93 -Travel Update

My travel agency is a very small side-hustle.  I started it for a couple of reasons:

1. I love to travel

2. I was traveling a lot and wondered if I could offset some costs with Travel Agent commissions.  It’s also a fantastic tax shelter.

3. I want to work with travel companies like cruise lines, hotel chains, and airlines in my lean and leadership consulting businesses


You’ll notice that I didn’t include “make lots of money.”

Still, to learn the business, you have to DO the work.  I have booked a couple of dozen vacations for people - mostly cruises, but several land vacations for people.  I find it fun but it’s pretty time consuming to do the research and then get the booking done and make sure every client is treated as if they are my only client.

Of course, this year destroyed the travel industry.  Cruise lines have been anchored since March.  One of the last things I did before the pandemic really hit was a Ship Inspection of the Disney Magic cruise ship in Port Canaveral.  Yes, travel advisors get to do ship inspections, which for us are really just familiarization tours of ships.

Because my business is small, I have not had to cancel a hundred vacations for people - just a few.  Yesterday I had to cancel a European river cruise for a client after Avalon Waterways, following global health guidelines, suspended all cruises through the end of the year.

Now, with United and American laying off 38,000 employees and Disney having to cut 28,000 mostly from California Theme Park operations,

And now with the early aid money gone, more and more suppliers of travel products on on the brink of disappearing.

But in speaking to both Carnival Cruise Lines and with Globus, which operates Avalon Waterways, and with people in general, there is still demand for traveling, but its bottled up right now.

What that tells me is that when the pandemic lifts, there’s going to be a huge opportunity to take advantage of that pent up demand. 

If you think you might want to get into this business, send me a message and I’ll walk you through how I did it and get you hooked up with my Host Agency - which really makes it easy and very cheap to get started.

For the next few travel updates, I’m thinking about profiling particular places or suppliers.  I can show some pictures and video if I do this through zoom.  I want to offer more luxury vacations, so I’ll likely focus on small ship and expedition cruising, river cruising globally, and some other places that offer unique experiences.

If you want to plan a vacation for late 2021 or 2022, they are all booking now and I’d be happy to find something special for you.  You can reach me at David.veech@clandestinetravel.com.

Have a great day and I’ll see you tomorrow.