Connecting with Customers: How to Sell, Service, and Market the Travel Product

by Marc Mancini

Overview

Thinking about a career in travel? Or perhaps you're already a travel professional, but would like to polish your sales and service skills. Maybe you're a student in a travel training program who wants a preview of how to do your job right.

 

No matter your goals, Connecting with Customers: How to Sell, Service, and Market the Travel Product will help you get there.

 

Connecting with Customers features several unique elements:

·      It compares sales and service excellence practices in the travel and hospitality industry with more familiar examples from other fields.

·      Because it was written as a textbook-workbook, it features all sorts of thought-provoking application activities, diagnostic self-assessments and other dozens of other elements that turn it an interactive experience.

·      It's written in a style that's casual, accessible and a pleasure to read.

Through interactive exercises, vivid examples and engaging prose, author Marc Mancini provides you with practical and powerful strategies to satisfy the travel needs of today's consumers. You'll learn how to:

·      Adapt the six fundamental steps of sales to the travel environment

·      Reveal the seven secrets of great customer counseling

·      Implement 15 best practices used by the world's most acclaimed service providers and that can be applied to the travel and hospitality industry

·      Apply the six major phases of the marketing cycle

·      Create a results-driven marketing plan

·      Decide which types and aspects of e-commerce will help you sell better

·      Serve the needs of niche markets, corporate travels, group departures and more

Connecting with Customers will help you achieve a deeper understanding of not only what sales, service and marketing practices the travel and hospitality business shares with other industries, but also how it differs from them in fundamental ways.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781949667059
Publisher:	Marc Mancini Seminars and Consulting Inc
Publication date:	09/12/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	202
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Marc Mancini brings a wealth of hands-on, real-world industry experience and is one of the industry's most successful and in-demand consultants and curriculum designers. He is the former Chairman of the Travel and Hospitality Departments at West Los Angeles College. His client list includes Marriott, CLIA, Holland America Line, AAA, Norwegian Cruise Line and the Hawaiian Visitors and Convention Bureau. It's estimated that his training programs have reached over 300,000 travel professionals. He was also well known in another field. He is a graduate of the University of Southern California's prestigious cinema department and served for many years as a film critic for Film Comment and Rolling Stone. Dr. Mancini was named "Educator of the Year" by the International Society of Travel and Tourism Educators and, in 2010, received ASTA's Diamond Award as one of the seven most distinguished travel professionals in the history of Southern California. Dr. Mancini has authored eight books, produced and hosted 32 videos, created dozens of online training programs and published over 300 articles. His works have been syndicated by the Los Angeles Times and he has appeared on CNN, ABC's Good Morning America and Showtime. He holds a BA degree from Providence College and an MA, MS, and Ph.D. from the University of Southern California.

Read an Excerpt

Is travel something very special to you? Do you enjoy the thought of helping other people have great vacations, too? Also, if you're already a travel professional, are you looking for ways to perform at an even higher level?

If your answer to any of these questions is yes, then Connecting with Customers: How to Sell, Service, and Market the Travel Product will provide interesting reading indeed. This book will help you explore the best ways to satisfy the travel needs of today's consumers. You'll uncover the marketing strategies that underlie selling and buying travel today. And you'll discover how to not just satisfy travel customers, but delight them. Even better: This voyage of learning, we hope, will be entertaining, too.

Many other travel sales and marketing books are out there. How is this one different?

• It applies sales, service, and marketing principles to all sectors of the industry: airlines, travel agencies, cruises, tours, lodging, car rentals, attractions, tourist bureaus, and more. The result: You can apply your knowledge to any travel situation.
• It takes the experiences you're familiar with from other sales and service industries and carefully compares them to what goes on in travel. By connecting the two, you'll understand travel-related selling and buying much more quickly. Moreover, you'll come to comprehend more fully the overall principles of sales, service, and marketing. This information will help you in all sectors of the business. It'll even help you become a better-informed consumer.
• It examines not just front-line sales, but business-to-business and internal sales, as well. That way you can apply your insights to all sorts of scenarios.
• It's thoroughly up-to-date. It examines today's e-environment of sales and service, and predicts where it's all going.
• It uses lively and entertaining prose to make your reading easily understood and fun.
• It provides useful and practical solutions for travel situations. Sure, you'll encounter theoretical explanations, but only to deepen your understanding of why certain things work and others don't.
• It deploys an arsenal of tactics to help you learn. Bullet points, objectives, a glossary, lists, charts, bold or italicized items, and sidebars organize this book's content so that you'll understand easily and remember more.
• Perhaps this textbook's most unique feature: It's interactive. Little activities throughout the text and major ones at each chapter's end will' challenge you to apply, explore, and benefit from your new-found knowledge in ways that will make this book's message a part of you. In a sense, you will be this book's co-author!

HOW SHOULD YOU STUDY FROM THIS BOOK?

1. Read with pen in hand. Connecting with Customers is as much a workbook as it is a textbook. Complete those activities, answer those questions. Doing thus will engage you in the material and fire up your insights. And don't worry about "ruining" your book. You're personalizing it to your experiences and with your thoughts.
2. Pay special attention to bold or italicized concepts and words. These are things you must know to succeed in travel. Reinforce additional key points by using different color highlighters.
3. If any word or term is unclear to you, find out its meaning. We've tried to limit this book's vocabulary to concepts that are familiar to people who know at least a little about travel. In many cases—just to be safe—industry terms are defined for you in the text, in the glossary, or both. A good dictionary (including the travel dictionaries listed in the bibliography) should clarify any terms we've overlooked.

"I WISH I'D KEPT THAT BOOK!"

You'd be surprised haw often people say that. This textbook is an investment in your future. It has strategies that will come in handy later on, that you'll wish to refer to—even if you work in an entirely different business. And, after all, once you fill out the exercises, you will have helped write it!

TO THE INSTRUCTOR

We're delighted you've adopted Connecting with Customers for your students. You'll find that it provides a refreshing and rewarding approach to teaching three very critical subjects.

Connecting with Customers takes an ecumenical approach—all industry segments and situations are covered. No matter what travel career your students eventually pursue, they'll be prepared. This book also approaches its topics in the order that your students are likely to experience them: Sales and service first, marketing and more advanced topics later. Yes, its emphasis is on sales, but again, this is probably what your students will need to understand—especially today—in the early phase of their careers in travel. By alluding to other buying experiences, it permits your students—even those who've done little traveling—to relate to the content more quickly.

Connecting with Customers can serve as a stand-alone textbook or as a supplement to courses on virtually any facet of the travel industry (including introductory ones). It's appropriate to all instructional levels: Four-year colleges, two-year colleges, proprietary schools, and high schools. Most importantly, its unique, interactive format will support you in your efforts to involve your students—both in and outside the classroom—in a powerfully motivating way.

Connecting with Customers is supplemented by an Instructor's Manual that includes a test bank, thematic outlines, suggested answers to all activities and questions, and teaching tips that will help you connect to your customers: those future travel professionals.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Basics

Chapter 2: Welcoming Customers and Determining Their Needs

Chapter 3: Recommending Solutions and Addressing Concerns

Chapter 4: Enhancing the Sale and Achieving an Agreement

Chapter 5: Serving the Travel Customer

Chapter 6: Marketing Travel

Chapter 7: Special Topics

Chapter 8: Your Future in Sales, Service, and Marketing

Glossary

Index

Introduction

Is travel something very special to you? Do you enjoy the thought of helping other people have great vacations, too? Also, if you're already a travel professional, are you looking for ways to perform at an even higher level?

If your answer to any of these questions is yes, then Connecting with Customers: How to Sell, Service, and Market the Travel Product will provide interesting reading indeed. This book will help you explore the best ways to satisfy the travel needs of today's consumers. You'll uncover the marketing strategies that underlie selling and buying travel today. And you'll discover how to not just satisfy travel customers, but delight them. Even better: This voyage of learning, we hope, will be entertaining, too.

Many other travel sales and marketing books are out there. How is this one different?

• It applies sales, service, and marketing principles to all sectors of the industry: airlines, travel agencies, cruises, tours, lodging, car rentals, attractions, tourist bureaus, and more. The result: You can apply your knowledge to any travel situation.
• It takes the experiences you're familiar with from other sales and service industries and carefully compares them to what goes on in travel. By connecting the two, you'll understand travel-related selling and buying much more quickly. Moreover, you'll come to comprehend more fully the overall principles of sales, service, and marketing. This information will help you in all sectors of the business. It'll even help you become a better-informed consumer.
• It examines not just front-line sales, but business-to-business and internal sales, aswell. That way you can apply your insights to all sorts of scenarios.
• It's thoroughly up-to-date. It examines today's e-environment of sales and service, and predicts where it's all going.
• It uses lively and entertaining prose to make your reading easily understood and fun.
• It provides useful and practical solutions for travel situations. Sure, you'll encounter theoretical explanations, but only to deepen your understanding of why certain things work and others don't.
• It deploys an arsenal of tactics to help you learn. Bullet points, objectives, a glossary, lists, charts, bold or italicized items, and sidebars organize this book's content so that you'll understand easily and remember more.
• Perhaps this textbook's most unique feature: It's interactive. Little activities throughout the text and major ones at each chapter's end will' challenge you to apply, explore, and benefit from your new-found knowledge in ways that will make this book's message a part of you. In a sense, you will be this book's co-author!

HOW SHOULD YOU STUDY FROM THIS BOOK?

1. Read with pen in hand. Connecting with Customers is as much a workbook as it is a textbook. Complete those activities, answer those questions. Doing thus will engage you in the material and fire up your insights. And don't worry about "ruining" your book. You're personalizing it to your experiences and with your thoughts.
2. Pay special attention to bold or italicized concepts and words. These are things you must know to succeed in travel. Reinforce additional key points by using different color highlighters.
3. If any word or term is unclear to you, find out its meaning. We've tried to limit this book's vocabulary to concepts that are familiar to people who know at least a little about travel. In many cases—just to be safe—industry terms are defined for you in the text, in the glossary, or both. A good dictionary (including the travel dictionaries listed in the bibliography) should clarify any terms we've overlooked.

"I WISH I'D KEPT THAT BOOK!"

You'd be surprised haw often people say that. This textbook is an investment in your future. It has strategies that will come in handy later on, that you'll wish to refer to—even if you work in an entirely different business. And, after all, once you fill out the exercises, you will have helped write it!

TO THE INSTRUCTOR

We're delighted you've adopted Connecting with Customers for your students. You'll find that it provides a refreshing and rewarding approach to teaching three very critical subjects.

Connecting with Customers takes an ecumenical approach—all industry segments and situations are covered. No matter what travel career your students eventually pursue, they'll be prepared. This book also approaches its topics in the order that your students are likely to experience them: Sales and service first, marketing and more advanced topics later. Yes, its emphasis is on sales, but again, this is probably what your students will need to understand—especially today—in the early phase of their careers in travel. By alluding to other buying experiences, it permits your students—even those who've done little traveling—to relate to the content more quickly.

Connecting with Customers can serve as a stand-alone textbook or as a supplement to courses on virtually any facet of the travel industry (including introductory ones). It's appropriate to all instructional levels: Four-year colleges, two-year colleges, proprietary schools, and high schools. Most importantly, its unique, interactive format will support you in your efforts to involve your students—both in and outside the classroom—in a powerfully motivating way.

Connecting with Customers is supplemented by an Instructor's Manual that includes a test bank, thematic outlines, suggested answers to all activities and questions, and teaching tips that will help you connect to your customers: those future travel professionals.