Small Details Add Up to Big Profits

For Billie J. Ruff, owner of the Travel Café in Montana, expanding her business eight years ago to include meetings and incentive travel was a natural progression. About half of her business was corporate travel management, and these clients were asking Ruff to plan their meetings, retreats and incentive travel. She partnered with Karen Campbell, a business customer service consultant, to launch EventTures, an event planning company within the larger Travel Café agency.

Today, between Travel Café’s corporate division and EventTures, Ruff is solidly positioned as Montana’s go-to woman for anyone planning to move large groups of people. But her work is not with just large groups and not only in Montana. Ruff has worked with groups as small as 20 and as large as 600 in Mexico, Jamaica, the Netherlands and beyond.

Her first large event, a group of 600, stands out in Ruff’s memory. It was set in her home state and it tested her team’s ability to think on its feet. Held in May, 2002, the three-day County Commissioners conference brought in 600 commissioners from all over the United States. Ruff’s company arranged the travel, speakers, entertainment, catering, spouse tours and transportation.

To provide a taste of Montana, Ruff arranged an evening’s entertainment at Pompey’s Pillar, a local Montana attraction. The evening was to include a pitchfork barbeque, reenactments of scenes from the Louis and Clark expedition, and Native American dancers. When an unexpected snowstorm hit, Ruff and her team had to find a way to move the party indoors, in less than six hours. They found a horse arena, but first had to pitch in with shovels to clear hay out. Then they bused the commissioners, barbeque, actors and Native American dancers to the site. The crowd loved it. “It was a panic situation at first,” Ruff said. “But it turned out perfectly.”

This quick thinking, along with attention to the smallest details, are essential qualities for agents thinking about including group event travel in their business. “The one thing you have to be is organized,” Ruff told Travel Market Report. “Any successful travel agent has to be tremendously detail oriented, but when you’re moving groups of people, you have to be especially good at that.”

In addition to being organized, agents must to be able to deal with lots of different personalities. “If that’s something that bothers you, I would say it’s not for you,” Ruff added.

Another discipline agents considering this niche need to be good at is budgeting. Before submitting a quote, the agent must first think about every little item and every possible occurrence. For instance, in addition to the cost of the motorcoaches hired to bus people around, each driver expects to be tipped. “And don’t think the client will pay that on site,” she said.

“You have to think about your day by day agenda and about what could happen.” During a recent group event in Jamaica, Ruff had to send two members of her team in a taxi to pick people up from a bar to make sure they got back to the resort safely.

“It’s those little expenses you learn about as you go along,” she said, adding that there has been more than one time the company was closer to breaking even than making a profit because of such small details.

Profitable Groups

Omitting those precautionary charges is mostly in the past now. Ruff told TMR she aims to achieve a 25% margin with each meeting, retreat or incentive group she plans. While she doesn’t always get there, when she first began planning events, each group achieved only a 10% profit margin.

Ruff told Travel Market Report that she’s learned how to price groups appropriately over the past eight years. At first she tried to establish a set fee for the company’s planning services but quickly found that each group required such customized programs a set fee didn’t work.

Today, she tries to negotiate net rates with vendors then build a commission into the final price. For services that are non-negotiable, such as shore excursions and/or spa treatments, Travel Café charges a set fee for pre-bookings. Those fees and commissions add up just because of the sheer volume involved, Ruff said. “When you can negotiate a good deal on behalf of your clients and still have a decent commission built in, with the larger groups you have a better chance of making it profitable just from the sheer numbers.”

Currently, some 20% of Travel Café’s business comes from group events, meetings and retreats, and with an approximate 25% profit margin on each group, that’s a lot of profit.

Drumming Up Business

Much of Ruff’s meeting and incentives business is repeat business, about 50% of it derived from the agency’s corporate base. In addition, she receives new leads on a daily basis.

As a member of the Chamber of Commerce, and with her reputation firmly in place, Ruff is typically sent any leads for groups looking to plan an event or meeting in Montana. Additionally, as woman-owned company, Travel Café receives leads from local governmental agencies.

Leads for international group events often come as a result of Travel Café’s membership in Travelsavers Worldwide Independent Network (TWIN). In one instance, a fellow TWIN member in New York referred a European corporate client to Ruff after the client requested a group coordinator, a service his New York agency did not provide. TWIN also provides Ruff with tools for responding to multinational RFPs and analyzing corporate expenditures, as well as providing insights into the world of corporate travel that are useful for long term planning.

Ruff has also found her membership in Acclaim Meetings helpful. “We work with them to make new vendor/wholesaler contacts when we are making arrangements in an area where we may not know someone,” she said.