Fora’s top 3 tips on how to get clients

One of the most important aspects of building your travel advisor business is attracting and keeping clients. But it can be difficult to know where to start. Below, we share three tips our advisors have used to create robust and sustainable books of business. 

Lean on family, friends and word of mouth

Most of Fora’s top bookers started with people they knew. They booked vacations for their siblings, their parents, their best friend, their aunt. From there, word spread. Their mom told her book club. Their friend told his boss. Their aunt told other school parents. Referrals are arguably the most powerful client-acquisition tool.

As you start making bookings and planning trips, ask your friends and family for candid feedback. It can be difficult for those we love to give us constructive criticism. But we can steer them in the right direction with pointed questions. A few of our favorites are, “If you had to choose one thing I could do differently next time, what would it be?” and “What was one thing I did that pleasantly surprised you, or that you wish I did more of?” These questions will help elicit helpful responses. Take the feedback, implement it and iterate from there. 

As referrals start branching out beyond first-degree friends and family, you’ll be ready to take on additional clients. And as you hone your craft, word of mouth will continue to be a valuable tool in your travel-acquisition toolkit. Even as your business grows, never underestimate nor forget about its power.

Advertise your services

Word of mouth is essentially free advertising. Make sure you take advantage of it, too. Tell everyone you know about your travel advisory business. Share what you’re up to at the next PTA meeting. If your barista mentions a trip they have coming up, let them know you’d love to help them out. If your partner’s boss has expressed frustration with all the logistics involved in corporate travel, let them know you can lend a hand.

If you feel comfortable using social media, take advantage of the increased visibility it affords. Fora’s travel agent training includes a curriculum track dedicated to teaching advisors how to market themselves and their businesses. It covers email marketing, social media (including Instagram), TikTok and more. If you gravitate toward one medium, stick to it. It’s better to concentrate your efforts on a single, well-executed pursuit than to disperse your energy across multiple domains. Some Fora Advisors focus solely on email and drive a lot of bookings that way. Others rely on Instagram. Still others forgo social media altogether. Do what works best for your lifestyle and the kinds of clients you want to attract (and our training will get into how to do this successfully).

We also provide numerous social media and email templates to our advisors each week, so advisors can think less about what they need to post or share and more about planning incredible trips. Advisors get to pick and choose what works for them. 

Join a host agency that supports your advisor journey

Travel advisors are entrepreneurs, and building a business is hard work. It can also feel isolating and overwhelming. The right host agency will help show you the ropes and set you up for success when it comes to getting clients. Hard work, an entrepreneurial mindset and a roll-up-your-sleeves attitude are still necessary, of course, but it helps to have a little guidance and community support. 

At Fora, advisors have the opportunity to create and submit a Fora profile, which lives on Fora’s website. These profiles allow advisors to demonstrate their expertise and increase visibility to potential and existing clients. Fora’s profile pages also house advisor travel guides, which they can submit via our integrated travel advisor portal. These guides further establish professionalism and drill into the topics and destinations advisors feel most passionate about. 

Both profiles and travel guides contain numerous calls to action, or CTAs, where clients can reach out directly to book their next trip. Building and maintaining a website often requires a lot of time, money and energy. We’ve designed advisor profiles and travel guides to remove this friction so that our advisors can focus on scaling their businesses and planning incredible trips. 

These resources make our advisors more findable. When a client lands on Fora’s website and peruses content on Costa Rica, for instance, that client will see Fora Advisors who specialize in Costa Rica as well as a curated selection of advisor-made Costa Rica travel guides. Fora’s marketing training also instructs advisors how to create quality travel guides so that their content will more likely pop up in search engines.

Finally, our training has an entire module dedicated to finding and keeping clients. Even better, when you surpass a certain booking threshold, you'll be eligible for our client lead program — a best-in-class program that generates over seven figures in bookings each month. The need to get clients never goes away, but the process becomes easier over time — and builds on itself.