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Designed to help you
quickly build up your existing
travel planning business
Take the Audio Tour (27:54)
Builder FAQ
Getting Started
Our two bundles are designed to help companies that are either starting out or already have an established travel planning business:
Founder Essentials Bundle – gives new travel planners everything they need to start their own travel planning business, including the 8-lesson video training, Silver Certification, membership in the Travel Expert community, and a profile and membership in the Travel Expert Network.
Builder Essentials Bundle – designed to help established travel planners quickly build up and improve their existing travel planning business, including membership in the Travel Expert community, and a profile and membership in the Travel Expert Network.
Our Builder Essentials Bundle gives you a Gold Certification to make you stand out from the crowd, membership in the Travel Expert Network to help increase your lead generation, the support of your peers, other travel experts who are happy to help you grow your travel planning business.
Certification
Silver Certification: You need to pass three assessments:
Implementation Assessment: Are you able to plan and deliver fantastic custom trips to your destination for travelers?
Expertise Assessment: Are you a “boots-on-the-ground” expert on your locale, able to create the perfect itineraries custom-tailored to each traveler?
Business Practices Assessment: Are you legit? Are you easy to work with, ready to go the extra mile, all “i’s” dotted and “t’s” crossed?
Gold Certification: You need to pass the same three assessments as for Silver plus an additional assessment about your past trips:
Engagement Assessment: We look at some of your trips, review your itineraries, process, feedback. Typically, if you’ve done more than ten trips or been in business over a year you will pass with flying colors.
You’ll get everything you need to succeed with your travel planning business.
- Certification badge to display on your web site and in marketing materials
- You will be given the title Certified Travel Expert™
- Listing in the Travel Expert Directory with your own profile page
- Access to referrals from the Travel Expert Network
- Monthly Mastermind calls where you get your questions answered
- Bi-monthly Working Sessions where we roll up our sleeves and get to work
It really depends on you. Some people go through the assessments quickly, and do it in less than a month. Others take longer.
Community
They are all scheduled as a one hour Zoom calls, with advance signups. Once everyone is there we start.
If you have an active Travel Expert Community Membership you can attend both the Monthly Mastermind calls and the bi-monthly Working Sessions. Certified Travel Experts get a one year Community Membership free with each certification. So if you first got your Silver Certification, that would give you one year of Community Membership, and if you then went on later that year to get Gold, you would get another year of Community Membership.
Our goal for the Working Sessions is to give participants an achievable, useful task for the week. Whether it’s to come up with an elevator pitch or creating a blogging calendar we try to make it useful, something where doing it in the group will help. We look for topics everywhere, from questions that come up on Mastermind calls, Facebook, or just things we find that we think could be useful.
We go around and get responses to the monthly topic, then open it up to questions.
We have two calls for a week-long Working Session, on Monday and then on Friday of the same week. On the first call we go through a presentation and discuss the goals for the week. For the second call we go around and have everyone present their work.
Network
Any Travel Expert with a current Travel Expert Network Membership can be listed in the Travel Expert Directory, and also receive referrals. You need to be certified to get a Network Membership – when you get either a Silver or Gold Certification you’ll get a one year free Network Membership.
When we first formed Travel Beyond the Obvious we were worried about competition among our Travel Experts but it turns out to be just the opposite. First, there are plenty of travelers to go around, and second, other CTEs in your region actually help your business do better with support and referrals when they get too busy.
We look at the request and then review our current CTEs for that area for a fit, both in terms of where specifically the traveler is going, the style of travel they want, and also some of the other features like on-trip support or personal guides.
