The Art Of Selling Travel Podcast

Want last minute bookings to close out 2026?

There's still time....

But first, ask yourself the real question: do you actually WANT last minute clients?

In this episode of The Art of Selling Travel Podcast, I'm breaking down how to fill your calendar with holiday and late fall bookings without training your audience to always book last minute. Because whatever you market is what you get.

Market the deal, you get deal hunters. Market to the procrastinators, and well... you get last minute procrastinator Pollies that move as fast as a hurricane.

Plus, why the best way to grow your sales is to stop booking one trip at a time, how I mapped out 10 years of travel for one client, and the four magic words that got me a booking the morning of the first snowstorm.

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"I'll get to it next year" and other famous last words. Spoiler... next year never comes.

There are still three months left in 2026, and that's plenty of time for your plot twist.

In this episode of The Art of Selling Travel Podcast, I'm talking to every travel advisor with a "when I get around to it" list that keeps growing.

Updating the website, starting the weekly email, or building the group landing page. We're breaking those big, scary projects into 15-minute bites so you can actually get them done before the holiday chaos hits.

Plus, a public service announcement about Black Friday deals (they suck, and waiting for them has cost real clients real money), why your outdated website is NOT the reason you aren't getting sales, and what a bear on a mountain taught me about finishing what you start.

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Travel isn't what it used to be. Resort fees, baggage fees, tourism taxes, parking, and cruise lines where the cheaper the fare, the more it costs to get off the ship. Your clients are being nickeled and dimed for everything, and most of them have no idea until they're already there.

In this episode, I'm talking about the "bed and buffet" cruise and why letting price lead the conversation sets your clients up for a miserable trip. We dig into how to talk about pricing with confidence, why budget should be the last question you ask, and how to explain the real difference between a bare-minimum booking and a truly inclusive experience.

I also share a story from 2014 that still haunts me, a family who booked a "cheaper" cruise online and couldn't afford to get off the ship. It changed how I sold travel forever, and I want it to change how you sell too.

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Karen Morales rolled up to a five-star hotel in Hawaii, ready to be pampered, and they handed her a room with stairs. She's a wheelchair user, an accessibility advocate, the Head of Accessibility at Fora, and the founder of Joyward Travel. She had sent the emails. She had confirmed the room. It still happened. And that moment is exactly why this conversation matters for every travel advisor, not just the ones who think they specialize in accessible travel.

In this episode of The Art of Selling Travel Podcast, Karen and I dig into why accessible travel is one of the most underserved and most lucrative parts of the market. One in four people globally lives with some kind of condition. Multi-generational trips are the biggest bookings out there right now, and almost every one of them has at least one accommodation baked in. Yet only about 30 percent of accessible rooms are even bookable online, and hoteliers will raise their hands when asked if they've hosted a guest with special needs but go silent when asked if it's in their marketing. The rooms exist. The money exists. The conversation is what's missing.

Karen shares what she's learned from travelling to nearly 50 countries, six of those years in a wheelchair. You'll hear about the hotel in Okinawa that sent her a photo of the bathroom and the shower chair before she arrived, the Sicilian beach club owner who bought a beach wheelchair and assigned two lifeguards to get her in the water, and the morning in Japan when her chair died on day one of a two-week trip and a DMC with boots on the ground saved the entire vacation. That last one is the reminder every advisor needs. There are moments in travel that no amount of research and no AI is ever going to fix. A human with a relationship in market will.

We also get practical. Karen walks through the questions that actually work, like asking whether a client can comfortably climb into a Sprinter van instead of asking if they need an accessible room, or reframing a flat shower with a railing as risk reduction instead of a disability accommodation. I share the story of a family who kept insisting on room service for years until I finally asked why, learned their son was autistic, and completely changed how I planned for them. The lesson in both cases is the same. Ask better questions, ask them with hospitality, and stop leaving things at the surface.

If you're a travel advisor who wants to serve an aging client base, land more multi-generational bookings, and be the person your clients trust when things go sideways, this one is for you. Find Karen at ForaTravel.com on the accessibility page, or through her own brand, Joyward Travel.

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Ever heard "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all"? Turns out that's pretty solid marketing advice too. In this episode of The Art of Selling Travel Podcast, Glenda Beagle gets real about why the exact same words can land as supportive, sarcastic, or straight-up angry depending on the energy behind them, and why that matters more than most travel advisors realize when they sit down to write an email, record a video, or post on social.

She also breaks down why knowing your audience changes everything, with a story about writing a roast for her dad and uncle's 75th birthday while her cousin wrote a toast. Both worked, because both of them knew exactly who they were talking to and what they were there to do. Your marketing needs the same clarity. Who is it for? What's the intent? What do you want them to feel? If you can't answer those, no amount of money thrown at ads, agencies, or courses is going to fix it. And if you're paying someone to do your marketing and they've never asked you those questions, they're just taking your money.

What to do when your energy's off: gut check, wait a day if you need to, go for a walk, have a dance party, shake it out. Get to a place where you're focused on the who, the what, the intent, and the outcome before you create anything. That's how you make messaging that actually lands.

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Going viral is not the point.

In fact, it might actually hurt your travel business, and in this episode Glenda explains exactly why. She breaks down the four ways people actually make money on social media (view revenue, collaborations, affiliates, and selling your own product) and why only some of those matters for a travel advisor. If you are not grinding out ten videos a day for ad revenue, then vanity numbers are a distraction from the KPIs that actually move your business. 

She shares the story of a bakery that hired a "go viral" consultant and ended up posting content that is off-brand, uncomfortable, and makes you question their food handling, while other bakeries go viral simply because people love watching cake decorating. She also calls out the business coach who went viral once with a chin-up video and is now selling a course on how to do it (yet hasn't repeated it herself).

The lesson in both cases is the same. When your focus becomes going viral, you lose sight of who you are creating for, why you are creating, and what you are actually selling. You end up attracting the wrong audience and pushing away the people who would have bought from you.

Then comes the reframe that changes everything. That video with 100 views? That's 100 humans in a room, silent, giving you their full attention while you tell them a story. How often do you get that chance? On social media, you get it every single day. Captivate those 100 and the algorithm brings you 100 more. Glenda challenges you to stop asking "how do I go viral" and start asking "how can I connect with even one person so they know without question they are in the right place."

This is exactly what the Building an Audience workshop is about. Glenda is flipping the traditional awareness, evaluation, sales funnel into community, connection, conversion, and tackling the gremlins that tell you nobody wants to hear your voice. Join us September 22, 23, and 24, 2026 at artofsellingtravel.com/grow.

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Let's just get this out of the way: your email list is not a nice-to-have. It's not something you'll "get to eventually." It is the one digital asset you actually own, and if you're not building it, you're building your business on rented land.

In this episode I'm making the case (loudly) for why email needs to be a non-negotiable in your marketing, why social media alone could leave you stranded, and exactly what makes a good weekly email work.

Spoiler: it's three pieces, one story, and always a PS.

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If marketing feels like a slog, I promise you it's not because you suck at it.

It's because nobody talks about the foundations, they jump straight to the shiney objects and magic pills. Which is like building IKEA furniture with half the parts and no manual.

This week, I'm getting into why "free" marketing from your host agency is quietly costing you clients, why AI content is setting off alarm bells for your audience, whether you realize it or not, and why the "faceless" trend was always going to die (I called it back then too).

In this episode, I also talk about the marketing funnel and why most advisors have it backwards, and why I ditched AI for my own writing.

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River cruises aren't cancelled this year, they're adjusting, and that distinction matters more than most advisors are giving it credit for. In this episode Glenda breaks down how to actually talk to clients about water level disruptions, whether they're already booked or still deciding, without panicking them and without torching your own sales down the road. She uses her own backyard as the example: an Alberta town that went from drought warnings and lake level maps in March to 19 inches of rain by June, proof that conditions change fast and your messaging needs to be built for that reality, not for the panic of the moment.

Listen to Angela Hughes on YouTube on water levels: https://youtu.be/STjy91agNfs?si=7JNGysjyqR1P9_9n 

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Glenda opens with the mantra of the episode: never hit send while you're angry.

It comes out of a TASS coaching call, where an advisor did everything right on a river cruise inquiry (fast turnaround, custom research, a proposal built around what the clients actually wanted) only to find out they'd booked elsewhere. Stung by the loss, she fired off an email listing everything she'd done for them. It didn't land the way she hoped.

Glenda unpacks what happened next: how to repair a client relationship after an emotional reaction, why the word "disappointed" does more work than anger ever will, and why the fix isn't about being right, it's about being the adult in the room.

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