Tales From the Front Lines - Laurie Keith, Romantic Planet Vacations

TravelPulse Canada is proud to support Travel Advisors around the globe. Our "Tales From The Front Lines" series is designed to give consultants a voice during the COVID crisis and bring professionals together. Enjoy today's submission.

"I have been a travel agency owner in Canada for over 25 years and have survived so many challenges including the introduction of the internet, epidemics, supplier bankruptcies and much more but nothing could have prepared me for COVID 19. I have never seen anything like this in my career, ever.

Coming into 2020, forecasts showed that my boutique host travel agency, Romantic Planet Vacations, was heading towards being the best year in our 16 years in business. Life was good. Bookings were flowing. Reservations, accounting, and lead management software was invested in. I had just joined some highly regarded leadership organizations to help me excel in my business. We had begun organizing our large database of clients into travel segments to update and retarget. We started venturing into other markets like river cruising, luxury and adventure. I was growing our team of already highly trained, motivated, and strong selling niche travel experts. Brand new and highly effective marketing campaigns were launched. By February we were celebrating our largest attended live destination wedding and honeymoon expo events across Canada from Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton. I had just returned back from a glorious family holiday to Hotel Xcaret on March 8th. Then it all hit. For as long as I live, I will never forget the day the world closed.

After getting over the initial shock and disbelief, I knew that I had to kick it into crisis mode, and fast. A Covid 19 Response Action Plan was implemented with a 3 pronged focus to protect the client, protect the team and protect the agency. Within 2 weeks we had completed 7 of the 15 phases of the Action Plan. We spent a combined over 100 hours on hold with suppliers during these critical and initial weeks in the repatriation and rebooking of clients. We created a Dream Team CARE Fund which put aside $10,000 to be used as a financial relief emergency fund for any of our team members including our independent agents. It also included new travel stocks to be shared by the whole team to boost morale and show our commitment to our industry long term. We had cut back the majority of our expenses including negotiating our lease down by 85% and end all marketing campaigns. Then I focused my sleepless nights and efforts into lobbying our valued suppliers, our consortium, ACTA, and TICO to support future travel credits and oppose refunds to help save our industry. Deepening the connection with our team and our clients was also priority. Our weekly COVID 19 team meetings help navigate through the ever changing news and policy updates and so we could just be together, be supportive of one another and maintain that knowledge. Our team's motto through this is that we may be in isolation but we're not isolated. We also invited our valued supplier partners to cohost a series of consumer webinars which are still ongoing and have included Air Canada Vacations, Jamaica Tourist Board, AMResorts, Barcelo Resorts and many more. To date, these have yielded approximately 50 new wedding couples attendees and one new wedding group booking to date!

To take that connection a step further, we commissioned handmade face masks and distributed them to our entire team and their family members as well as all affected wedding couples that had their trips cancelled by COVID 19 with a message of hope.

As challenging as the last 3 months have been, I've been able to find peace in my isolation with my family and a renewed energy and optimism to reboot, regrow and reinvent. If there is anything that has come from these challenging times, like so many of the previous ones, is that our travel agency community is a passionate and most resilient one. We will get through this, as we always do. I do feel that we've all been given the opportunity to prove to our clients our true worth; to help them navigate through these unchartered waters, to provide them a sense of comfort and outstanding professionalism and knowledge and to continue to make their travel dreams come true when the world reopens. This is what we do best."

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