How Travel Advisors Leverage the Travel Calendar to Their Advantage

September is here! My kids are back in school, my wife, Jillian, and I are prepping for a whole lot of fall football games to see our girls, and across the network we’re all getting ready for... Wave Season?

Before you read another paragraph, I have a directive for the travel advisors: open your notes app or grab a sheet of paper and write down the names of fifteen households that could take a meaningful trip in 2027. I am serious, just think through the people you already know.

Include that family that keeps mentioning an all-inclusive, the couple who has always wanted to see Italy, the grandparents considering one big multigenerational trip, or the client who came home six months ago and has gone quiet since.

I am calling this your “Fall Fifteen” list.

Now choose the first five names and ask them one question this week:

“If you could put one trip on the calendar for next year or even the year after, what would it be?”

You don’t need a promotion (but there are some good ones) or a supplier brochure. Your job right now is to find out where their imagination is already headed.

Why I Am Asking You to Start Now

I used to think about Wave Season the same way most people in travel did. The snoozy holidays wrapped up and January arrived with offers from cruise lines and the freezing winter temps got people thinking about traveling somewhere warm. Clients started calling, and the first quarter became a sprint to spring break. The rhythm has been changing, and the Wave Season we once knew almost isn’t recognizable anymore.

The cruise booking window is now about nine months, roughly two months longer than it was before the pandemic. One industry analyst described Wave Season as moving so far into the holiday season that it is beginning to feel closer to Halloween itself.

Beyond cruising we find the same behavior. The consulting firm McKinsey studied this and saw hotel, airline, and cruise bookings jump on Travel Tuesday, while search interest in the event grew more than fivefold in two years. Last fall, resorts and tour operators were launching major promotions in early November, and some were out before Halloween.

Clients are making next year’s travel decisions earlier.

Your Client Has One Calendar, Unfortunately

Until some miraculous advancement in technology arrives that allows to clone our best clients or invents a time machine, they only have so much time to travel. Cruise lines, hotels, and tour operators will flood the market with advertisements and offers, but your client simply sees a lot of attractive destinations and experiences all competing for the same vacation days and the same dollars.

If a family deposits an escorted tour of Italy in November, the wonderful cruise offer that appears in January will have arrived too late. Their big trip is already on the calendar.

Your focus as we approach an ever-earlier Wave Season is to start the conversation ahead of the ahead of the Black Friday offers, ahead of the year-end promotions, and ahead of the January sales. Your focus is to be an influencer, not an order taker!

As an advisor, you can be in a much more valuable position than the company sending the first sale email—if you start early. You can begin the conversation before urgency takes over. You can help the client compare a cruise with a resort, an escorted tour with a custom itinerary, or one expensive trip with two shorter ones. You have time to ask better questions because nobody is staring at the countdown clock yet.

Four Things to Learn Before November

For each person on your Fall Fifteen list, try to learn four things:

• Who is likely to travel?
• What destination or kind of experience keeps coming up?
• Which dates could realistically work?
• What investment would feel comfortable?

Set the expectation that there will likely be a flurry of offers from around the industry and you can help your clients make sense of them. This is a signal that they can safely turn off their travel antennae (from competing booking channels) and you are there to filter the noise.

As we move through the fall and into the thick of Wave Season, keep the conversation warm, and get closer to specifics and defined yesses. Better conversations build better client relationships, pure and simple.

Start with Five

Fifteen names may feel like a lot, so start with five conversations this week. Send a text, make a call, write a personal email (include a past detail so it feels personal), or write a handwritten note. If you’re sending an email or mailing a card, follow a few days later with a call. Ask the question and listen.

Wave Season is stretching backward, and the best-prepared advisors will enter the holidays with real client conversations already underway. They will know who wants to travel, what those clients are hoping to do, and which offers are actually worth bringing to them.

The promotions can arrive whenever they will, but you’ll be ready because your Wave Season starts with those first five conversations.