1 The Riches are in the Niches: Betsy Ball, Euro Travel Coach

This podcast is brought to you by Travel Beyond the Obvious, where we train travel planners to turn their locale knowledge into money. You can watch 3-minute samples from any of our courses for free on our site.
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In this episode Madeline interviews established destination expert and TBO graduate Betsy Ball about how she started her successful travel planning business Euro Travel Coach, how she built up her expertise, how she gets clients, and how she plans her trips.

Mentioned in this podcast
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Euro Travel Coach
To contact Betsy about planning your bucket list European trip, go to eurotravelcoach.com.

World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms
wwoof.net

WorkAway
www.workaway.info

Trusted Housesitters
trustedhousesitters.com

Italy Beyond the Obvious - Italy trips planned to perfection
italybeyondtheobvious.com

Free Consultation
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If you're thinking about starting your own travel planning business, or want Madeline to help you plan a bucket-list Italian holiday, you can schedule a free consultation here:
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Transcript

spk_0:   0:10
Hi. This is Madeline Jhawar with the Travel Business Owners podcast that helps travelpreneurs grow their own travel business. If you want to make six figures planning custom bucket list trips for travelers and you know a local or destination like the back of your hand, listen to this podcast - it will show you how to turn your knowledge into money. Our guests include successful travel business owners who talk about how they've been able to succeed, as well as business experts and advisors who can help you grow your business as a travel planner. If you're curious whether our lessons will help you, visit us at TravelBeyondtheObvious.com and check out free samples from every one of our training videos. Today we're talking with Betsy Ball, one of our first graduates and the owner of Euro Travel Coach, a successful travel planning company that sets up custom trips to most of Europe. Hi, Betsy.

spk_1:   0:58
Hi, Madeline. I'm glad to be here. Thank you for making the time. I wanted to talk to you about your owner being an owner of a travel business and how you started Euro Travel Coach, and we'll get into some fun travel stories. Why don't you start by telling us a little bit about your background, your professional background and what you did before you started your own travel coaching business.

spk_1:   1:26
Sure, I'll be glad to. I taught international business at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas for 15 years. My husband had been teaching there for 27 years. He taught music, and we surprisingly found out that we could retire from the university a little earlier than expected. And so we decided to do that because we love to travel and knew that we wanted to do something new. We'd been in Texas for a long time, and we were ready for the for the next phase of our lives in our career. When I was teaching at the university, I took a lot of students abroad, so I took students to Ireland, Spain, Australia, Canada, and that was one of the most rewarding parts of my experience as a professor at the university was to take those students and exposed them to new cultures and give them an opportunity to see the world. And I have always always loved so much traveling with my family, and I plan many, many a trip, and people have been telling me for a really long time that I should start a travel company And so when we decided to retire from teaching, it was sort of a natural transition. So I figured it out from there and just kind of started. Looking at what could I do to help other people travel specifically to Europe? And how could I make a living doing that?

spk_0:   3:14
And that might be when you found me. 

spk_1:   3:20
That's exactly when I found you because I was looking for other companies that were already doing it. I wanted to sort of model myself after those successful business models. I taught business, have a really good business background. It's just I know a lot of really great entrepreneurs, but this was sort of my first attempt at at doing something on my own like this. So I wanted to see what other people were doing, and I did. I found you and I was super impressed. There was an article that you wrote, a blog on Tbex, I believe. And I found that article about being a travel planner and charging fees in order to help people plan great trips and create great itineraries. And it's like, Okay, I think I could do that. And I sort of took it from there. You were very generous to help me figure that out.

spk_0:   4:20
Well, as you know, I'm so excited. I think that fee for service custom travel planning is a huge opportunity. And a lot of our customers don't know that it exists. You know, our potential customers are like, Wait a minute, that's a thing. Who else does what you do for other countries? 

spk_1:   4:44
Exactly. I get that a lot from people who find me and they think it's going to be the business model that we expect from a travel agent where they are earning their living through commissions. And this is a different thing because we could be so custom and so specific so the guests were not limited to a portfolio, we're gonna be able to make money from we can do whatever. It's gonna be best for the client. It's great.

spk_0:   5:14
Yeah. People really appreciate it. So let's paint the picture of your world a little bit. Tell us a couple of fun stories? Let's start with what was the best trip that you ever ran or one of your favorites?

spk_1:   5:29
We create custom itineraries, but we also lead small group trips, so we have a couple different revenue streams. So which one do you want me to tell you about it?

spk_0:   5:46
Pick, I mean, maybe a trip that you were on.

spk_1:   5:51
We developed an itinerary for Tuscany. And we decided that we wanted to travel with a very limited number of people. So we invited 10 guests to come and stay at a villa outside of Montelpulciano with us. And these were all folks who love food, love wine. But we're just completely romanced by Italy. And it was just so great. To have us all together in this one place. It was it was a really, really great trip because we tried very hard to combine opportunities to go to different towns and meet with local guides and have a tour of the city. We went to Assissi and and Marco was just a fantastic guy, showed us all over. He told us about the history and the buildings and the churches, and I mean the food. And he was just fantastic. And then he also took us to Orvieto, where he did the same. We liked Orvieto even better than Assissi. And then we had another guide in Sienna. But we also had our daughter, who is also part of our company. She studied hospitality in university, and when she graduated, she won a scholarship to go on a wine tour. Her focus was beverage management. And so, this wine tour, she got to travel for six weeks to California, France and Italy and visit wineries during harvest. Wow. Yeah, I know. Really totally jealous. She developed relationships with these wineries. So it was fantastic because we got to go to Silvio Nardi, which is a beautiful Brunello producer when she was there, she got to stay overnight there. But we went and we had a beautiful luncheon on their on their porch overlooking the vineyard. And because they knew Chelsea and had a relationship they just treated us beautifully, and that was just amazing. Fantastic. That was really great.

spk_0:   8:25
Amazing. Tell us which destinations I know you do. Europe. How many countries and how many destinations do you guys do?

spk_1:   8:40
Well, this was interesting, because when we started, I had the most experience in Italy, France and Ireland. In trying to learn how to create this business probably the biggest challenge I had was and still is the website and learning about search engine optimization and trying to make trying to help people find me on Google. Well, so what I read was that the riches are in the niches, you're supposed to have a very niche kind of a business so that people can find you. And you're not always competing against Trip Advisor. And it isn't all the other big guns out there. So I was trying to focus on Italy, France and Ireland because that's where I had the most experience. But our first itinerary was for Austria. Somebody asked me if I could create an itinerary for Austria, and I talked to them about what they wanted. And I have certainly travelled in Austria, I just don't have as much experience as I do elsewhere. But we made a great trip for them. They wanted to go to Salzburg. They wanted to go to Vienna. They just wanted to experience some of the things same things that we had experienced there. And so we built a great trip for them. And so after that, another request was someone who took a cruise from Basel to Amsterdam. And they wanted to spend some time in Switzerland and then some time in Amsterdam, on either end of their cruise, and they asked, could we create itineraries for them for before and after their cruise? And I mean we could, we knew Zurich, we knew Amsterdam. So we said, absolutely, we can do that. Different opportunities came up that weren't in the places that we thought they would be, but we could still do it. And so then it becomes, well, you know, we can do that. We can create fantastic trips for people in lots of different places in Europe, and the last three years since we retired, we've been traveling nine months of the year in Europe. So we continue to learn more and more about all these destinations and exploring new places for our clients so that we can help them travel too. You know, we like non-touristy things and touristy things, but it's great to go to places that are not quite so heavily trafficked. And so we're exploring those places for our clients. So it's been really good. So we haven't been asked to create an itinerary for a place that we haven't been able to do a good job for. So does that make make sense? 

spk_0:   0:00
Absolutely! I think you've hit upon a couple of really important points there. Oh, and I love this thing. What did you say? The riches are in the niches. I love that. Yeah, because in our Travel Beyond the Obvious course that you've participated in we do talk about being a destination expert, and you know exactly what you said about showcasing your expertise through and having customers find you because they're looking for information about a specific niche, and Europe can be a niche. And as I said,you're  delivering what the customer wants and you're doing it based on places you've been. Why don't you talk a little bit of actually about your lifestyle? Because I know  you're traveling nine months, and you've shared this a little bit with me, but tell everyone how you managed to travel for nine months and what your approach has been.

spk_1:   12:36
Sure! Well, when we when we decided to do this I knew that we wouldn't be able to just afford to stay anyplace we wanted to any time we wanted to. We taught at the University, we don't have an unlimited budget, but we explored different options and found that you can participate in something called work away or wwoofing.  "Wwoofing" is short for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms and our  real goal was because we were teaching at a university, we really, really wanted to participate in a harvest. We wanted to pick grapes during a harvest, and we absolutely loved the Piedmont area in Italy. We love Barolo wine, and we were very specific and wanted to pick grapes in Piedmont, and we had never been able to participate in the harvest cause we were always teaching. But we have learned a lot about wine. We have certifications in wine. We've studied wine, we've had a lot of wine to drink, and we really wanted to pick grapes. And so we looked into wwoofing and found a new organic winery in Dogliani, in the Piedmont region. And we went there for a month, our first year of travel and picked grapes. And then because it's a farm, once the grapes were picked on their pressed and they're fermenting. Then there are other things to do around the farm. So we did everything from stacking wood to cracking nuts to baking bread, to picking grape leaves to planting vines, anything that was needed on the farm, so that's where it sort of started. And then, in order to continue that, we also have done work away, which is quite similar. But it's not necessarily on an organic farm like this. It can be anything. We have renovated kitchens. My husband helped renovate a kitchen in the Lake District in England, and my job there was to scrape paint off of a fireplace, which actually was very rewarding. Took me four days, but I finally got most of it off. It was great. And let's see way worked on a lovely piece of land, it wasn't exactly a farm, but some folks have a bed and breakfast, and some  beautiful land by a river near Kilkenny in Ireland. And we pulled up a chicken coop and did some painting and just basically anything that they needed us to do. We even worked at a thatched cottage in the new forest in England, and this was a really interesting place. There was a bed and breakfast, and they served tea, but they also had a gin bar. So I ended up working the gin bar and it was awesome.

spk_0:   0:00
Oh, amazing. And so people just post things that they need, and if you have the skills, you just apply and you get room and board, or you room in dexchange for work, or ?

spk_1:   16:05
Every single one is different. But yeah basically, the setup is room and board and the typical setup is you're expected to work four or five hours a day for five days a week, about 20 hours, 20 to 25 hours a week, and then you get room and board for that, and then the rest of the time is your own. But you get to meet people that you would never meet otherwise. And you get to stay in places that are way off the beaten track, like when we were in Ireland. My husband's a musician, and we got to go to traditional Irish music sessions with the woman who owned this place, and she was incredible. It was incredible. We'd never would have gone there in a 1,000,000 years, and it was just amazing. They were fantastic musicians that way. Anyway, we just loved it. It was great.

spk_0:   16:57
So you're working five hours a day and some of this sounds like backbreaking work like you. It's like you have to be in decent shape to do this.

spk_1:   17:07
It depends on the job. It depends on the job. Like pulling up the chicken coop, that was kind of that was kind of,physical. But it was good, you're outside and with people, and that's good.

spk_0:   17:20
And then with the rest of the time, you're building your travel business.That's exactly right. Yeah. And the accommodations are different in each place. We're we're older. We're in our fifties, and I do have certain things that I look for when I'm looking for one of these positions. You're volunteering, but I like to have my own room. I don't have to have my own bathroom, I like it if we can share our rooms. But sometimes in Ireland we had our own little cottage with a kitchen and everything.   

spk_0:   0:00
Is your daughter coming with you as well for these?  

spk_1:   18:01
Not for these. When we lead our small group trips, she comes and then she also does all she writes blogs for us. She helps me with all of the bookings and with all of the itinerary planning. And she's really great for that.

spk_0:   18:19
It's incredible. What a great way, we do talk about in the course that it takes a while to set up a business like this, you've got to lay the foundations. That's an online business, right? So you've got to have a presence online that when people google you there, they find something. You've got to learn about S E O and create content which might not be indexed for a few months. You've got to think about your customer and your fees, and your services. And it's not something that you just put up overnight and you start getting customers. So it's amazing to have to do it kind of slowly and consistently while you're also having experiences. That then as you said, allow you to plan even more destinations for your customers, so it's kind of the ideal approach.

spk_1:   19:11
We have really enjoyed it. I want to mention one more thing that we've done to extend our travel budget, too, because we really enjoy watching people's homes and their pets. So there is a website called Trusted House Sitters, and there are other websites out there. But that's the one that we have used. And these are people who need someone to come into their home and take care of their dog or cat or their chickens or whatever they may have and their home while they're away. So we've had some fantastic experiences doing that. We stayed in a converted convent. A family went to France skiing, and this converted convent was about an hour south of London, and we were there for three weeks, walking their dogs every day. They let us use their National Trust passes so we could go visit the parks in the area. They let us use their cars. They can't always do that, but they were able to put us on their insurance, so they let us use their car. We stayed in their home, and it was just amazing.

spk_0:   20:18
Incredible. And how many dogs were you looking after?

spk_1:   20:22
Two. I think the most we've ever done is two.

spk_0:   20:25
That's totally doable. It's not taking over a farm.

spk_1:   20:29
No, no, no, no. I mean, some of them are, but that probably wouldn't be the best fit for us.

spk_0:   20:34
Right, right. That's amazing. You're kind of the ideal person to do this travel business because you've got the passion. But as we know, passion is not enough.

spk_1:   20:45
Right?  

spk_0:   20:47
You've got the experience. You've got the flexibility you've got the skills and as you said, you have a very strong business background, which is super important. You're solving people's problems.

spk_1:   21:04
Exactly! I find that we have two sets of customers for the most part. One set of customers are folks who are very time poor. So they love to travel. They know where they want to go. But they just don't have time to spend planning a trip because planning a trip, as we know, takes a lot of hours and a lot of research and if you're doing it on your own, it's just it's gonna take a long, long time. So for those folks who are time poor, but they have some money that they can pay someone else to do the job for them. That's one set of customer, the other set of customers that we have. I think we have some of these folks because of our study abroad experiences when we were teaching at the university. Some folks have never traveled to Europe, and they they just don't really know where to start. And I love those folks. I can help them. They might have traveled a lot in the U. S. Air in Canada. It's not that they've never traveled before. They don't know what they're doing, but they're just not quite sure. How do I manage the language? Can I really take a train? You know, you know what kinds of things do I need to be sure to see when I'm in Salzburg, so we can sort all of that out for them and make it super easy. And then they don't have to be intimidated by going someplace that's not quite in their company zone. We can. We can help them be more comfortable so that they can have an amazing experience.

spk_0:   22:42
And people tend to get tripped up or or intimidated by the little things, too, like a different currency or a big time difference. You know, a three hour time difference in the US is not a big deal, and people might be used to that. But then they go to Europe or wherever, and it's, you know, eight hours, nine hours, 12 hours and you really have to accommodate for that. You can't just like land and get the ground running.

spk_1:   0:00
Right, that's exactly right. And we can we can prepare them for that. So it's been a lot of fun. As I said, we love taking students abroad, and that was amazing. But this is really fun to help people travel who don't have to have that academic portion attached to it. There just there to really experience it and have a good time. We don't have to, you know, have an exam at the end of the day. It's great, right?

spk_0:   23:31
Right, Right. Bonus. Right. So do you have any advice to anyone who wants to start their own travel business? Maybe they're in the same boat as you. Where they were kind of doing it anyway, they have the passion, what advice would you have to someone who might want to get into the travel industry?

spk_1:   23:53
I would say learn about the website and how to create it in a way that is going to be appealing to people who are going to find you. I think for me, that's been the biggest challenge. And it takes some time to get to this point. I'm I'm not one to spend a lot of money initially on something, I tried to do as much as I possibly could. I did as much DIY as I possibly could. But at a certain point, if you can hire an expert to help you, it can make a really big difference. Because I hired an SEO expert, and that has made a big difference in our ability to attract people to our site. And I took your course, which was amazing because it gave me processes. I was already doing some things but I didn't have a process. And so having that process has made me much, much more efficient, and I was not even aware of all the tools that are available. I had no frame of reference for what would be the best tool to use, what would be the best investment in the tool? And so using Access as an itinerary planning for our clients has made a world of difference in our ability to put together our itineraries and then share it with our clients. And I don't know that I would ever would have found that if it hadn't been for your course. So it's been great.

spk_0:   25:32
Good, good. Yeah. I'm thrilled that you've had a positive experience with the course. My goal is to make people successful in this new industry, and the course is the way I'm trying to do that. I find it's like what you said about working efficiently and using the tools. It's kind of like "new level new devil" type, you know, right, like it doesn't matter until you have lots of clients. When you start, you're like, Well, I have everything in my head. I don't need these tools, just checklists and processes. And then you get to a point where you do not have everything in your head and you cannot and you should not. And also, you've got a lot of people doing this or solopreneurs. And you've got this, the other people in your team. So you do actually need to know who's doing what and when and by when and how. And so you do need that system. And I think that's that's the secret. I think it's the secret sauce. Is is the system and the process? 

spk_1:   26:33
I agree. I totally agree. I just don't want to drop any balls. I want to make sure that I'm taking care of my clients every step of the way. And having a system to follow helps me do that. It makes me more comfortable in what I'm doing. So it's very helpful. So my advice would be when you when? When you can, if there's something that but you either don't like or maybe it's not your strength, if you can hire someone to help you do it, then that can be a very good investment..

spk_0:   27:12
Thank you. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

spk_1:   27:21
Anything else I would like to add? I just love sharing different cultures with different people because I think as we understand the world, we can all get along better, and I think that's a good thing. So I'm thrilled to be able to do that for some people.

spk_0:   27:40
100%, less us versus them. I 100% agree on that one. Well, Betsy, this has been so fun. Thank you so much for being our very first guest on the Travel Business Owners Podcast, we really appreciate it. And we will catch up soon in the Travel Beyond the Obvious Facebook group.

spk_1:   28:07
Perfect, I love it. Thank you, Madeline.

spk_0:   28:09
Thank you!

spk_1:   28:11
Ciao!

spk_0:   28:16
Thanks for listening to the  Travel Business Owners Podcast. We really appreciate your support. You can find links to anything we mentioned during the podcast in the notes below and we've also linked our company, Travel Beyond the Obvious as well. We an eight-lesson  course on how to start and build your own travel business with free samples from every lesson so you can see what they're like. And finally, please, if you liked this podcast, subscribe to our channel and give us feedback below about other topics you'd like us to cover in future episodes. Remember, our only mission is to make business owners like you wildly successful. Thank you again for listening.