Beyond The Bookings: 2021 Travel Marketing Planner

Aim

We have created the ultimate 2021 travel agent planner, to help UK travel businesses better plan their social media and maketing strategy.

Hello! We are Mia and Kate, two UK travel business owners with a background in marketing before we launched our careers in travel.

Like so many in our wonderful industry, our own travel businesses have been impacted beyond comprehension by COVID-19, and we understand the immense pressure and stress that every person in the travel industry is under right now. 

Specifically, within the travel industry 12,000 jobs have already been lost and a report by ABTA suggests that a further 75,000 jobs are also at risk. Travel has proven itself a resilient industry and one that will bounce back over time, but in the mean time job losses are rife, particularly in sales and marketing roles, which means marketing support for small independent travel agents struggling to survive is vastly reduced.

At the same time, the number of travel agents facing redundancy and moving to a self-employed set-up is growing, and these are the people that need marketing support more than ever to get their new businesses off the ground.

As frontline travel business owners, and with our own experience in marketing, we wanted to create a resource to help independent travel agents plan and execute effective social media and marketing plans for their businesses. 'Beyond The Bookings' was born.

Beyond The Bookings' is an A4 day-per-view printed desk planner and journal, which will help independent travel businesses in the UK to create and schedule consistent, impactful social media content throughout 2021. 

This unique journal includes:

• Important key-dates and seasonal sales focus periods specific for the UK outbound travel industry.
• International and National dates of interest including events, holidays, celebrations and occasions for destinations around the world.
• Hundreds of National Awareness Days that can be used to anchor relevant business content and messaging.
• Goal setting pages, social media monthly planning templates, and prompts to help business owners craft their own content plans and execute them with their own unique tone-of-voice and brand styling. 
• Other invaluable information such as currency tables, embassy and airline contact information, and key supplier contacts to help agents find the correct information quickly and easily. 

The journal will retail at £34.99 and will be available for travel agents in the UK to pre-order from Wednesday 9th September 2020. We aim to have printed planners with our members by early December 2021. 

We are fund raising for this new venture, with a view to cover the cost of the initial minimum print-run of the planner which will cost £3,000 to produce.

Working with travel partners

Our goal is for this to become the must-have marketing desk planner for all travel agents in the UK. With this in mind, we hope to include the details and key events for as many holiday operators and travel suppliers within the planner as possible.

We are now accepting sponsorship for Beyond The Bookings for independent agent travel partners who wish to be included. There are several tiers of sponsorship or support as follows:

1. Full Partner - £500 contribution

Full sponsors will be invited to include up to 10 of their own events within the planner (conferences, training events, brochure release dates, competitions or any other significant dates for the business), and will be included within the Travel Contacts Glossary. Full sponsors will also be invited to share bespoke content within our monthly support newsletter and closed members-only Facebook page for journal owners.

2. Named Sponsor - £150 contribution 

Named sponsors will have their travel business contact details included in the Travel Contacts Glossary, so that travel agents can quickly find and contact them.

3. Supporter – optional donation

We welcome any further contributions from any business or individual who wishes to support this venture. Supporters will be listed on our website as a huge thanks for their valued donation.  

We really hope that Beyond The Bookings will be a positive initiative within the travel industry, and will help agents and operators alike to rebuild their businesses in 2021. Thank you so much for reading and we are so appreciative for each and every contribution towards this venture.

This project successfully funded on 21st October 2020