The Perfect Travel Product Mix: A Data-Driven Guide for Travel Advisors [+ Calculator tool]
This is Part 1 of HAR's Data-Driven Success Series, Small Changes. Big Impact: 5 Data-Driven Steps for Strategic Growth in 2025. Go to the full series!
When it comes to a travel advisor’s product portfolio, there’s a big difference between getting into a groove and getting stuck in a rut. Diversifying your product mix might be the difference between struggling to keep afloat and cruising along toward your agency goals.
But where to begin? Here. We’ll walk through a way to quickly audit what you’re selling and equip you with the questions, data, and tools you need to create and evaluate your product mix!
The Numbers Don't Lie: Product & Profitability
Here’s what the latest data tells us about the top products for revenue per booking. 1
Leading revenue-generators:
- River Cruises: $6,425 per booking
- FITs: $6,025 per booking
- Tours & Packages: $4,717 per booking
- Ocean Cruises: $4,041 per booking
- All-inclusives: $4,010 per booking
But the most profitable products aren't necessarily the most commonly sold. Ocean cruises dominated the market with 41% of advisors selling them as a primary product, followed by all-inclusives at 19% and FITs at 15%. Here's the full picture.
The key so assessing your product mix is finding a balance between what is profitable and what makes sense for you agency to create a balanced portfolio.
What Makes a Balanced Travel Product Portfolio?
Before you jump in to number crunching, here's what to keep in mind to help create a balanced portfolio. Ask your self a few questions to ensure it achieves some form of balance in addition to profitability.
1. product diversity
Think of your product mix like a year-round garden. You need different products that bloom in different seasons. If there's a gap in your seasonal offerings, you may gravitate to specific products. For example:
- Winter: Caribbean cruises and warm-weather all-inclusives
- Spring/Fall: European FITs and river cruises
- Summer: Alaska cruises and family-friendly tour packages
What products will help fill in gaps you might have?
2. Complementary Products
The most successful portfolios often pair products that naturally enhance each other. This plays into the "small change, big impact" ethos I'm going for here! For example:
- Book ocean cruises? How might you optimize pre/post-stay packages, tours or hotels?
- Love all-inclusive resorts? How's you balance local tours and excursions?
- A European river cruises buff? Consider adding something like rail journeys before or after cruise.
These pairings not only increase your booking value, but also create more comprehensive experiences for your clients. Besides, your current travelers are the hottest leads you've got! If they have flexible schedules, see what they may like to add!
3. Target Market Alignment
You know your clients best. (If you don't, then you can read up on how to qualify your clients here! Your product mix should reflect your clients' travel patterns:
- Consider booking windows (cruises often book 6-12 months out, while all-inclusives may be 3-6 months)
- Match products to your clients' typical vacation timing (school breaks, holidays, business travel seasons)
- Align with your target market's budget and travel style
4. Complexity Management
Is it manageable at your current capacity? Will you have to scale to include it? Consider a balance of:
- Quick-to-book products (like all-inclusives) that provide steady income
- More complex, higher-yield products (like custom FITs) that require more time but offer better returns
The key isn't to include everything, but to create a mix that's sustainable for you and your clients! Again, you don't necessarily want to fall into the trap of reorienting your entire agency to adapt to a new product. We're all about small changes, big impact here.
Building Your Strategic Product Portfolio
The aim isn’t to upend your processes or abandon what you’re already good at in the name of growth for growth’s sake. The aim is to push against your comfort levels to encourage sustainable growth.
The numbers will help you determine what your most profitable products are not only by your sales volume, but also by time investment. Here’s how you can use the data at different phases of your agency trajectory. Below I break it down how it might look for new vs. experienced advisors.
[NeW ADVISORS] Establishing a Product Mix
If you're newer to the industry and maybe don't have a sales record because -- for heaven's sake -- you just started your agency and are building up your clientele for the LOVE OF ALL THINGS HOLY!
Don't despair! You can use our Product Mix Calculator for projections to see what kind of mix you might want to aim for! (It’s super fun and nerdy.)
The tool can help you determine a strategy as you begin to build or expand your product portfolio. It will also help you decide where to focus your educational development to target products that combine ease and profitability.
By ease I mean, products you are most comfortable with. Maybe you love them. Or you're passionate about learning about them. You booked ton of them as a traveler. By profitability, I mean higher-earning products that may (or may not!) be more of a stretch in terms of learning curve, interest, or alignment with your target market.
I like to think of like dinner and dessert. Dinner is the ease, the main course when it comes to product mix and dessert is the profitability piece. You have less of it, but man is it so good! For some, this may overlap. (What can I say, I like to eat dessert for dinner whenever I can!)
Love cruises? Awesome. Maybe get your learn on about tours & packages or FITs for pre and post cruise excursions. Maybe you’ll go for a mix of 90% cruise (the spaghetti) and 10% tours & packages (the ice cream).
The Product Mix Calculator offer a goal sheet where you can tweak your targets for gross sales of different products to help you visual an optimal combination within the products you'd like to work with!
>>> Jump to instructions on how to use HAR’s Product Mix Calculator!
[Experienced advisors] assessing Your Product Mix
So you found the perfect product to complement your portfolio and enhance your profits! After you find a comfortable rhythm with your sales and you’ve become the Jedi of advisors, the next step is to take a casual audit.
What do I mean by casual? I mean you can use HAR’s Product Mix Calculator to get the data behind your current product sales and learn a few broad strokes of where you might want to apply your strategic energies.
How to Use the Product Mix Calculator
HAR Product Portfolio Assessment Calculator is a great free tool to being visualizing where your products stands and how you might optimize it. I will help you:
- Assess your current travel product portfolio mix
- Compare your performance against industry benchmarks
- Get actionable recommendations to maximize profits
Here's how to use it!
1. Preview the Calculator
Take a look at our embedded calculator below to see how it works. This view-only version shows you the structure and calculations before you create your own copy. It's dynamic, so once you populate it with data, it will adjust! Keep in mind there are five tabs/sheets total. To move along the process, go tab by tab!
If you're a noob with no sales, think of this as a thought exercise and fill it out in terms of projections.
This is PREVIEW only! 👉 Click here to create your own editable copy of the calculator
Wow what a beaut, right? You should see it in action! Just fill the form below and you can create your own copy!
2. Time to put that darn thing to work!
- Go to the tab: Step 1: Input Dashboard
- Enter your sales data in the cells:
- Gross Sales
- Number of Bookings
- Hours per Booking
- The calculator will do the rest!
3: Review Your Analysis
Check "Step 2: Analysis" to see:
- Your current product mix: Total will equal 100%
- Performance vs. benchmarks: This tracks where you are versus the industry standard. 2
- Revenue per hour calculations: This is one of my favorite parts because it helps you assess not only how to maximize your profit mix, but where you have opportunity to increase efficiencies!
4: Get Recommendations
Sure, This tab offers "recommendations," but it's a little cryptic. Allow me to decode these product-specific recommendations below:
Once you have this decoded, you'll be left with a few "broad-stroke" ideas on how you might move forward with different products!
In general, it will highlight growth opportunities, but keep in mind that this calculator isn't implanted in your brain and doesn't really care about your passion projects. Maybe you spend 20 hours planning and booking and FIT because you LOVE to nerd out on itinerary details and you don't really care that your "hourly" compensation ends up being a pittance.
Take it with a grain of salt!
5. Goal Planning
The info isn't much good if you don't put it to use! With the goal planning, you can:
- Set revenue targets
- Plan your ideal product mix
- Check if your goals are achievable
What do they mean by achievable? Here's it's assessing how many hours you'd have to invest per week to hit the goal you have laid out. If it's above 40 hrs. per product, we may just recommend you slow your roll!
You're Ready to Mix it up!
Remember, the perfect product mix isn't about chasing the highest revenue products – it's about building a sustainable, profitable portfolio that works for both you and your clients. Being successful as an advisor is as much about strategy as it is about sales.
95% of hosted advisors report they would choose this career again. Why? They love what they do, the relationships they build, the experiences they get to have and share among their clients. The data is to help you glean is to offer you some concrete information and to help you set attainable goals. But it's also about your unique strengths as an advisor and what keeps you connected to what you do!
Ready to take the next step? Download our Product Mix Calculator and start mapping out your strategic growth plan for 2025. And don't forget to join us next week for Part 2 of our series, where we'll dive into "The Science of Client-to-Booking Optimization: Maximizing Revenue Without Burning Out."
Footnotes
