Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

Touristlink provides a totally new way for travellers to find and book services online, especially those they have a hard time finding elsewhere on the web.

Members can use our simple form to request whatever they want whether it is a “Taxi Pickup from an Airport” or a “Guided trip to Mt. Kilimanjaro”.

Once a request is made it goes out to our network of travel agents and guides who can then make offers from which the member is free to choose one if he likes. This functionality is seamlessly built into a content rich social platform where travellers can interact with each other and with local businesses.

Touristlink is developed by GoTripIndia, a web development firm founded by David Urmann in 2005 which now employs over 70 IT professionals.

Prior to launching Touristlink we launched several other successful travel sites including: Travelaffiliatepro, an affiliate program for travel website owners, and Hotelkhoj, an online hotel booking portal developed exclusively for the Indian market which lists over 2,000 hotels.

• David Urmann is the Founder and CEO. His global perspective and scientific background have helped him launch successful business ventures in both the travel and outsourcing industries. He is an avid traveler having visited over 40 countries and is the author of a travel guide book on his home state of Utah.
• Jayesh Badge is the Cofounder and COO. He has 9+ years of experience in advertising agencies & IT. He oversees the Indian operations of the company.
• Deepak Gupta is the lead programmer at Touristlink engaged in the development of client side, server side scripts. He specializes in the LAMP & Open Source Software.
• Ganesh Chavan is the manager of customer support & public relations, Ganesh has 6+ years of experience with leading names in industry like IBM and GE for Banking solutions.

Our entire team can be seen here.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

We are bootstrapping the launch from our existing revenues. We are looking forward to a point where it makes sense for us to bring on additional funding.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Our conversations with travellers and feedback from customers showed us a clear need for a service that would connect travellers to local service providers.

Many of our existing customers have mentioned how hard it is to find local service providers online for things like trip packages, tour guides and arranging ground transport.

This feedback from customers was reinforced for me by lots of personal experiences. For instance, last year I planned a weeklong tour in Rajasthan with my wife and mother but didn’t really want to book an overpriced tour with a travel agency which I didn’t have any experience with and who wanted me to wire half the money before I arrived.

As it happened we ended up finding a great guide but it was just by chance. Another example occurred on a trip I took to China where I remember looking for a translator / city guide and I ended up finding someone on Craigslist but I wasn’t sure who I was really dealing with and it would have made me feel better if I could have seen reviews from other customers to help me know I was making the right choice.

Touristlink solves this travelling dilemma by letting local providers sign up and then offer their services in response to requests by our members.

Describe the business, core products and services?

Touristlink looks to target the travel activities market by providing a service that lets travellers request the exact services they need and then receive multiple offers from travel providers.

Most transactions in this $80 billion marketplace are still occurring offline and 90% of providers state that they face product display and cost issues with existing distribution channels which are significant barriers to increasing sales.

Touristlink intends to solve these problems and become the primary website for these transactions by providing a marketplace which is seamlessly built into a content rich social platform where travellers can interact with each other and with local businesses.

One thing keeping us excited is our mobile application which we will be launching in the New Year.

The mobile app is very simply the request that allows travellers to request services no matter where they are. We are essentially giving our members a very simple application which will put them directly in contact with our entire network of travel providers.

We think that making this service accessible to be people on the go and actually travelling will be an important key to our success.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

We are focusing on marketing locally and we currently have marketing teams in several popular tourist locations in India who are directly introducing our service to both local travellers and foreigners.

The initial response is encouraging and we hope that as we improve conversions we will be able to scale this operation to more locations.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Touristlink is a direct result of conversations and feedback from our customers which showed us the need for this type of service.

We have been in the online travel business for four years and are responsible for the successful of development of several websites.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

Once a traveller selects an offer from a travel provider he pays 10% of the total price which we keep as our commission and the rest is paid on delivery.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Touristlink aims to target a giant market in which no dominant competitor exists and most of the transactions are still occurring offline. The opportunity lies in bringing these transactions online.

They occur offline as many of the providers in the segment are small businesses doing less than a million a year in revenue and even if they have websites they often lack the ability to manage transactions or availability.

That such a large market exists with no dominant leader signifies to us the need for a fundamentally different solution.

All of our competitors are trying to force a traditional online booking system on to small businesses with highly variable products – a booking engine in which products are defined by a set of standard variables and availability is managed independently for each.

Having dealt first hand with over 2,000 hotel owners in India, we do not think this is the right approach and instead believe the request-offer model that we are offering will be much more suited to this market where the products are highly variable and where getting providers to correctly upload products and then continuously update availability is difficult at best.

Even if we are not asking providers to take on the complicated task of uploading products we must still face the fact that many of the providers have limited experience marketing services on the web.

This means many of them need to be individually worked with and essentially trained on how to use our system. This implies a relatively high workload per provider but being located in Nagpur one of the least expensive cities in India might give us an edge over competitors trying to do the same on a large scale elsewhere.

If one quickly browses through Touristlink it is clear that it is much more than a transactional platform it is for the visitor primarily a social network and destination guide. Every Touristlink member is different and this is reflected in his online profile.

We believe that the travel providers who will be most successful on the site will be able to take advantage of this and customize offers based on the members profiles.

A key part of the Touristlink strategy is making the site a place where travellers can build relationships with providers and ask questions and get advice even if the end result is not a sale.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

Sometimes it feels like everyone is a critic and I think the best thing you can do with the criticism is not to take it personally but to try to learn from it.

We have built enough websites to know that it is a constant testing and refinement process as you interact with visitors.

The key thing to success is just to move forward everyday and try to make the product better. We were invited to attend Seedcamp, an early stage mentoring and investment program, this past November in Barcelona and we received some great advice.

I thought we had a pretty defined business concept going into this program but in-depth discussions with our mentors definitely pointed us in some new directions and certainly made us focus on what our key concepts are.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

If we are engaging our users and getting them to come back and use our service then we will be successful.

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

CruiseEdge is an email lead generation web service for the US cruise market aimed at getting cruisers the best cruise deals by connecting them with experienced cruise agents.

CruiseEdge is being built by some of the staff that used to work for 1st Cruise Holidays.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?

CruiseEdge has taken no outside investment to date and is at the moment being bootstrapped by the team’s founders.

What problem are you trying to solve?

The average person searching for a cruise vacation online visits over 10 cruise websites, but what if you could visit just one cruise website and get experienced cruise agents to contact you, at your convenience, with the best cruise deals available.

Cruisers can book their cruise costing thousands of dollars online via self-service websites without ever talking to an experienced and knowledgeable cruise agent.

We think that cruise agents are a resource that is being under utilized by most travellers, and that most travellers would benefit from the expertise and knowledge that a cruise agent could give them when it comes to booking their cruise vacation.

Describe the business, core products and services?

CruiseEdge will connect cruisers looking for their perfect cruise vacation to experienced cruise agents who will then contact the traveller via email with the best cruise deals that they can offer, all in a timely manner.

The CruiseEdge web service will sit between visiting your local cruise agent which could be impractical and using an online cruise website which allows you to book without any expert guidance.

For cruise agents it is an email lead generation service that aims to build customer confidence in the cruise sector and in cruise agents as the cruise agents get to use their knowledge and expertise to give the customer the best possible service and therefore raise brand awareness.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

Anyone looking for a cruise online who doesn’t want the time consuming task of visiting over 10 cruise websites and taking lots of notes and comparing cruise deals on offer that then go and sell out just at the moment you are ready to input your credit card details.

Cruise agents who want more qualified exclusive cruise leads to boost their bookings and their online brand, while giving cruisers the best possible service.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

No, there is a gap in the US cruise market for a service like this and at CruiseEdge we believe that cruisers could get better deals and better service than what is currently on offer.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

Cruise agents will pay a monthly subscription fee to be a part of the web service and as the service is being bootstrapped it should break even within days of launch and then quickly become profitable so that we can build upon the service.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• The CruiseEdge team has extensive knowledge and experience of the online and offline cruise market and will bring that to build a service that serves the customer and the cruise agent.

Weaknesses:

• CruiseEdge is a new type of cruise search website and therefore a lot of work is needed in promotion and brand awareness to attract customers and cruise agents.

Opportunities:

• We believe that is a lot of room for increasing the services that CruiseEdge can offer in the coming months.

Threats:

• Traditional online cruise agents could start to offer a similar service, but as CruiseEdge is being built by a small team of cruise experts, we believe that we are agile enough to build the CruiseEdge web service to the ebb and flow of the cruise market using the lean startup method.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

No one thinks that CruiseEdge could possibly work, so we believe that is a good as indication as any that we should give it a shot for the next 12-months and see what happens.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

We hope to have about 50 Cruise agents join the web service in the next 12-months and we hope to serve over 500,000 cruisers in 2012.

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

I’ve been a self employed travel agent for 15 years, before that I worked in catering and the hotel trade in the UK, Australia and the USA.

I’ve started a new company to run SYTA – SeeYourTravelAgent – Monk Travel Ltd, with myself and my wife as the sole shareholders. There are no other employees. I outsourced the design of the site.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

Self-funded, we may seek investment for expansion later

What problem are you trying to solve?

Fewer visits to high street travel agents, difficult to get your business found on the internet, people still like face to face contact, but don’t have time to track down and visit a suitable agent

Describe the business, core products and services?

We recruit dozens of agents around the UK to pool their expertise into one easily accessible web site. Skype and perhaps later other video calling services connect the public to the agent. Free.

The agent will be charged for the lead on a pay per click basis.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

Independent travel agents and home workers who have a niche specialty are our customers and the public will be our users.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

I spoke to a lot of agents and head of a major travel consortium before I invested my own money in the site.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

After an initial free period to validate the quality of the leads generated and gain feedback from agents, the site will rely on clicks to generate revenue.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• It’s a simple and powerful way to connect travellers to agents and should be very cost effective. I believe in web site names that describe what they do.

Weaknesses:

• It may be open to abuse, but if it happens a lot we can find ways around that.

Opportunities:

• Internet on TV is bringing Skype video chat into the living room [See Panasonic commercial]. Microsoft bought Skype, so expect further integration.

Threats:

• It may be copied.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

Everyone I’ve spoken to thought it was an excellent idea, so I had to go ahead with it.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

That every agent that registers gets new business, has generated revenue for SYTA and most of them wish to remain on the site.

Here is a clip:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MC-dA1D6734

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

But hang on a second, is the idea achievable as a small startup?

Will consumers or the industry take to it in sufficient numbers for it to be a commercial success? Or will you just get plaudits at launch but six months later quietly close your doors when no one is looking?

Here are five themes that always seem to struggle.

It does not, however, necessarily mean that it is impossible to run a startup based on these models, simply that perhaps wannabe travel entrepreneurs should at least consider switching their focus to other areas where success is easier to come by.

1. Selling consumer leads to travel agents

There are so many of these startup companies around! It seems natural that agents will buy leads, but really they are a lot of work for the agent to handle – they don’t really want an email inbox full of “I want to go to Spain, what can you sell me” style questions.

That is why we all built websites in the first place, right?.

Now, this type of business has the ability to work when you sell such leads to the next layer down in the industry (eg. tour operators or suppliers) or when the lead is well focused (i.e. the lead includes some element of product selection and travel dates rather than just open ended unspecific requirements).

Suppliers have the margin (30-40% rather than an agents much smaller 5-15%) to afford staff time to dedicate to answering these emails properly.

The trick is to get the leads to the right suppliers, not in sending leads to agents that then have to work out which is the appropriate supplier.

Do that work and the lead starts to have value.

2. Trip inspiration/trip planning websites that are too focused on user interface

Who really is going to spend an hour fiddling around answering questions using a fancy UI hoping that at the end of it the website is going to come up with a wonderful, fully matching, trip plan?

There are travel products that are inherently inspirational. These are what you should focus on exposing to consumers. Product, product, product rather than UI, UI, UI.

Big caveat here, as noted philosopher Bertrand Russell once said: “Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.” So if you are going to have a user interface-oriented trip planning website, at least make it enjoyable! Easier to say than achieve though.

3. Two-sided marketplaces

A two sides marketplace is one where you both generate both supply and demand. A conventional business might be one where you are generating consumer demand, but selling another organisation’s supply.

The problem with two-sided marketplaces is that to grow them companies need to run the so-called hockey-stick growth curves on both sides at the same time, and at similar rates.

The worse case scenario is to end up with too much supply and insufficient demand (then suppliers get bored and leave, unless they have another reason to stay).

If you are starting a small travel startup then focus on a sector where you just need to achieve one hockeystick growth curve not two.

4. Solving a new consumer problem

If you are going to solve a consumer problem ensure it really is a problem that consumers have. Don’t invent a new consumer problem and then look to solve that.

Otherwise you have to both sell the idea, as well as sell your solution to the problem. Double the work.

One of the classic cases in the sector is the startup created primarily after the founders had a problem of their own when travelling, a relatively isolated issue rather than widespread.

Also, just because the problem exists doesn’t mean there is a business to be made in solving that problem. Gaps in the market hardly ever exist because you are doing something completely unheard of beforehand – but because others have entered and exited before you.

5. Small travel agents setting up flight/hotel booking websites

Don’t! It just isn’t necessary. It is a battle you cannot win versus the existing, larger and probably well-established online travel agents.

Even using simple technology doesn’t make it easy.

If it takes three hours to configure a hotel in a reservation system (including loading in a contract, finding images, creating a description etc) and you get one booking a month per hotel, then that three hours looks bad.

But that same three hours is necessary for a company which sells 20 bookings for that hotel per month. Much better ROI. Just not a game small travel agents can win.

As always, would love your feedback in the comments. Any models to add to or ones to subtract from this list?

Based on volume and lead quality, the travel agent lead-generation service is offering this range of compensation to affiliates for leads provided to Tripology and sold to travel agents.

“Every transactional site out there has some sort of affiliate program,” says John Peters, general manager of digital strategy and travel for Rand McNally, which owns Tripology. “Instead of some hum-drum program, we thought we’d do something dramatic — share up to 50% of revenue we earn with a few select partners in the travel industry.”

Peters says Tripology will limit the program to 50 affiliates.

Tripology doesn’t charge agents big dollars for leads so the affiliate program may not generate large dollars for affiliates — unless the volume is large.

However, each lead can be sold up to three times.

Tripology says the leads sell for $1 to $25 each, with the price determined by an algorithm.

“The more the agent can earn from a booking, the more it costs,” Peters says. “So a lead for two people going to Williamsburg for the weekend costs less than four people looking to take a Greek Island cruise. So, an air-only request might cost $1 but a destination wedding to Saint Lucia for 20 people would cost $25.”

Website and blog owners with substantial traffic can sign up for the affiliate program on the Tripology website. If approved, Tripology generates an affiliate link to track the leads that the affiliate sends to Tripology.

The affiliate program comes with a dashboard so affiliates can monitor how much money they are making as they make it, Tripology says.

Peters says Tripology will be more selective about which sites can participate in its new affiliate program than it did under a prior program, and the compensation is greater, as well.

“Why? Because in travel lead-generation, the quality of the leads is more important than quantity,” Peters says. “Anyone can generate a lot of bad leads. At Tripology, we focus on securing quality leads for our Tripologists.”

The paid research program, which Jetsetter calls its Expert Planning Service, was introduced to employees’ families and friends in late October and is now in the early stages of a three- to six-month beta. Jetsetter has contacted a select group of customers, who have booked hotel rooms on Jetsetter, about the program.

Here’s basically how it works:

Customers fill out a form seeking advice about a particular destination or type of trip, say a Mexico vacation or an adventure vacation to anywhere.

A staff of two Jetsetter employees pairs the traveler with a travel writer from Jetsetter’s roster of some 200 correspondents.

Many of the travel writers work for high-profile travel magazines, appear on TV or have written travel guidebooks, for instance.

The travelers pay a fee that usually is in the $125 to $150 range, although it has gone as high as $200 for at least one extensive trip. The writers share a portion of the fee with Jetsetter.

The travelers talk on the phone with the writer for about an hour and outline their trip goals. And, then the writers spend around another four hours or more researching the trip and providing the travelers with specific destination, hotel, restaurant, bar and tour recommendations.

Some of the hotel recommendations may be for Jetsetter partner hotels, says spokeswoman Kellie Pelletier, but they don’t have to be — especially if the traveler is taking an extended trip to a variety of destinations.

The travel writers can make hotel reservations for travelers and although they sometimes give advice about flights, they won’t be making airline reservations, Pelletier says.

“We are not going down that road,” she adds.

Pelletier says the travel writers all have stayed at the hotels they are recommending and visited the restaurants and bars they are pointing to.

“They’ve slept in the beds, eaten the food and participated on the tours,” says Drew Patterson, Jetsetter founder and CEO.

Rather than using a travel agent, Jetsetter’s Expert Planning Service is the type of trip-planning service that many of Jetsetter’s customers are looking for, Pelletier says.

Jetsetter is keeping all options open, however, and the Expert Planning Service may look much different in three to six months when the beta ends, Pelletier says.

The program is sort of a lead-generation service for travel writers, similar in its broad outlines to lead-generation services for travel agents.

Jetsetter doesn’t view it that way, saying the writers have been trained on Jetsetter review manuals and will only be used for planning services. Jetsetter considers the program as an extension of personalized services it can provide its customers.

To date, the writers have planned more than 30 trips for Jetsetter customers, and all of the trips have been international ones, with the exceptions of a Florida vacation and a sojourn to Hawaii.

The trips have included “a vacation in Nicaragua for a group of friends, a hip design hotel and surf lessons in Hawaii and even an R&R trip in Australia for a U.S. Marine and his girlfriend,” Jetsetter says.

Pelletier says Jetsetter would welcome more travel writers participating in its Expert Planning Service.

The Expert Planning Service beta coincides with the soft launch of Jetsetter 24/7, with Jetsetter supplementing its flash sales of hotels with a retail offering.

Members of the private sales site can search for limited-time flash sales of hotels or use an All Vacations tab to search for properties on a retail basis.

Here’s a Jetsetter video on Facebook about Jetsetter 24.7.

In March 2010, Rand McNally acquired Tripology, which provides consumer leads to travel agents. Tripology has its own Tripology iPhone app.

Rand McNally decided to integrate the coding of the Tripology app into Explore America.

Companies that support a number of brands have to decide whether to integrate multiple brands or functionality into apps or to let them run entirely on a standalone basis.

For different companies, there are varying answers depending on their circumstances.

Expedia Inc. has maintained separate iPhone apps for Expedia.com, hotels.com and TripAdvisor.

Combining apps for Expedia.com and hotels.com — both transaction sites with hotel bookings — wouldn’t make much sense.

Under a different set of considerations, Bing recently integrated Bing Travel’s metasearch functionality into the Bing app.

Rand McNally, which still maintains Tripology as a brand, opted to integrate Tripology into Rand McNally’s new Explore America app because it wanted to leverage Tripology’s revenue-generation capabilities. The standalone Tripology app still is available, too.

The free Explore America app is heavy on inspiration and travel information.

Users receive a Daily Adventure with a map and up to five photos about an interesting destination in North America. Users also can access additonal Rand McNally content about that destination and share the Daily Adventure with their social networks.

There is also a daily travel quiz, replete with scores and leader boards.

“Our Triplogy app is all functional, but there’s no fun to it,” says John Peters, Rand McNally’s general manager of digital strategy. “Explore America is fun and educational but it needed useful revenue-generating functionality.”

“So if you’re looking at really neat picture of a wonderful place, you’ve read all about it, taken the quiz and shared the picture with your social network, why not let a consumer take the next step and get connected to a travel specialist and make the trip happen,” Peters says.

Peters acknowledges that “apps like Explore America can cost many tens of thousands of dollars, so adding revenue-generating functionality helps the return-on-investment equation dramatically.”

At least that’s the hope.

And the Rand McNally communications team is in full swing to get the word out and make that happen.

Rand McNally planned to send nearly 1 million emails about the app to a subset of its mailing lists and to promote Explore America on Rand McNally and Tripology Twitter accounts and Facebook pages, with a new Rand McNally Facebook page slated to be rolled out this evening.

As evidence of that strategic direction and apparent latitude, Rand McNally completed its integration of Tripology, acquired in March, and introduced a hotel-search advertising platform.

Tripology is now accessible at Tripology.com and through a Find a Travel Specialist link on the Rand McNally homepage.

The travel agent lead-generation company says it plans to introduce technology enhancements later this year.

Meanwhile, Tripology says since its acquisition by Rand McNally, it has renewed alliance agreements with Travel Leaders, AAA, MAST Vacation Partners, Vacation.com and Ensemble.

Tripology, which say it has matched more than 150,000 consumer trip requests with travel agents looking to fulfill them, has more than 40 suppliers in its Travel Industry Supporter Program.

Under the supporter program, suppliers reimburse Tripologists — travel agent members of Tripology — for each lead that culminates in a booking.

In other news, Rand McNally separately introduced a Search for Hotels link on its homepage, enabling consumers to search for domestic and international hotels and book on advertisers’ websites, including Orbitz, Hotwire, Priceline, Booking.com, getaroom.com and DealBase.

Rand McNally competitor MapQuest, a unit of AOL, uses Travelocity to offer some travel-booking services to consumers through AOL Travel.

If you’re wondering if you should try lead generation to get new customers or if you’ve tried lead generation and failed, read on.

While just signing up and jumping in is a good start, there are certainly two ways to attack these leads; the right way and the wrong way.

The right way isn’t one 100% fool proof, but you can be sure the wrong way is a 100% waste of time and money.

After leading the team that helped register over 15,000 travel agents and processed over 150,000 travel leads, I’ve come up with some suggestions on how to do lead generation correctly.

These come from some of our best clients, lest you think I’m pulling these out of thin air.

Here’s a fact: according to Forrester Research, 27% of online travelers would rather work with a good offline travel agent, if they knew where to find one.

So, more than a quarter of the people shopping online would rather work with an offline travel agent; they just have no idea where to start looking for the right one.

These consumers are frustrated with online booking engines and the plethora of generic, meaningless travel information and want – get this – to talk to a human being.

So, here are the ten things you need to do to succeed with online travel lead generation:

1. Be “open for business” for as many of the 24 hours in a day as possible.

To prove my point, last year, I had invited a handful of our top travel specialists to New York for a brainstorm session. During our dinner conversation, I noticed one of them, Kristen, was typing on her iPhone.

I remember thinking, “I wish she was paying attention to the conversation”, so I asked her a question and hinted I saw “she was busy.”

Her response? She showed me her iPhone screen and showed me she was buying one of our leads – on her phone, during dinner- that was, according to her, “right in her sweet spot.”

My response? “Please continue.”

2. Specialize, specialize, specialize

Some travel agents register for lead generation services and get a booking right away.

Others try it yet simply don’t succeed. It doesn’t mean they’re not good at what they do, it just means they haven’t yet figured out how  to sell to online consumers or they took too long to respond or, the big lead-killer; they come off as generalists.

Online consumers don’t want generalists; they can get that online. They want a skilled professional who specializes in the exact trip they are looking to take and who demonstrates he/she has first-hand knowledge of the destination and local contacts there.

By the way, “cruises” isn’t a specialty any more than “hotels” is. Family cruises is a specialty. Small-ship cruises is a specialty. Small-ship cruises for gay couples with children is an amazing niche.

The more defined you get, the less competition you’ll have. True, your potential audience is smaller, but you’re much more likely to get the business.

3. Stop worrying about price shoppers

Do some consumers want a cheap price? Sure, but that’s no different from consumers who call a travel agent’s office.

Frankly, I’m a little tired of agents who say lead generation “pits agents against each other based on price”.

This would mean that anyone who has ever walked into a travel agency never walked into another one or called another agent to check prices.

People shop for everything. They check prices and search for deals. With online travel lead generation, it’s up to travel specialist to prove why they can offer the best value.

It’s up to the agent to show they have local contacts, that they’ve been to the destination, know the destination intimately and offer the best, hard-to-find, relevant information.

4. Pick a lead-generation company that lets YOU pick YOUR customers

There are a few companies selling “leads” but only one other legitimate one that I know of lets you decide which leads you want to buy.

This way, if you don’t like the lead, don’t buy it. Also, you should only work with lead generation companies that offer you the option of setting filters.

You should be able to filter out leads that don’t match your “sweet spot.”  If you don’t want to work with someone who doesn’t have at least $X to spend, set a filter and you won’t even see those leads in your in-box.

Some of the most successful lead-buying agents tell me they ignore the budget field entirely because they’ve found consumers just don’t know how much travel costs and they’re certainly not going to guess high.

5. Be timely and be persistent

People are busy yet they expect timely responses. When you buy a lead, act quickly with an initial response and then stay top of mind until they’re ready to make a purchase.

I’m not saying you should stalk someone, but a quick response and then regular, polite follow up is critical if you’re in sales.

If the person decides not to travel (or even if they book with another agent) put them in your database for proper, targeted marketing efforts later.

You paid for the lead, so use it to grow your database.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard one of our travel specialists saying they booked someone months or even a year after they bought the lead.

The lesson here? Follow up, follow up again and when you’re done with that, you guessed it; follow up again.

6. Know your acquisition costs

Recently, a travel agent told me at a trade show she tried lead generation but it didn’t work as well as “walk-in” customers because (ready?) those walk-in leads are “free”.

Free? Really? When I had her add up salaries, rent and other expenses then divided it by the number of walk-ins…well you know how this story ends.

I’ve also been amused by the people who are going to put money into Search Engine Marketing, i.e. buying keywords on Google or Bing.

Fine by me, but you should know SEM isn’t for the faint of heart.  A $100 budget can disappear before your eyes with terms like “cruises” or “vacations” going for $4, $5 or more PER CLICK, which includes little Johnny doing his book report on Caribbean Islands.

His homework project will cost you $5.

7. Be passionate, but not too verbose

When you’re selling face-to-face, it’s easy to show emotion. For some reason however, one of the biggest mistakes agents make with online leads is they become either short-hand secretaries or encyclopedias.

With an online lead, you have one chance to make an impression on the customer.

Your goal is to get the consumer to trust you, respect your knowledge and to start painting a picture of the vacation in their minds.

Your first few sentences of your first email to them will say it all. Too little or too much information or long, boring diatribes is a sure way to lose the business.

Get someone excited and wanting more and you win.

8. Invite every online lead to read your blog, follow you on Twitter and “like” you on Facebook

People book vacation with agents they know and like. Holding cruise nights, attending social gatherings and general schmoozing are not gone forever, but they have been virtually replaced by social networking.

Someone who likes your blog, enjoys the pictures of your travels on Facebook or Flickr and finds your tweets funny will stay connected to you.

This way, when they’re ready to book, they may very well book with you. If they’re not ready, they will hopefully refer their friends to you.

By the way, if the whole blog / social media thing is foreign to you, please feel free to put down the buggy-whip and join us in the new world whenever you have time.

A 45 year old friend of mine uses “social media tutoring” time to connect with her fourteen year old daughter (her daughter is the teacher in this case).

The lesson here? Get with the program; ask your kids or your grandkids for help if you have to.

9. Your online profile is your calling card

Dress it up. Market yourself. Tell people all about your travels (please, PLEASE tell me you travel regularly to refine your craft, update your knowledge and expand your contacts).

List all the languages you speak (if English is your only language, learn another one and impress your clients. Heck, get a used copy of Rosetta Stone language classes from eBay or something).

Finally, get a professional photo taken or better yet, use one of you on a recent exotic vacation.

And smile, would you? People like smiling people.

10. Speak up

If you’re having trouble making online lead generation work for you, talk to the lead company.

Really, we’re happy to talk anytime and share everything we know.  We can’t make money unless you keep using us.

So if you tried, say 15 leads and didn’t close a single one, something is wrong. Call us and we’ll try and help you on track.

Finally, some agents are getting ALL of their business from lead generation sites – they’ve stopped most other marketing efforts and are concentrating on leads from such companies.

NB: This is a guest article by John Peters, vice president and general manager for travel and digital strategy at Rand McNally. He was previously president and CEO of Tripology before selling the company to Rand in March 2010.

TripAtlas, based in Toronto, is a lead-generation service for travel agents and a travel-content website for consumers. It has content partnerships with MSN, Yahoo and Sympatico.

One advantages of the new Custom Trips tab on the TripAtlas homepage is that consumers interested in the posted trip respond via email directly to the agent and, in that way, the agent who posted the excursion doesn’t have to compete with other agents for the consumer lead, says Laura Monk, an account executive at TripAtlas.

Agents who pay a $35 monthly fee to TripAtlas, can use a Trip Publisher tool to post the trip they are promoting. It appears both on a Custom Trips page and on the agents’ storefront like this one from Luxury Vacation Partners in Wayland, N.Y.

Agents who pay the $35 per month fee are called TripAtlas Pros. They can use a variety of the site’s online tools and receive a daily email with consumer leads.

Although TripAtlas bills the Custom Trips tab as a promotional tool for “off-the-beaten path” vacations and “adventurous travel” some of the postings, such as Fairmont Orchid Bed and Breakfast and Mexican Riviera – 7 days, seemed fairly routine.

Still, agents can use the Trip Publisher tool to post photos and other trip details and then consumers contact the agent via an email form with their contact information.

TripAtlas is five years old and about 200-300 travel agents use the website daily, says Monk.

The move breathes new life into Tripology, a lead-generation service for travel agents which had fallen on hard times weeks ago when an investor pulled out of the company.

It also ends weeks of speculation about who Tripology’s suitor was after Peters had announced that Tripology had signed a letter of intent with an unidentified company.

Peters says the Tripology brand and operations will remain largely the same as Tripology becomes a Rand McNally property and one piece of the puzzle as Rand McNally transitions into an online, trip-planning company.

Jeff DeKorte, the former general manager of AOL Travel who was brought in by Rand McNally to strategize about Web strategy, says Rand McNally is in the midst of transforming itself from a traditional, print-based company that focused on selling maps and globes, into an online travel company which offers mobile-based services.

Among immediate changes, Tripology’s headquarters will relocate from Manhattan to Skokie, Ill., where Rand McNally is based.

Peters will run Tripology and become Rand McNally’s vice president and general manager of digital strategy.

Tripology, which has 14,000 travel agents signed up to use its lead-generation services, employs five staff, including Peters, and discussions are under way with the parent company about staffing levels.

Peters talked to Tnooz today at the TravelCom conference in Dallas about the acquisition. One year ago, TravelCom designated Tripology as its innovator of the year.

Peters says Rand McNally’s purchase of Tripology for an undisclosed sum almost immediately solves several of Tripology’s problems — brand recognition, consumer traffic and distribution.

Peters acknowledges that it had been costly for Tripology “to get in front of consumers.”

But, according to Compete Inc., Rand McNally had 757,000 unique visitors in January 2010, down from a 2009 peak of almost 1.2 million unique visitors in June.

Tripology had 33,600 unique visitors in January, Compete says.

DeKorte says Rand McNally has a broad vision to become an online trip-planning company and the strategy is evolving.

The move to become a a force in online travel coincides with the ascendance of a new Rand McNally management team which Patriarch Partners, the owner of privately held Rand McNally, brought in several months ago, DeKorte says.

Peters emphasizes that with the lead-generation service becoming a Rand McNally property, Tripology remains “all about travel agents.”

He emphasizes that the acquisition means Tripology now will have the resources to develop more travel agent tools, including social-media features and lead management tools, which had long been delayed.

Says Peters: “We had a to-do list a year-and-a-half long.”

Playing it as coy as possible as a lead-up to an announcement, Tripology President and CEO John Peters yesterday wrote a blog post, entitled “A Clue or Two from Tripology,” about the household name company that has swooped in to rescue Tripology.

The clues point to a trip-planning company, possibly one heavy into mapping, as becoming the new owner or investor in the travel agent lead-generation business.

The blog states:

“Do you need a hint? This company will guide you, from here to there. They know the world better than most; the places, the borders, the geographies.  Like Atlas, the world is on their shoulders.  You’d be hard pressed to find a person in the USA that hasn’t looked to them for travel guidance.

“Need another clue? If you had to get from here to there, you’d look at one of these. For this company knows where all roads lead, where every river winds, where every national park begins and ends. They inspire, they educate and now, trip planning is their focus.

“Tripology has found a new home and I couldn’t be happier.  More details to come in the next few days. Free leads continue for a bit longer!” Enjoy!”

So, apparently Tripology is ready to enter its next phase and all concerned will be interested in seeing if the company’s revenue model can be sustainable.

President and chief executive John Peters says the company has signed a Letter of Intent with a company to acquire the business, not just “invest”.

The company, according to Peters, was one of a number who bid for the business and is “a name you all know”.

“I fully expect this deal to be consummated (though it’s not official until it is). I CAN tell you Tripology is poised to continue on; bigger, better and stronger than ever.”

The decision to announce a deal is on the table this early comes as Tripology’s rivals step up their marketing activities during its suspension of commercial activity

Peters says as a gesture of goodwill to the agents in the system it will be offering free consumer travel leads until early-March.

Mark Murphy,  the president and CEO of Performance Media, says he never thought Tripology’s business model made a lot of sense, and that its woes, coupled with the collapse of dot-com fave eGulliver in 2001, show that such businesses that rely on travel agents to pay for consumer leads won’t make it.

“Don’t give me $15 for a lead, give me tools,” Murphy says.

And, tools — free social media tools that would enable travel agents and consumers to engage more deeply — is what Murphy has in mind as an upgrade for a revamped Performance Media beta website, Travel Tribe.

Murphy’s new vision for Travel Tribe, which has been around for about eight months or so and hasn’t been very successful, would be sort of a blend of Travelzoo (deals and newsletter), Tripology (lead-generation), Lonely Planet (destination guides) and PhoCusWright (market intelligence about destinations).

Travel Tribe already has some of these nascent elements, Murphy says, including a deals newsletter, free leads for travel agents, user-generated and professionally written destination content.

But, within three or four months, Performance Media plans to redesign the beta website, which hasn’t been marketed, to enable consumers to ask travel or destination questions, and search for people who have been to particular destinations or people who want to go to those vacation spots.

Social-media tools would be introduced on Travel Tribe to accommodate this functionality, and consumers would be able to connect with and get answers from travel agent specialists, Murphy says.

Performance Media brings something to the lead-generation table that other businesses have lacked, Murphy says, including the destination content it already has and can further develop from existing publications Travel Pulse, Agent@Home and Vacation Agent, a staff of travel editors, a sales force and an in-house roster of 10 full-time developers.

“I have a media company with content,” Murphy says, adding that the lead-generation business has a high barrier to entry because others have to license content and get little SEO boost. “For me it’s a strategic add-on to my existing core business.”

With all of the failures in the lead-generation game, Peformance Media would have something to prove.

One competitor, Travel Weekly, tried to leverage its content and assets in a consumer website, Professional Travel Guide, and came up short.

Murphy offers a basic tenet that such businesses should develop multiple revenue streams, keep an open mind, and “be fluid, go where the market goes.”

While Travel Tribe would forego collecting fees from travel agents in favor of advertising and a cost-per-click media model, Murphy also wants to explore the development of market intelligence research for destination marketing organizations.

If consumers on Travel Tribe are discussing Bermuda vacations and their issues with them, perhaps Travel Tribe can develop market intelligence for the DMO, Murphy says.

“If I’m Bermuda, I would want to slice and dice that conversation, depending on how much chatter is taking place,” Murphy says.

But would Bermuda be willing to pay? he asks rhetorically.

I phoned Murphy after I’d heard a rumor that Performance Media might be interested in investing in Tripology.

Murphy says he hasn’t spoken with Tripology recently, but he would “never say never.”

But, Murphy says the Tripology business model, coupled with its overhead, didn’t appear sustainable.

“If you can’t turn a profit with five or six people…” Murphy says.

Still, he doesn’t count Tripology out.

“I think someone with the right assets could buy it and make money,” Murphy says, pointing to an agency group like Amadeus’ Vacation.com as a fit.

Says Murphy: “Wouldn’t it make sense for Vacation.com to be lead-generators?”

Update: Tripology President and CEO John Peters says potential investors have been making inquiries.

“There are indeed a few suitors, some are household names and they are doing a lot more than circling Tripology,” Peters says. “I simply cannot release any more information at this point.”

Peters adds: “I can tell you that I continue to be so very impressed with the kind words of support (emails, voicemails, etc.) that we’ve received not only from our Tripologists, but from the trade in general. I promise, the Tripology family has been very touched.”