Tourism, despite all the difficulties recently experienced, remains an extremely attractive business area. He gives an opportunity to open his business with small investments and is connected with a lot of positive emotions: helping people to rest, and after hearing their positive impressions – it’s very pleasant.
And nevertheless, the tourist industry is a «tough nut». In order not to break off spears on him, or rather not to lose all the money, we need to carefully and seriously approach the opening of our travel agency.
The easiest way to open a travel agency is to buy a franchise «Sletat.ru» .
But if you still want to do it yourself – we offer you step by step instructions from the expert of the company «Sletat.ru» Ivan Pasechnik .
Where to begin?
First of all, it is necessary to find out how the tourist market is organized and what it consists of. The business owner must decide whether to work with the franchisor or as an independent agency. Opening yourself, you take more risks. First, unknown travel agencies are not credible, which means they need more serious efforts and budgets for promotion.
Secondly, we will have to solve independently the issues of acquiring technologies related to the search and booking of tours. And thirdly, it is more difficult to work with tour operators – suppliers of tourist products.
Network travel agencies offering a franchise can be divided into main categories, each of which has its own branches.
- Travel agencies from tour operators, whose task is to sell the tourist product of this supplier. It is obvious that the tour operator can offer low cost of vouchers only in certain directions, therefore such a travel agency as a result may not be profitable enough.
- Travel agencies that receive traffic from offline channels. Such agencies are not limited in the choice of providers of tours. Their minus is the weak development of Internet technologies.
- Travel agencies that receive traffic from online channels. More modern networks attracting the audience via the Internet and owning various online tools for searching, booking and selling tours. Minus – such a network misses the «classic» offline audience.
- Networks that combine online and offline communication channels and provide technologies for automating work, as does Sletat.ru. The main mission of such companies is to give the travel agency the opportunity to sell the most profitable tours with the help of modern technologies and to put this process on stream.
When choosing a franchisor, it is important to pay attention to his experience and specifics of doing business. Some companies have a high risk of bankruptcy during the crisis. This is due to the fact that in some situations a tour operator may require prepayment for tours of up to 100%, while tourists often pay them in installments, and the network of the network does not have a sufficient financial «airbag» for such a case.
Before opening a travel agency, it is important to analyze the availability of the target audience. If you are going to open in a large city – St. Petersburg, Moscow or another millionaire – to analyze it entirely does not make sense. Choose the most attractive area and estimate how much your company will be in demand in it.
Another important element of training is the analysis of the competitive environment. Find out which agencies are nearby, what they offer, what are your competitive advantages and differences from them. You can even come to a touristic competitor as a secret buyer, if you really need it.
Investment size
Investments in the opening of the travel agency, as a rule, are relatively small: this business does not require expensive equipment or purchase of goods. And nevertheless, the volume of investments can be very different. The main expenditure items at the opening of travel agencies – office rent, purchase of equipment, costs of promotion and payment of fee, if you open an agency franchise.
The larger the city, the higher the amount of investment in the lease. The rental rate in 2016 on average is about 1.5-2 thousand rubles per 1 sq. Km. m, but in Moscow and St. Petersburg, it can be slightly higher – an average of 2.5 to 4 thousand rubles. Thus, the minimum amount of rental costs will be about 30-60 thousand rubles.
Personal experience
For high-quality customer service and minimization of queues in the office, it is optimal for two managers to work simultaneously. To accommodate two workplaces and a comfortable waiting area, a space of 15 sq.m.
Do not forget that the premises are likely to need repairs. Even if it is in good condition, it will need to be brought to certain standards. For example, our offices must necessarily be branded in accordance with the guide. Compliance with these requirements allows creating a comfortable atmosphere for clients and managers and increases the loyalty of tourists to the brand as a whole.
With regard to the cost of furniture and equipment, there is a wide variation in the amount of investment. You can buy inexpensive furniture and used equipment or choose more expensive options.
Do not forget about the costs associated with the registration of the agency. You will need to register a PI or LLC and pay a state fee, open a bank account (for which the bank will take a commission), recruit staff, formalize employees in the labor inspection and pension fund. If you do not use forms of strict accountability (SSR), but the cash register, then you need to register it. As for settlement and cash services, Sletat.ru, for example, cooperates with the largest Russian banks and offers favorable conditions for the franchisee.
The budget for the promotion of the travel agency can again be different: there are both expensive ways and channels that do not require any investment. On average, you need to put about 100 thousand rubles into this expense item in the first 4-6 months of work.
Among the constant costs of a travel agency is a payroll for managers. Their salary consists of salary and percent of sales. In St. Petersburg or another major city, a manager can receive 15-20 thousand rubles of salary + 10-20% of the agency’s profits. If we are talking about a small city, then the ratio will be 10-15 thousand rubles of salary + 10-20% of profit.
At the same time, when calculating the volume of investments, one must firmly understand that in the first six months the agency can work without profit. And this means that we need some kind of financial «pillow». Therefore, do not invest your last funds in the business. Also, the entrepreneur needs to understand, due to what he himself will live. Money should not be associated with its current costs, you need a clear budget, allocated for business development.
Step-by-step instruction
At the initial stage of the development of a travel agency, a very important moment is promotion. To make it work best, you need to understand which channels of attracting tourists are most effective in a particular case.
Look, what potential partners are next to your travel agency. The tourist audience is adjacent to the audience of leisure – restaurants, cafes, bars, beauty salons, etc. You can establish contact with representatives of such businesses and conduct joint actions, spending a minimum of funds. For example, you can jointly provide discounts to customers, print double business cards, prepare and place on the tables, tent-tents with information about a partner, etc.
Keep in mind that tourists come to the office next to which they live or work. And therefore it is important to convey information about its discovery and existence to residents of nearby houses. If you opened in a residential area, you can make a mailing list. And it should not be an attempt to sell the tour, but a beautifully designed invitation to visit your office.
Try to use local media: tell them about your discovery, give ads regularly. Remember that progress should be permanent, it should never stop. Otherwise, there will be no influx of new tourists.
All these promotion methods do not require large investments, so be sure to use them. If you have a budget for promotion, use contextual advertising. It works very efficiently, the main thing is to find a company that can competently conduct it. Also you need to understand such tools as landing page creation and SEO. Please note that the advertising campaign should be designed for two or three months or with some periodicity, for example, one month every six months. With the availability of funds, you can connect advertising to radio and TV. But you need to study the audience and the effectiveness of such advertising.
You do not need to use all possible channels of promotion, only the most effective ones are enough. To identify them, consider the conversion – how many tourists come from advertising campaigns, how many of them ultimately reach sales and how much money you invested in this or that case.
Personal experience
People spend a lot of time in social networks and do not want to leave comfortable space. VKontakte, Facebook and other similar sites are a modern, popular and budgetary channel for attracting tourists. Sletat.ru developed a special module for searching for tours in social networks. Thus, a tourist can search for tours where he is comfortable, and from there send the applications for the selected vouchers.
If you have opened an agency in a small city, it makes sense to go out to the audience in the city-forming enterprises, negotiate with their management and the leisure department, offer the participation of employees in interesting events, etc. Remember that tourism is not limited only to foreign destinations, you can sell and domestic. They are well suited to «accustom» the audience to themselves in particular and to travel through travel agencies in general, gradually transferring customers to foreign package tours.
Having decided on the format of work, the place for opening and the channels of promotion, it is necessary to start looking for managers. To determine how many people you need in the staff, you need to understand how great your client base is and how many people will come to the office. Most often in a tour agency employs 1-2 managers. One of them attracts customers, calls, invites to the office, processes applications, another – sells tours in the office, works with incoming tourists, leads further work on the sale. It is necessary to understand that tourists, when they come to the office, do not always immediately buy a tour. More often they just learn the information, and to bring the deal to the end, they need to maintain communication.
In the modern travel agency, it is important to automate the processes associated with the search and booking of tours and the processing of incoming applications. Managers of the travel agency have to look for suitable tours hundreds of times a day. For this you can use the «search engines», which are on the site of every self-respecting tour operator. In this case, the manager will actually have to work manually, open many sites and tabs to find a suitable tour from different suppliers, and during this time the price may change. In addition, it will take too long to work with one tourist.
Today there are special search engines that «collect» in themselves the proposals from all tour operators. They allow you to accumulate all the information in one information space and save time for managers. When choosing such a service, you need to be careful: it can «limp» the relevance and reliability. The system must online download and update information about the composition of the package and its price, instantly update the data on places in the hotel and on the flight.
Personal experience
Sletat.ru has developed a system of search for tours, which contains offers from all major tour operators and updates the data on vouchers in real time. The agency can install the service on its website and promote it in social networks. In this case, the lion’s share of the search for the tour is done by the tourist himself. As a result, the time for the work of a manager with a single client is reduced from 2 hours to 40 minutes.
Another important point is booking a tour. Much more convenient when the agency does not communicate with tour operators on its own, but uses the services of the reservation center. Sletat.ru has its own Central Bank, which simplifies the work of the travel agent, increases the speed of customer service, allows you to store data on all applications in one place, increases the security of tourist bases and provides a higher percentage of sales and additional bonuses when the plan is implemented.
A place
The issue of placement of a travel agency should be given special attention. First of all, analyze the city in which you plan to open, and the specific location. At first glance, the most successful option is an office in the center of the city. However, this does not always guarantee success, nor is it an opening in a sleeping area.
Everything depends on the place. If you open in a remote from the center of the budget area with a new building, the case may not go. The main part of the population here is young families, who often bought housing on mortgages and do not have excess finances for trips. Therefore, try to choose for accommodation areas of the middle and elite class.
The main criterion is good traffic. It is desirable that this is a lively part of the city in which potential customers are most likely to see your advertisement or sign and go into the office. On the right choice of the location of the outlet, Yevgeny Chichvarkin said well several years ago: «People should walk past the store day and night.»
You can open on the first floors of residential buildings, in freestanding buildings or shopping centers. In the latter case, it is better to choose modern buildings and try to avoid old buildings of low class. But this again depends on the specific shopping center, its location, the freshness of the repair, the presented brands.
Also it is worth taking a closer look at the environment. For example, you can open next to the grocery store. It does not have to be an institution of a well-known network, but it’s worthwhile to focus on the price segment above the average.
Another tip: it is best to open where there is an opportunity to place a light sign.
A signboard is 20-30% of the success of a travel agency. Without it, you will find it hard to find even those who go to your agency purposefully. A sign will also allow you to «lure» those who simply pass by.
As for the premises, there are also certain requirements for it. First of all, you need to focus on the convenience of a tourist. It is desirable that the office was a square shape: so it will be easier to rebrand and create comfortable conditions in it. It is important that there are windows in the room, otherwise the atmosphere will «crush» the client. Basements and basements are not the best choice.
Do not open on the last floors. If the building has an access system, it should not be complicated. If a tourist needs to take a passport to get a tour or get documents, get his data and go up to the 11th floor, he will rather give up the campaign altogether – few people will want to overcome so many obstacles.
It is advisable to provide a waiting area in the office. When all managers are busy, the client should be able to wait his turn in comfort. Otherwise, he will simply go to another agency. In the waiting area it is necessary to place coffee, tea, a cooler with clean water.
Another important point is the children’s playground. One of the key types of travel agency clients is a woman of 30-35 years with one child. Accordingly, it is necessary to provide a playground in which children can do something while parents choose a tour or wait their turn.
Documentation
To start the activity of a travel agency, you need to register an LLC or an IP. Everyone chooses the preferred form for himself, it is only necessary to make a reservation that the owner of the registered IP is responsible for the obligations with all his property, and LLC – in the amount of the authorized capital. Also the owner of the tourist business needs to decide: with the imputed or simplified taxation system, it will work.
Many are confused by the issue of licensing the travel agency. Earlier, in order to sell tours, the travel agency really needed to get a license. But under the current rules, licensing is not required. At the same time for travel agencies created a single all-Russian registry on the basis of the Association «Tourist Information». It is not yet clear whether participation in it is mandatory, or the register has a recommendatory character. This issue should clarify the additions and amendments to the law on tourism, released in 2016.
Check-list of opening
- The choice of the concept of a travel agency (self-discovery or purchase of a franchise)
- Location analysis
- Analysis of competitors
- Room search
- Estimation of a place of rent, calculation of the traffic, a choice of an optimum variant
- Conclusion of the lease agreement
- Registration of IP or LLC, registration with the tax inspection
- The measurement of the room to create a design project
- Drawing up an estimate of construction (list of necessary furniture, building materials)
- Search for a construction team
- Purchase of building materials
- Repair work
- Buying furniture and interior items
- Purchase of machinery
- Development of an advertising campaign
- Development and coordination of the signboard, its installation
- Development of shares, discounts and other marketing activities
- Search for an accountant on outsourcing
- Search of sales managers of tours
- Interviewing, selection of candidates
- Scheduling shifts
- Festive opening.
Is it profitable to open
Tourist business is attractive primarily because of small investments. You will need to hire managers, rent a room, buy furniture and equipment and pay for advertising. All this is quite possible to «fit» in 200-250 thousand rubles of initial investment. With a successful location and competent promotion, the payback period of investments will be from 6 months to one year.
At this stage, close to 80-90% of travel agencies. The next psychological point is 3 years. After overcoming this boundary, the agency can already be considered more or less held.
The average check in the travel agency is 70-80 thousand rubles. But you need to understand that travel agencies sell the product formed by the operator, and receive only agency fees in the amount of 8-10% of the cost of the tour. To the company worked not at a loss, but received a profit at least in the amount of 100-150 thousand rubles, you need to sell from 30-35 rounds per month.
For higher earnings, you need to have an increased commission from tour operators. The increased percentage (11-13%) of the offices of the Sletat.ru network is obtained when booking tours in our Booking Center. To achieve this allows a large amount of booking CB, which significantly exceeds the sales of one agency, so tour operators are profitable to work with it. It is important to note that raising the commission even by 1% is already plus 10% or more to the agency’s monthly profit.
It is also important to be able to quickly sell tours. To make the search and booking process take less time, and communication with the client and active sales are more, you need to collect all the tools for automating work in one place. So, Sletat.ru offers to the offices of the network the opportunity to select profitable tours on the site sletat.ru, in one click to send requests to the reservation center, keep a record of sales, customer base and financial statements in the «TourOffice» system.
Increase the profitability of the travel agency can be due to corporate sales. We need to look for major partners, offer favorable conditions for their employees. It is very convenient for a travel agency: it’s one thing to sell a tour to 1-2 people, another is an organization that employs 100 people.
It should be noted that seasonality is strongly pronounced in tourism. In winter, sales are lower, the main profit of the agency is received in the summer, and it is impossible to influence this. The only way to keep the business afloat is to get the maximum profit during the season. To do this, it is necessary to attract as many customers as possible and process all incoming requests. In this, of course, will help automate the search and booking of tours.
Summing up, I want to say that in tourism there are many moments that from time to time cause difficulties. You can face difficulties when booking a hotel room, a plane ticket, a transfer organization, etc. All these issues need to be resolved promptly with the tour operator. For a new agency, this is quite a difficult task, as the travel provider will rather pay attention to the seller, which he already knows and has authority. Beginning travel agencies for the first time have to work out this positive image. Therefore, it is better and more comfortable to trust a large player who has experience and weight in the market, and start working under his franchise.
I hope our experience will help you not only to open a travel agency, but also to make it successful! I wish you big sales!
