Side Hustles are the Future of Work & You need to Have one.
The best part is to do it with Automation all while continuing to receive a steady paycheck from your real job. Without taking the risk and going full throttle into the world of working for yourself. Here’s how to become an independent travel agent.
Starting a side business is not just about putting extra money into the pocket, it’s the real job security. It allows you the freedom of choice. For some going all-in is exhilarating, for some others it can be a crippling thought.
You don’t need to be a Celeb or have a Revenue model to get started right now.
“Bias for Action” is all you need
What if you can get
- A profitable travel business idea off the ground
- With minimal investment of at $14 a month
- Minimum effort (less than 15-Minutes)
And you can make all this happen with your stable and steady job.
Yes, being an “Independent Travel Agent” is that idea.
Well in this post we will show you exactly how to do this.
This is a step-by-step guide on how you can be an Independent Travel Agent from idea to implementation. It’s designed for Busy and Impatient & a roadmap to start earning money in less than a week from now.
It’s not that hard to start one.
Let’s start with, What you need:
- Willingness to learn and Experiment
- Willingness to act & maybe around 1 Hour.
What you don’t need:
- You don’t need much money
- You don’t need much time, as you will see you can be up and running in less than a day.
- You don’t need a Degree or Special form of Education. No IATA Certifications, You don’t need to be a member of a particular travel association, etc.
- No Complicated Software or Spreadsheets
- You don’t need employee assistants or business partners. You would have to get help at some point but not right away.
- You don’t have to be an entrepreneur to start a business, with a little resourcefulness you will be able to take your travel agency from idea to revenue.
Let us stick to what is essential, using this blog post you will go from having No Business to being an Independent Travel Agent with an Online Travel Agency in 3 easy Steps (in less than 1 Hour).
How To Become An Independent Travel Agent In 3 Steps
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Name your agency
While you can have a ton of naming ideas around how you would like to name your business. Build an arsenal of the names you like and then run them through namechk.com to see if not just the domain name, but are there other handle names available on other platforms too. -
Designing a Logo
There are tons of ways to do this. But mostly this is a Vanity Object. You should not spend a significant amount of money or time to tick this off the checklist. Of all the tools these two strategies might work out the best for you.a ) fiverr.com – You can see a total of 9784 services are offered for Logo Design. You can select the design style you like from the freelancers available. Also, check the number of revisions they offer before you go ahead with them.
b) Brandmark.io – Since this is a company that leans into AI for everything we do, we can’t resist recommending tons of AI tools that can make your Independent Travel Journey easier. You can use Brandmark to generate instant logos & visualize product results. At the time of writing this DALL-E from Open AI is on an Invite only basis, once you have access to this, you shall be able to generate these logos with just some words put together. Till then, Some results from Brandmark were generated in less than a minute.
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Launch You Travel Website Using Pathfndr
Now that you have a logo and a name, The domain can be registered on any of the Domain Name providers.
This is a stage where you will be popped with tons of questions on what to do next,
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- Should I create a website on WordPress
- Should I use a No-Code tool like wix.com or webflow
- How Does Hosting work
- Where do I get the Rich Destination content from
- Should I be investing in API
- Should I sign-up for a Travel affiliate program
- Should you outsource the website development to a web developer
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The answer to the above checklist is, that you should be doing “None of the Above”. There is an entire graveyard of wanna-be “Independent Travel Agents” who get into decision paralysis and end up spending thousands of dollars & countless hours.
Fortunately for Retail Entrepreneurs, this problem of having an e-commerce store was long solved by a company that now runs 15% of the retail E-commerce worldwide, known as “Shopify”. We borrowed a page from this standardization playbook and launched “Pathfndr.io”, no surprise, travel advisors lovingly call us “Shopify for Travel”.
What does Pathfndr do?
Consider it as a Swiss Knife for Travel Advisors, it answers all of the questions we asked above. For example –
- You use this no-code tool, enter the below 3 fields (Upload a logo, Upload a Background Image & type in your Domain Name) and hit publish! Voila, you have your website ready!
- Price Friendly: Pathfndr is a travel verticalized solution that is cheaper than most of the No-Code platforms worldwide. Wix Starts at $80 Per Month and so does Squarespace at $19 Per Month.
- The platform that works Globally – While getting a static website up and running is no big deal, you will compete at a different level when you can operate with the efficiency and competency at Expedia or booking.com.
With Pathfndr you don’t need to look any further No APIs, No Engineering Stack Trauma & no more debates about AWS or Google Cloud. You are immediately up and running with Global Airline Content, Hotel & Sightseeing Rates with Availability from 60+ Different Bed Banks around the world.
And don’t just stop at this, you will have tons of features to make your new Hustle awesome –
Want to explore how much can you earn being an Independent Travel Agent, try our earnings Calculator – https://tinyurl.com/4n45vcff
While we don’t touch base on the topic of forming a legal entity only for the reason that you are just testing the waters here, your taxman in most countries should be okay with a few initial transactions under your account.
However, once you have done this you should move towards forming a legal entity as most customers of yours would start demanding Invoices for taxation purposes.
Now with your Hustle live, let’s bring in more customers to your website & look at various Lead Magnets in our next post.