Identify your key travel supplier partners.

Upon completing the Power of 100worksheet and outlining a path of action items to complete, travel suppliers should be high on your list unless you are developing a guide business and your focus will be selling your guide service only. For most attendees in the Travel Business Academy- Start up & Growth Program you'll be selling travel products made up of travel components that you'll need to source from travel suppliers like hotels, resorts, and tour operators.

If you have conducted your research and have contacted every possible partner you'll likely have narrowed your travel supplier list to three-five core potential partners. This is enough to get you started, remember everything at startup and launch is about creating positive momentum, so even if you have only 1 supplier this is great cause you are making progress, moving forward and have at this time accomplished more than 90% of others who try to start businesses but ultimately fail.

Solicit suppliers through phone, email, and on-site meetings.

If you haven't contacted any potential travel suppliers at this time you need to start now. Please see the hotel and activity destination provider solicit letters in the Resource Library. You can download these and use these as a starting point, reference. Remember it's very important that when you communicate you are very professional, use professional stationary and or have at least a splash page or landing page that displays what your start up is about. The first thing suppliers will most likely do is try to find you online so if you don't have a splash page or a landing page at this time please consider having a web designer make one for you. These are expensive and should only cost $100-$200 to have made.

Sales Goals/Production

When you write, call or meet with travel suppliers most of the time the question about sales production will come up. For example if I am trying to get hotel inventory at a hotel to sell the director of sales and or the revenue manager may ask me a question like this, "so Matt how many rooms do you think you will sell," or "so matt what can we expect in sales?"

This is the time for you to leverage the Power of 100 and share with the travel supplier your goal of selling 100 reservations and bookings, how you are in a professional online travel business startup business program and your entire focus is launching your business with the goal to sell 100 bookings. If you are going to work with only one travel supplier then you can tell them that your first milestone is to bring them 100 bookings/reservations as your exclusive supplier. After you bring the supplier 100 reservations you can revisit and or review the relationship to see if everything is working out good for both parties. You want to very proactive here and show that you are truly interested in working with the travel supplier and interested in bringing them business. Please see the Light Sales model worksheet for projecting your sales, income and expenses.