Still in Her 20s, Molly Murphy Follows Her Own Business Plan at Her Own Agency

When hiring a new travel agent, some agencies look for sales experience, and some look for travel industry experience. But Molly Murphy owes her career to National Travel’s Ted Lawson, who appreciated her pluck and attention to detail, and took a chance on a 21-year-old applicant who had neither sales nor travel industry experience. All Murphy had to offer was that she just plain loves to travel.

The HR pundits call that a recipe for disaster — but Lawson’s faith paid off big-time. The agency’s youngest hire ever, Murphy soon was among its top five producers, with gross sales over $500,000 — and sometimes over $1 million — in every one of the four years she worked there. 

Then two years ago, when her husband’s job moved them to Michigan, Murphy decided to take the leap and launch her own agency: Vitamin T Vacations (because, she says, travel is like a vitamin), in Auburn Hills.

Eighteen months later, and still under 30 years of age, she has never looked back. With no advertising budget, her business depends solely on referrals from past customers and leads from her Avoya host network. In the past month, four new clients came on board.

Murphy says about 75% of her clients are Millennials like her. She thanks her lucky stars for her very first client in Michigan, a hairdresser for whom she planned a honeymoon at the Eldorado on Mexico’s Riviera Maya; the bride was so impressed with Murphy’s attention to detail that she has sent along a steady stream of brides-to-be who have sat in her salon chair and listened to her recommendations.

While the leads she gets from Avoya tend toward river cruisers to Europe (in which niche she has certification), Muphy’s 20-something personal clients book mostly honeymoons and destination weddings, traveling on smaller budgets and looking more for trains and Airbnbs when they cross the ocean. But they also tend to book all-inclusive resorts in Mexico and the Caribbean, where the booking window is much shorter than that of river cruises; that means commissions come in more quickly, and that’s helpful to a new travel agency, where cash flow is tight.

Millennials tend to “research what they want to see and then come to me to help them build their best trip around that,” Murphy says. But high-end or low-end, all of her clients get her undivided, and almost unlimited, attention.

(Murphy believes that a river cruise is a wonderful experience for a Millennial, she noted, especially for a “mom and daughter or grandma experience – it’s just so stress-free; it gives you a real opportunity to connect with the person you are with.”)

The long-term view
When you’re a 20-something agent with 20-something customers, the focus is on the future — and the customer is always right. She never pushes preferred suppliers; when a client wanted to see Europe for two months, for example, “I could have just recommended a tour, but instead, I planned it piece by piece, the trains and the B&Bs, as well as the airlines and hotels.”

And while Murphy is comfortable with technology, she has not gone paperless. Still fresh in her mind is the memory of her own excitement when she booked her very first cruise, and the travel agent hand-delivered her documents, came in and sat down, and went over all the details face to face.

“I try to follow through with that now; even if they want me to email the documents, I’ve been making llama and cactus and pineapple bags, and putting in luggage tags and my business card, and actually trying to deliver them, or having them call me when it arrives so we can go over everything. It makes it so much more exciting than saying, ‘Here are your documents, print them out,’” she says.

And in keeping with the theme of getting rid of plastic that was highlighted on the recent Tourism Cares trip she attended, she is sending stainless steel tumblers and straws to special clients, with a note saying, “To help save the local environment, please take these along and keep your drinks cold on the beach.”

“It’s well worth the five or ten dollars it costs when they refer me to a new client, and come back themselves,” she says.

A little background
Murphy’s love of travel started when she saw “The Rescuers Down Under,” an animated movie, as a child. She decided there and then to go to Australia — and summering with her parents on an island in Canada just stoked that “passion to visit areas that aren’t well known.”

She worked for five years as a waitress to save up the money. And in college, she got an internship with The Wilderness Society in Sydney for the summer, where her job entailed wearing a koala suit to protest the mistreatment of animals.

When she returned, she went right to her college’s Study Abroad office and signed up for a semester at the University of Ulster in Ireland. “I traveled alone and met incredible people; and when I came back and graduated, I thought, ‘What can I do to keep traveling?’” A job posting from National Travel caught her eye — and her tales of backpacking through Scandinavia, planning every detail and every train, finally convinced Lawson (after three interviews) to take a chance on her.

In Michigan, Murphy started her agency the way she started her solo trips: Doing the legwork and getting the details right. “I did so much research before I started; I had all my ducks in a row, my E&O insurance, and my host agency,” she said. “With so many opportunities ahead, I wanted to do it right from the start.”

And indeed, the experience has been largely what she expected. Between the startup costs and the small book of business to start, “I knew it would be a struggle, but in 18 months I’ve had so many referrals, it’s been amazing,” she said. And starting slow has given her a little extra time “to make sure each client is taken care of, to look over every itinerary and quote, to talk to clients, so those extra referrals come back to me.”

She expects to gross close to $250,000 in 2019 — not as much as at National Travel, but pretty good for a job working at home, with the freedom to see the world and build her knowledge base, and with many years ahead in her own business.

2019 agenda
Murphy clearly understands the importance of selling what you know — and she is loving being able to choose the trips she wants to take. In 2019, she chose Tourism Cares for Puerto Rico (in addition to giving back and networking, “so many clients cruise from there, and it really helps me to give them personal recommendations”); CruiseWorld’s Star Program, to which she has been invited; Delta Vacations University; and her first Avoya conference, onboard Royal Caribbean’s Navigator of the Seas.

Perhaps the hardest thing about working alone, is taking care of customers when she is on the road herself. But she has found a buddy and they have worked out a coverage plan for one another; “you don’t want to work the entire time, but if something comes up, you want to be contacted,” Murphy said. She believes that she has solved the time-management problem inherent in working at home, with set working hours during which she sits in her home office space.

“It’s definitely been a change not actually seeing people in person; I liked when people came in and I got to meet them in person,” she says. “But I do Skype and FaceTime.”

In the end, Murphy says, clients are “looking for someone to connect with, to show them that using a travel agent is so different from booking online. I need to do something extra for giving me the chance to be their agent and build that relationship. I don’t send an extravagant gift every time. But these are the moments they will always remember.”

And with 75% of her customers being Millennials, like she is, those little connections will hopefully pay off for years to come.