- The most important part of being a home-based travel agent is advertising. No matter how good you are, you will not make any money unless you have clients. To a certain extent, the best advertisement is customer satisfaction. If you have satisfied customers, they will tell their friends about the great vacation they had, and you will have new clients. But that will not make up a significant portion of your business. For most home-based travel agents, their day will start with working on advertising. In many cases, traditional media sources (as in newspaper and magazine ads) will require too much money. Even a Yellow Pages ad may prove to be too costly. In these cases, Internet advertising may be able to help. The first step to this is creating a web page. There are many companies that can help you create a basic business web page. The next step is to get visitors there. Many companies, including Google, offer a fairly inexpensive set of advertisements that will provide a link to your website when people looking for related information are looking through similar sites. In addition, many companies and independent contractors specialize in helping optimize your website so that it shows up on search engines.
- A certain portion of any day is, ideally, spent with clients. This includes looking through different flight options, contacting airlines and, when the occasion calls for it, contacting hotels and resorts to help facilitate a vacation. In some cases a client may need to suddenly change their plans, and part of the duty of a travel agent is to help accommodate their needs. A customer that has had a crisis successfully handled by you is likely to become a repeat customer.
- Being a home-based travel agent involves doing a lot of your own paperwork. This includes ensuring that your clients' flights are proceeding as scheduled with the airline, as well as making sure that all tickets have been paid for. A travel agent also needs to make sure that his or her commission has been deducted for all fees and that all costs have been accounted for. Proper bookkeeping is critical in the event that there is any sort of inquiry, whether on behalf of the airline, the client, or the government. A great deal of currency may pass through a travel agent in any one day, and it is very important that there is a careful record of all transactions.
