for each of our associates, along with the opportunity to attend an annual luxury overseas conference.
In 2022, we decided to shake things up on the educational front and started to introduce new and enhanced policies that we believed were right for us as a business, as well as our team members and of course our suppliers and tour operator partners. But what does doing things differently actually mean?
We have always believed that a travel provider needs a return on investment for each trip. This means we need to find the right person for every opportunity, and to do that we refer to the growing bank of educational and travel information we carefully collate each year from each of our associates. We look at their preferences for short and long-haul, their customer database and their aspirations for developing their business in the future.
Sharing experiences
Once we have allocated the trip to an associate it’s then about sending through the report they will need to complete on their return, so that the information is shared with the business as a whole. Everyone is also encouraged to use our closed user groups to post short videos and photos while they are away. After all, who doesn’t love to see their peers having a great time knowing that other similar opportunities could be coming their way later in the year?
Over the last two years we have introduced our own exclusive journeys to some amazing destinations where there is an equal upfront financial investment from the supplier, our team member and from us as a business towards travel costs. This approach is the start of our commitment to making the trip work for all parties concerned – and this year we are taking things to a new level in terms of paying back those companies who demonstrate their trust in us by offering these trips.
Return on investment
For each educational place offered there will be a pre-agreed but realistic target set. Once the target is achieved, the associate will go back into the educational pool for any other suitable trips that may come through. This approach means that those associates passionate about learning and growing their business will have the opportunity to travel on more than one trip a year, providing they have added value to the supplier partner in terms of sales. We will continue to strive to get every member of the team away at least once per year.
We would love to offer our team members more of the right trips but we will remain ultra-conscious that, for our educational programme to grow and thrive, these suppliers need an ROI – they need to be able to demonstrate the value that we add to their business.
Radical change comes in the form of operators and suppliers monitoring their ROIs carefully. We all make mistakes and educational programmes are no different, but the secret of a mistake is learning for next time. Not every trip will be a success, not every trip will offer a shared value to a wider audience, but carefully evaluating the results achieved from an educational programme should be non-negotiable for everyone.
There are a lot of takers in this industry and it’s important not to fall into this category – it’s short term and isn’t sustainable. So next time you get invited on a fam trip, think carefully about the ROI for you and the travel partner.