We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jennifer Meers a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Jennifer, thanks for joining us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.
Seeing the world is so important to me, and making sure others get to see it as well is something I’m quite passionate about. I think many travel agents would tell you they love to travel, but most do it all from a cabin on a large cruise ship. Ports of call for 4-6 hours is the bulk of travel they experience. And, they are quite great at selling this exact same experience to their clients. Cruises are easy to sell. They take very little work. For most travel agents, cruise sells are most, if not all, of their business. To me, that isn’t travel. There’s no time or opportunity to dig into the beauty and culture of a place before you’re herded back onto the ship to set sail for the next destination. I encourage my clients to travel by land most of the time. Cruises have their place, no doubt, but land travel is where the magic is, in my opinion. As a travel planner, I create itineraries that are customized specifically for each of my clients. I select city-center hotels myself so that my clients are walking distance to the main attractions. I make sure they get at least 2-4 nights in each town before moving on to the next. I add in varied experiences such as food and wine tours, bicycle tours, cooking classes, kayaking or catamaran experiences, atv adventures, guided museum tours, castle or cathedral visits, etc so that no day looks like the one before or after it. These experiences are what create the memories that last a lifetime. They’re the most important part of the itinerary. I do not consider the commission amount for any portion of a client’s trip as I’m in the planning process. I know full well that if the trip is epic, and my clients get the chance to truly fall in love with the beautiful destinations they visit, the commission will take care of itself in repeat clients and referrals. In my experience, this method is not only successful from a business model perspective, but it also beautifully feeds my passion for sharing the world with others.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I am the owner and one of the travel planners for Jennifer Meers & Associates- Dream Vacations. I’ve been in the travel industry for almost 9 years and have owned my franchise for 2.5 years of that time. My team has grown quite a bit this year, there are now 8 associates from all over the US working with me. We all plan all types of travel, but we also have areas of travel we are especially passionate about. Several of my team specialize in luxury travel, some in US travel, others in family travel, and we also have our own Disney guru. My personal passion is international travel. Specifically Europe, lately, though I intend to branch out to Africa and Asia a bit more in the coming year. My team knows that the best way to be the most effective and knowledgeable travel planner is to actually get out there and travel. That is a huge priority for each of us and sets us apart from others in our field.
Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.
I was a teacher in my past life and left my career to raise my babies. I was home for 11 years pouring into them and loving every minute of it. Once my youngest headed to school, I wanted to do something productive, but teaching at the elementary level again was not it. I learned of a company hiring travel planners to work from home and that really excited me. I joined his team as a Southern European travel specialist. I absolutely LOVED this job! I loved trip planning and I loved working with my European suppliers who even became friends. After a few years of this, I was asked to teach travel and tourism management in a high school. I wrote the curriculum for the program and even got to escort the students overseas a few times. My family moved to a city that didn’t offer this course a few years later, so I taught other family consumer science courses instead. I was badly missing the travel industry so after a few years I began looking into how I could get back into the field I am so very passionate about. Though I loved working as a planner for the previous company, I knew I’d outgrown my potential there. I did a lot of research and decided that buying a Dream Vacations franchise was the perfect choice for me. I made this decision shortly after COVID and with no client list, so I thought it would really be a slow start. So, I continued teaching while treating my business as a side hustle. As this was something that was so very important to me and something that I was truly passionate about, what I thought might take years to build took merely months before it was booming. Booming in such a way that I could no longer do both jobs. The travel business very quickly surpassed the teaching job in both time required and income earned. 9 months after purchasing my franchise and side hustle, I had to quit my teaching job because my side had most definitely become my main. It took off and just continues to grow. It’s been a huge blessing to watch.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
FOMO. The fear of missing out. I traveled and I posted the pictures on my social media. I traveled more and I posted more. Though my audience isn’t huge, I had their full attention. Though they may not interact much or at all, they began telling people talking about travel what they saw on my page. I’ve found that people want to see us actually in the photos, too. The analytics show that a post of just the beautiful places we visit reach a number of people, but photos of us actually in the beautiful places reach thousands. The destination only pictures can look like stock photos from google. The slightly amateur, authentic photos with our team members in them show people that not only are we in these places, but that they could be there too. For the first year, facebook was responsible for about 94% of my sales. Now, the bulk is word of mouth/client referrals, but social media remains very important and I imagine always will be. I regularly get calls and emails from people who were referred to me by someone silently stalking my facebook page.
Contact Info:
- Website: JMEERS.DREAMVACATIONS.COM
- Instagram: @jenn_dreamvacations
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JenniferMeersAndAssociatesDreamVacations?mibextid=LQQJ4d