The #1 Business Tool For Travel Agents

For this week’s Travel Expert Insider, we’re showing you why travel agents LOVE G Suite. Watch the video below to learn how you can use it to improve your travel business.

G Suite For Travel Agents – Transcript

In this video, I’m going to talk about my favorite product to recommend for travel agents and that is “G Suite” by Google. I want to first start off by saying that you absolutely must have a professional, branded email address. Email addresses such as [email protected] or [email protected] are not professional. You need a professional email account such as, [email protected] or [email protected].

This establishes you as a legitimate business and helps to build a trust relationship with your prospective clients. With that said, let me get into why we recommend G Suite as a way to manage or provide a provider for that email address for you.

G Suite is a fantastic product by Google. It is $5/month per user or $50/year per user and the user is basically how many email accounts you have. Let’s say, you have SuzieQ@@MyGreatTravelBiz.com that’s one user and then you want to add [email protected], that’s another user and so on. If you have employees you can add them as well. Its $5/month, you can cancel anytime or $50/year which saves you a few dollars and you can also cancel that anytime.

Benefits:

Let me walk you through what you get when you sign-up with G Suite.

1. First, you get the Communication Tools. You’ll get Gmail, you get Hangouts which is a fantastic alternative to Skype if you’re using that. It’s a face-to-face video chat with your prospective clients or your colleagues. You also get Calendar (a Google Calendar that you can use for your business) and Google+ which is as most people know Google Social Media Platform. It’s there, it’s not the most popular widely use, you can get rid of it but it’s there, it’s available. You might as well create a profile on it and just get yourself out there. I wouldn’t recommend being active on it for most people but it’s one more place for you to be online and you might as well set-up a profile for it while it still exists. It can’t hurt. Google loves itself so having yourself on a Google products and platforms is a good idea for search engines.

2. You also have Storage. All of your stuff is stored in a Cloud and on your Google Drive. For example, all of these tools (Docs, Sheets, Forms, Slides, Sites) are stored in your Google Drive. If you’re not familiar, I’ll give you just a quick run-down.

a. Docs – is an alternative to Word or Pages (if you’re a Mac user) so you can do word processing in Google Docs and it’s stored in the Cloud. It’s really great especially for collaboration because it’s stored in the Cloud. If you collaborate you can give them access to it and they have real-time collaboration.

b. Google Sheets – is an alternative to Windows Excel or Mac Numbers (the Apple Numbers) for spread sheets.

c. Forms – is just a great way to send out customer surveys or any other sort of questionnaire to your clients or prospective clients and then you save all that information as collected and then save in the Cloud or in your Google Drive.

d. Slides – is an alternative to Powerpoint or Keynote and again you can save presentations in the Cloud online. You have access to them from any device where you can access the internet.

e. Google Sites – is a Website Builder. We don’t recommend it, I don’t not recommend it. I won’t get in to it to that today because I don’t recommend that you use it. There are some better options out there.

The Two Management Tools:

1. Admin Console – This is where you manage your account.
2. Vault – If you need more storage than what’s provided in the Google Drive, you can pay a little bit extra a month and get a Google Vault which gives you more storage. 99.9 % of our travel agents aren’t going to need this but it’s there if extra storage is something you need.

So if you’re familiar all with Google, you might be wondering why would I pay $5/month for this because I can still use all of these things for free and you’re right, you can use all of these things for free through Google.

The biggest reasons that I recommend G Suite for Small Businesses and for Travel Agents:

1. The branded professional email account. Absolutely must. Now, you can get it other ways such as through your website for your domain registrar or your host however, G Suite is a much better user interface. That’s why I recommend G Suite. A professional, branded email address is a must.
2. If you ever have any issues, G Suite has the best customer service. They have 24/7 free phone call and chat customer service and it is fantastic, it is really good customer service. They will help you out every time. You don’t get that with the regular Gmail accounts. I don’t think there’s any way to get any sort of customer service at all with the regular Gmail account. Other service providers, other email service providers that I’ve run into, the customer support is there but it may or may not be the best but I guarantee you that G Suite provides some of the best customer service out there and it’s free and it’s 24/7.
3. If you purchase for G Suite, you’ll get additional storage in your Gmail account and in your Drive. They also have some enhance security features. You get a 99% guaranteed up-time which you may not notice because it’s not very frequent but there’s some down-time with your email. Sometimes, email takes times to go-out or come-in and sometimes emails might be missed. That’s pretty rare but there is some down-time with most email servers. Gmail guarantees 99% up-time which is nice.
4. You also get full admin control of all of your users. I’m going to show you our admin panel. This is where I can control our accounts and all of our users. Right here is where I would click to add a user. You can see we only have 1 user right now and this is our support app marketing for travelagents.com. But, if I wanted to add new user like [email protected], this is where I would do that and if Jane worked for us and we had to let Jane go or Jane quit, this is where I would go to delete that email account. This is also where you can go to recover password and do some management.

When we go back to the Admin Console, this is where we also manage Billing and Reports.

One other really important thing that I’ll show you is Data Migration. So let’s say, you’re ready to set-up G Suite and you’ve been using some other email service provider, G Suite lets you migrate that data. You can migrate your email, your contacts, your calendars from another service provider into your G Suite account. That’s really nice. A lot of people are concern about losing stuff but there are ways to migrate your data.

Now to set-up G Suite, again it’s only $5/month per user or $50/year and I’m going to give you the link below this video and you click on that link and you’ll go to this page. You’ll just click “Get Started” and it walks you through the whole entire process. It’s really easy, step-by-step instructions to set-up your account.

The other important thing to remember is that you need to connect your G Suite account with your domain and I can’t go in to all different ways to do that now because it’s a little bit different for each domain registrar and domain host company but just know that you’re going to set-up a G Suite account and you’re going to have to connect it to your domain. There’s a couple of steps there. Lots of information G Suite walks you through it really well and there’s lots of tutorials if you Google it.

Now I’d love to hear from you!  In the comments below please share your experience with G Suite. What do you love most about G Suite?

Love & Success,

Heidi and Your Marketing Team