This week, my company provided me with the amazing opportunity to attend the Travel Leaders Network International Conference. From Sunday, April 30 through Thursday, May 4, I was in Orlando learning about sales techniques and technology that our travel agents can use to grow their business.
The reason I wanted to attend this conference in particular is because I haven’t truly engaged myself in the travel industry. All the training events and conferences that I attend are in the WordPress development space. To be able to better serve our travel agents and to get a grasp on what their day-to-day looks like, I asked to attend the TLN conference.
My top three personal takeaways/benefits include discovering some of the exceptional people within our industry, developing new goals for myself and my team, and getting exposure within the travel industry and with our travel agents.
I have intentions of following up with a handful of people in a week or so because they had such a big impact on my time at the conference and will continue to influence my decisions and career direction. The new goals I’ve developed are either based on a conversations I had or came to me after being exposed to great innovators in the industry. The other major benefit of my attendance was getting to have face time with these great innovators. Being able to build relationships with agents and suppliers is very rewarding. Typically, I don’t have a lot of interaction with our agents, so being able to ask them how our tools are helping them or where they can be improved was an amazing opportunity.
The experience I had at the Travel Leaders Network Conference this year is only the beginning of my engagement in the travel industry. I have no doubt that my involvement will increase in the future so that I can better serve our agents and suppliers.