How to be successful as a Disney travel agent
How Do You Become An Independent Disney Travel Agent?
How to be successful as a Disney travel agent. If you have a huge passion for Disney, if you're already giving friends and family tons of advice about their upcoming Disney trip, if you obsess over your own Disney trip, every little detail, then becoming a Disney travel agent probably isn't a huge leap for you.
If you're not really a Disney nerd or you don't love Disney or don't have a huge passion for it, it might not be the right niche for you. If you love all inclusives or cruises or different types of travel, go after that. With Vincent Vacations, you can be any type of travel agent that you want to be. But when it comes to Disney, there is a lot of detail, there's a lot of events, there's a lot of things that happen.
Are you Disney passionate? If you are, you can still learn about all the different products that Disney has to offer. So as long as you have that passion, you want to kind of have that as your foundation first, right?
So what else can you do to be the most successful if you want to be a Disney travel agent? Well, you may or may not know. Disney has a completely free training program once you are registered as a travel agent with them. You need an agency association to do this. That's why Vincent Vacations is here! Only authorized and registered travel agents may book with Disney. Once you are turned on and have access to their travel agents system, then you're going to have the ability to go through Disney's College of Knowledge.
They have a whole program to teach you about their product. Everything that they sell, all the cruises, all the resorts, how tickets work, how how to navigate the fastpass system. Anything that you can think of in terms of your experience at Disney and the different products that they offer, adventures by Disney for example, you're going to learn everything in the College of Knowledge. And it's free!
So, when you get started with Vincent Vacations, we will show you how to get enrolled in the College of Knowledge and start going through those courses. The other really cool after you are registered and after you complete the College of Knowledge, that's when you'll be eligible for those Disney travel agent discounts. So definitely make sure that you're doing that.
The next thing that you want to do is really log into Disney's travel agent system. The thing that they don't teach you on the College of Knowledge is they don't teach you how to operate the booking system. So that's something you want to play around with. Make sure you're comfortable with it and just do a few test itineraries, maybe book your own next vacation through that process, and that will help you get familiar with that.
Click here to learn more about how to become a Disney travel agent with Vincent Vacations.
So what else can you do with Disney to be the most successful? So after you've done College of Knowledge, after you've played around with the booking system, what are some things that top six figure Disney travel agents or agencies are doing right?
I'm going to share all of those with you today. And I also want to say it's so easy to get really excited because you love Disney like you love to go, you love the excitement, you're excited to help people. But the enthusiasm or passion for Disney is not enough on its own. You have to treat this like a business.
So the next five things that I'm going to go through really dive in how people are treating it as a business and approaching it as a business and are really key. So the first is stay informed. You have to stay on top of Disney information. The difficult thing with Disney is they don't a lot of times give you notice on when free dining is going to drop or when this is going to happen.
So they have some travel agent forums. They have places where we can get information. You need to make sure you're staying on top of that information and you are becoming the expert for the clients that you serve. So they know that they can rely on you. So that's the number one thing that top agencies do and top agents do is they're staying informed on everything that's going on so they can best support and help their clients.
Number two, embrace the festivals. If you don't already love Disney festivals, maybe you don't go because that's a busier time to go. I don't know. But you have to embrace flower and garden food and wine Art festival. I mean, there's the marathon week, there's so many now going on at Disney and if you were the go to person and know all of the deets on what's happening when in Disney, your clients are going to trust you.
And even if they're not going to the marathon, they might know that you are going to definitely know what's going on with flower and garden. This year is a good example. Flower and garden food and wine got combined as a couple of it. It was crazy, it was bizarre, it was weird, but we were on top of the information and we were able to consult with our clients based on which festival they loved to attend, What might be best for them to go in this unique year that's happening so stay on top of that information.
Make sure that you are really an expert in those things that are happening. The other thing that six figure top Disney agents do is they cross sell, they cross sell to Universal. That's just more money in your pocket on the same vacation. You're booking the vacation anyway. If the if the family loves Harry Potter, if they love Universal, it's an easy add on.
So packaging those things together. The other thing that a lot of times families will do with young children is they will partner their Disney vacation with a cruise. So they'll do Disney for the kids, but then they'll do a cruise. It's not always a Disney cruise. They'll do a cruise for themselves. So they'll combine those two are going out of Port Canaveral.
So or even Miami, depending on how the family wants to do it. So adding cruises would be a kind of an easy thing that you can add on to start to package and add more. So your your ticket sale for Disney that might have been $5,000 now becomes $10,000 because you're doing add ons. That's how you can make more money in the same amount of time with the same client and just increase your ticket sale, if you will, your end ticket sale.
The other thing that they do is really start with Disney, but then add on, even if you're starting as a Disney travel agent as your niche because you know what, you love it. You know, Disney backwards and forwards. Guess what? Your clients, eventually you're going to want to go other places. They're going to start asking you, Hey, I'd like to check out all inclusives for Mexico, or we've been thinking about going to Europe or Hey, we're considering Hawaii.
So starting to build your your library, right, of the things that you offer. You want to think about that as you grow in scale, What makes sense for you to also sell that could be complimentary one for your cash flow, but also, what are your clients asking for? And it's going to be different from agent to agent depending on who you're selling to and who your unique consumer mix is made up of.
But think about starting to learn. If you've become a Disney travel agent, how would I expand to now? So who serves and then maybe sell Europe and maybe sell Hawaii or maybe sell whatever things that you're most interested in? How do you expand those things that you're selling your catalog of vacations, if you will? The other thing that six figure Disney travel agents do really well is they really lean in and adopt a video strategy.
And there are some things that no one is going to show you how to do. You either have to go out and figure out how to do these things on your own, read books, go to seminars, buy a program, go to travel school. But there's some things you need to be prepared that if you do well, it will come together so much easier for you.
One is - You need to learn how to become an actual travel agent. Disney doesn't teach you that. So how do I prescreen clients? How do I get a waiver in place? How do I get insurance? How do I send out a booking? How do I present a proposal? How do I manage a trip? What is the how do I create a recurring business model?
How do I market to clients, how to create marketing that's actually going to bring me new clients instead of friends and family. Those things are not going to be taught in a regular environment. So learning how to become a travel agent, doing it the right way from the beginning is really key. Not just in making your set up decisions, but how you want to.
You know, learn how to make the most money in the least amount of time depends on how you set up, what marketing engines you have in place. And really to get to those highest those higher level of profits, even things like how are you going to incorporate that video strategy? What is a video strategy that might have freaked you out?
Right. It is a process that you can put in place. And if you know what to do when, how to do it, where to employ it, it can equal a regular flow of clients. That's what you need to create to create more abundance in your business to get it kicked off the right way. If you're starting or if your business has stalled and you were seen this year, especially as a lot of veteran agents who had clients who were, you know, in that recurring client base that just book with them every year.
