Custom Travel To France

Last week my husband Laurent and I came back from THETRADESHOW. It is a huge travel retailing and destination expo that takes place each year either in Las Vegas or Orlando. This year was Vegas. Not only did we have fun in the city of evil, but we also learned a ton of things and met some cool people.

The trade show was over 3 days and each day had a theme: the first one was about Cruise/Luxury/Destination. We weren’t too interested in that since at BellaTerra we focus on custom trips to France that range mostly from budget to mid-range. The main trade show though was hosting hundreds of providers of all sorts so we spent most of the time going from stand to stand and learning about industry trends and new products.

The second day’s theme was Home-Based Appreciation Day and Business Building. Since we work from our home office, we attended quite a few seminars that day that turned out to be a great source of advice. The seminars were geared especially towards travel agents who were just starting a business, but we gained a lot of confidence as we realized that we were doing a lot of things right in building our business and our brand and in dealing with customer service. Even when you feel that you are going in the right direction in your business, it is always good to hear it from someone else.

The third day was about Business Travel and Technology. It was quite interesting. That’s actually where I got motivated to start this blog. For all of you travel agents who weren’t lucky enough to attend this great event, here is a good CRM custom-made for the travel industry: OpenTravelCRM. A bunch of geeky very nice guys built it from scratch and THETRADESHOW was their first time presenting it to the public. It is completely free and has a lot of useful features such as FIT building and commission tracking. It is still a little bit shaky but I think that if you give them some time it will become a wonderful tool. It works for travel agents as well as for tour operators like us.

After much learning, we were rewarded each night by some great events organized by the committee. We got to try out the brand new hip-and-happening club called LAX at the Luxor. Entrance and drinks were free for us young professionals under 40, who all danced our troubles away on techno music in a gothic/chic decor of chandeliers and red drapes. The last night was the best for me personally: THETRADESHOW had provided me with a ticket to see the Blue Man Group. I have always been a big fan ever since I saw it a few years ago and seeing it again was just exhilarating, despite the fact that my husband had a ticket to another show.

We had a really good time and came back with many new ideas for our business. We will share them with our colleagues and try our best to continue running a successful business. Not only do I love planning custom trips to France for our clients and travel agents, but I also love that we are always so spoiled in the travel industry!

Celia Coene