8 Tactics to Become Travel Advisors’ Go-To Destination

The Global Travel Market (GTM) event in July offers a high-impact opportunity for destination representatives to connect with top-producing travel advisors. It’s especially important as more people are looking to travel advisors, especially in younger generations. Staying top of mind for advisors means staying at the top of consumers’ travel lists.

Long-term successful relationships depend not just on participation but on standing out, building trust, and becoming a go-to resource. This post outlines eight tactics for DMOs to strengthen relationships with advisors before, during, and after GTM.

1. Be Easy to Sell

Advisors prioritize destinations with clear, simple selling points. Muddled messaging or too many messages can make it hard for them to grasp your value.

So eliminate friction by making booking options easy to explain. Prepare a concise pitch you can deliver in ten minutes or less so that attendees at an event can know what you’re all about.

Get concrete and include flight access, ideal seasons, commissionable product, and booking contacts in a tight, ready-to-share pitch. Travel advisors will love that. The easier it is for them to grasp, the easier it will be to sell.

2. Tailor Your Messaging to Their Clients, Not the Masses

Travel advisors serve specific niches and traveler types. You can’t be everything to everyone, but you want to be something to someone.

It’s important to avoid generic destination overviews and customize how you present your offering. More importantly, ask advisors about their client base before jumping into your pitch.

Use information collected during events like GTM to match your talking points to their audience whether it’s luxury couples, multigenerational families, or adventure travelers.

3. Package Experiences, Not Just Places

Advisors sell curated journeys, not a list of attractions. But all too often that’s what destinations serve, and it’s difficult and tedious to parse through ten museums, twenty restaurants, thirty tour options, and forty hotels to find the best ones for their clients.

Instead, help travel advisors visualize what a full trip looks like, themed around interest or intent. Give ideas for meals and activities. Think in narratives, not checklists.

An easy way to achieve this is to offer itinerary-ready experiences like foodie trails or cultural weekends that they can adapt and plug directly into their client proposals.

4. Provide Client-Ready Sales Tools

Advisors need assets that are easy to forward, repost, or repurpose. They aren’t generating their own creative content and they also don’t have time to sift through endless versions of nearly identical assets.

So focus on tools that save them time and help them close sales. Provide short, client-ready itineraries, social graphics, and editable flyers they can immediately send to clients. Set up a QR code to make them easily shareable for travel advisors after the event.

5. Stay Visible With Value-Driven Touchpoints

If you only show up during big campaigns or events, you’re easy to forget. The squeaky wheel gets the advisor’s attention when they keep communication open and ongoing.
Don’t just be promotional, be likeable. By sharing seasonal updates, new experiences, or quick trends in bite-sized formats that are easy to read and use, travel advisors will feel coddled. And they’ll remember you all year, which is good since they are booking trips long after GTM.

6. Be Responsive and Resourceful

Advisors remember who made their job easier, especially under pressure. Slow and vague communication is the opposite of being likeable when travel advisors have to act fast.

Instead, destinations need to value quick replies, clear answers, and real-time support in order to stay in travel advisors’ good graces. Take notes or voice memos after meetings to ensure you capture any relevant details and use that to know how best to connect with each advisor. And above all, respond to them immediately when they reach out—it makes all the difference.

7. Build Two-Way Relationships, Not Just Transactional Ones

The strongest relationships are built on mutual respect, not just sales tools. Destinations who just want to pump out visitation via their advisors will find the relationship flailing after a while.

Why? Because advisors want to feel heard, appreciated, and included. Don’t underestimate informal interactions like having a coffee or sending a non-work-related message. Consider attending networking events, asking for advisor feedback, and continuing conversations beyond the table. These moments inject some much-needed humanity into the relationship.

8. Walk the Talk on Inclusivity and Representation

Advisors serve diverse travelers, and they’re evaluating whether your destination reflects that. They need to see representation in visuals, product, and partnerships.

But they also need to see it in action. Highlight inclusive experiences and show how your destination supports diverse travelers authentically. Develop itineraries and engage in some storytelling to showcase not just that diversity exists, but that it contributes to your destination’s experience.

Finding the right tactics to engage travel advisors is a constant challenge, but one that DCI knows well. Get in touch with Vanessa Gonzalez-Hernandez at vanessa.gonzalez-hernandez@old.aboutdci.com to learn more about working with DCI’s team of expert destination marketers.