If you are planning to start a travel agency in India, here is a detailed and complete guide to help you set up your own travel business
If you are thinking about how to start a travel agency but struggling to initiate your plan, you have reached the right place! Here at Pathfndr, you will get to know the exact steps needed to lay the foundations for your personal business and never look back!
The travel and tourism sector is considered one of the biggest industries worldwide and is slated to expand further in the coming years. So, if you get your project up and running in no time, you will see yourself cashing in huge profits!
That being said, you should remember that starting a travel agency is no easy task, and it requires a ton of hard work and high patience, and perseverance. Being a dynamic industry, the only way to make a career in this sector is by being continuously updated about the changes brought about by shifts and turns.
Managing a travel agency is more than just booking air tickets and setting up accommodations for guests. It covers other nitty-gritty, from taking care of the ground travel essentials to making sure people availing your service get a seamless travel experience.
How To Start A Travel Agency In India In 10 Steps
1. Invest in Market Research
For your travel agency business plan to take shape, you need to understand the playing field before thinking of making it big. Begin by doing thorough research on the industry and finding out in which areas the competition is the least fierce.
Since social media commands a great hold over the public these days, you must make good use of that and increase your visibility. In the early days of your agency, keep an open mind and learn to take mixed reviews about your services.
Try and find out entities with whom you have a chance to forge partnerships. This could be a great way to enter the market space at a nascent stage. As always, try building solid relationships with your clients from the beginning.
2. Train Yourself and Your Teammates
To make progress in any business, it is essential to continuously innovate and ideate. When building your own travel agency from scratch, you need to push yourself and your team to come up with fresh new perspectives.
On this front, you can seek investments from the outside and encourage your team members to undergo professional training.
3. Be Ready to Work at Odd Hours
The moment you juggle with the thought – ‘How to start a travel agency?’, you are entering the challenging terrain of the would-be entrepreneur. Having your travel agency would require you to work those extra hours without sufficient breaks.
Almost all travel agents set up their schedules vis-a-vis the demands coming in from the customers’ end. This means one would not be at the freedom to carve out a timetable of their own accord. The agency’s early days would find you and your team working tirelessly late into the night.
4. Tap into your Clients’ Interests
You must have a designated client base to make your entity stand out among a host of other agencies. A carefully chalked-up plan would go a long way to help you create a niche for your agency in the travel industry.
Make an effort to set up a task force within your company to identify marketing strategies best suited to your enterprise. The focus should be on creating a list of services to help you build a brand for your agency.
5. Create a Business Model and Design a Unique Brand
For every successful business in the modern world, a strong brand becomes a vital ingredient to get to the next level. Likewise, when pondering how to start a travel agency, one of the original thoughts you should entertain is having a proper business model under your arms.
Once you are confident of the path your enterprise will take in the long term, the next step would be building a solid brand for the same. Having a recognisable brand name makes it easy for clients to come knocking at your doorstep to ask for your services.
Be serious about making your agency unique in every sense by delivering experiences that are relatable to only your company. This would ensure that your core client group stays loyal to you in the long run.
6. Make Steady Investments in your Nascent Agency
It is common knowledge that in the initial days of a company, entrepreneurs invest vast sums of money to get the wheels moving. However, you do not need to spend much money to become visible in the industry.
7. Hire People with Passion and Qualification
Since you cannot run an agency all by yourself, getting the right people for your company becomes crucial. Starting from administrators to travel managers and supervisors; you should add members who have a knack for the travel industry and show a similar passion that you possess.
8. Look for Funds
To grow your business, you would need a substantial sum of money. It may be easier to support your budding agency in the early stages. However, the moment it begins to show promise, you would require to inject money to sustain the growth of the business.
For this to happen, you should look out for funding options. These days, apart from bank loans, there is another popular option; the options of bringing in venture capitalists to invest in your enterprise in exchange for some rights.
9. A Strong Marketing Pitch
The cornerstone of any successful business, marketing is where companies have to invest a sizable amount of money. The same goes for your travel agency.
Be very cautious in how you are marketing your company in the market. A robust marketing strategy can make your agency grow by leaps and bounds.
10. Tap into Pathfndr’s AI-powered Travel Operating System
Now that we have spoken at length about how to start a travel agency and dealt with issues such as – ‘How to start tour and travel business?’ and ‘How to open a travel agency?’, we will leave you with a final tip.
Give your dream of owning a travel agency a spring by using ‘Pathfndr’; one of the best AI-powered travel operating systems to create your own online travel agency. Check out our blog titled ‘How to Build a Travel Website in Less than 15 minutes’ for better insight.