Making Travel a Business
BY KATE RICE
Robert Louchheim stays focused on the bottom line
Most Travel Agents get into this business because they love travel. Robert Louchheim got into it because he wanted to make a living.
Today, his agency, Travel Destinations, Inc., Scottsdale, Ariz., is one of Ensemble Travel Group’s Top 25. His goal is to be in its Top 10. The Globus Family of Brands named Travel Destinations one of its premier agency partners in 2010, 2009 and 2008. Louchheim is a member of Oceania’s Cruise Concierge Club for top producers, and Princess Cruises just named Travel Destinations one of its top 200 agencies.
Louchheim’s company’s sales are up 35 percent over last year, a year that was 22 percent down from the year before. That means his agency, which is 80 percent leisure, with 55 percent of that cruise and the rest land, is actually up over 2008. He works out of the same 2,000-square-foot storefront that the agency has been in since 1979.
The agents who work out of the storefront rotate working the front desks because of the high caliber of those walk-ins. What’s this? A storefront agency with agents vying for walk-in clients?
“The walk-ins are unbelievable,” he says. A recent example: A client walked through the door who was the owner of two bars; his mother wanted to take the whole family on a cruise. The result: five cabins on a Seabourn cruise.
Admittedly, the parking lot of the shopping center where his agency is located is full of Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs and Lexuses. But it’s more than just location. Louchheim says that a huge part of Travel Destinations success is the quality of its agents.
On top of that, he markets.
Louchheim executes direct mail using Ensemble’s Lifestyle magazine and targeted marketing pieces. He markets across multiple channels, in the online component of DexKnows. the southwestern U.S. version of the Yellow Pages. He’s also in the print version. That generates traffic to his website, an Ensemble Client Site with content that focuses on unique experiences, not price. He receives online client reviews, and the result of all this is that when you type travel agency and Scottsdale in Google, he’s the first or second agency listed.
Louchheim recently held his first consumer event—the Travel Destinations Travel Expo—under a tent in his office parking lot—so clients, including passersby, would know where the agency was. It attracted 200 people and 17 vendors—who want to come back next year—and several bookings.
He also advocates database marketing. He uses ClientBase, saying that ClientBase and Ensemble kept him in business during the downturn. ClientBase kept him in touch with clients, while Ensemble was his marketing arm.
Louchheim simply gives his client list to Ensemble, which pulls supplemental information out of its COHORTS program to help send the right message to the right customer. He lets Ensemble pick out the clients from his database. Why?
“Because I can’t do everything,” he says.
He tells his agents—there are 53 independent contractors, most working from home but several working out of his storefront—the same thing. He processes ARC reports, follows up on commissions, pays them twice monthly, provides assistance in marketing if they wish and corporate reports for those who want it, freeing them up to do what they do best: sell travel.
Louchheim focuses on preferred suppliers for three reasons: higher commissions, better trouble-shooting and product knowledge.
“You can’t know everything about every company,” he says. He believes that agencies have to focus on a limited number of suppliers. But it wasn’t always this way.
Louchheim went to work for his parents in 1986 after four years in the Air Force. He needed to making a living and he knew he loved talking to people. He took over the agency in the mid-1990s, giving it its current name. But 9/11 brought dark times. Two agents left. He laid off the last two on his birthday, leaving him with just his assistant, who left his empty, 2,000-square-foot office in tears that day. “What are we going to do?” she asked. “I’ll figure it out,” he promised. And he did.
He had practiced what his father, Jerry, had preached—being active in the agency community. His father had stressed the importance of embracing other agents. “They’re not your competitors,” he’d say, “they’re your associates.” Louchheim was active in ARTA, on the board of the national organization, past president of the local chapter, past president of SKAL and is on the Ensemble technology committee.
Thanks to all that past relationship-building, his phone eventually began to ring. Other agents wanted to know what he was going to do with all that space. They wanted to pay him a little—just a little—to use it. Some major agency names—agencies with deep emotional ties to their businesses—moved in with him. He encouraged them to keep their original company names—and now there are about 15 names on a big wall in his office.
He doesn’t really consider himself a travel agent. Oh, he can handle a lot of logistics, but if you want to work with someone who can tell you the best restaurant in Paris, he’ll refer you to that person. His job is running a business that happens to be a travel agency.