Advisors ask me how I decide which trips to promote, and the honest answer is: I don't decide. The data decides, and I obey. When I finally looked at my website analytics properly, my two most-viewed trip pages turned out to be my two most profitable destinations. The audience had been voting the whole time. Whatever you did there, do that again.
“Whatever you did, do that again.”
The poor-woman's tracking stack
- Page views by trip = demand ranking. Your next launch is usually sitting at the top of it.
- Unique short links for each trip on your homepage, clicks tell you which webinar to run and which trip can absorb a price rise.
- Track every sales call and its outcome. If you don't know your close rate, you don't know whether you have a traffic problem or a sales problem, and they have opposite cures. Mine on private trips runs about seven in ten.
- Watch daily sales for anomalies, then investigate the good ones. Two same-day bookings once traced back to one tour leader's on-trip conversations, that's a marketing channel, and now it's resourced like one.
Keep the dashboard almost embarrassingly simple, revenue, profit, margin, expenses, list growth, one row a month. The point isn't sophistication. It's that clues only help the detective who reads them, and most travel businesses are sitting on a case file they've never opened.
Claire's own numbers
The framework, step by step
- 1
Page views by trip = demand ranking
Your next launch is usually sitting at the top of it.
- 2
Unique short links for each trip on your homepage —
- 3
Track every sales call and its outcome
If you don't know your close rate, you don't know whether you have a traffic problem or a sales problem — and they have opposite cures. Mine on privat
- 4
Watch daily sales for anomalies
then investigate the good ones. Two same-day bookings once traced back to one tour leader's on-trip conversations — that's a marketing channel, and no
Claire's own framework from this essay, in the order she teaches it.
Source: Claire B. Soares, from her own travel business and live trainings.
Common Questions
What metrics should a travel advisor track?
Trip page views as a demand signal, unique link clicks per trip, every sales call and its outcome, and daily bookings watched for anomalies worth investigating.
How do you know which trip to launch next?
Your website analytics usually already ranked them. Claire's two most-viewed trip pages turned out to be her two most profitable destinations.
What is a good close rate for private travel planning?
Claire's runs around seven in ten on private trips. Knowing your own number tells you whether you have a traffic problem or a sales problem, which have opposite cures.
Written By
Claire B. Soares
6× Condé Nast Top Travel Specialist, Certified AI Consultant, and founder of Travel AI University. $3.4B+ in enterprise travel software sold to Google, IBM, Boeing, the federal government, and the DoD; $16M+ in luxury travel sales with Up in the Air Life.
About Claire
