Introduction
You do not have to be in the travel industry for very long to realise it is a highly competitive place to be. Travel Uni is dedicated to helping you get ahead of the competition and to stay there.
Here we are offering you some tips for booking success in 5 steps.
In the first step you considered your market; the second step was about you and where you could be in the future; and the third step encouraged you to keep abreast of events and trends. This is the fourth step.
Know your goals
From the SWOT analysis completed in Step 2, you can now set yourself some goals. Naturally only you can decide what those goals should be but in this step you will learn how best to set them.
Let’s assume one of your goals is to get more profit from your existing customers.
Much has been written about goal setting and you are possibly already aware of the SMART acronym. To have a goal that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound is invaluable in establishing a meaningful outcome.
Thus we need to turn this goal into a SMART goal. In case you have not previously set yourself a SMART goal let’s work through this example.
Outcome goal = To profit more from existing customers.
To make it SMART answer the following questions.
S = Specific. What specifically does profit mean and which existing customers?
M = Measureable. How will you measure ‘profit’?
A = Achievable. Is the goal realistic and achievable?
R = Relevant. Is the goal relevant to your overall goal (in this case, booking success)?
T = Timebound. By when do you want to achieve the goal?
Once you have covered those 5 points you can state your SMART goal as, for example:
“My goal is to generate an extra £100,000 in commission payments from my top 50 customers by 31 December this year”.
Now spend some time setting your own SMART goals from your SWOT Analysis. Make sure you set only one or two to start: too many goals and you could be overwhelmed. Maybe start with one goal from each of Strengths and Opportunities and write them down in a place you will see them every day.
Of course it is one thing having SMART goals and another thing to actually do something about them and that we will cover in Step 5.
