Are You A Travel Professional, Meeting or Event Planner
(who wants to plan retreats for others)?

So you’re a travel professional, meeting planner or someone who feels pulled to be designing amazing retreats for others. Fantastic! This is basically what our company, Journeys of the Spirit®, has been doing for others since 2003 and loving every minute of it!

We’ve gleaned quite bit of information over the years having planned, managed, and marketed literally hundreds of retreats for ourselves and our clients and we are happy to share some of those insights with you.

First on the list is if you just want to book travel for your retreat clients we can tell you that you will not make a very good living doing that. Honestly, they can pretty much do that for themselves and you are not making your services stand out or be valuable.

Besides – if you’ve never gone on a retreat yourself or understand the finer details of how to lay out a retreat to be a retreat – you may end up creating an itinerary for your retreat leader that is exhausting and does not allow the facilitator to teach or allow the participants to relax and integrate what the facilitator is sharing.

In addition, if you book travel and that trip is not a go – you will not get paid for the work you do and even IF you change a service fee for your upfront work – it is not worth the effort from our perspective.

We feel that your highest value comes from when YOU totally get what makes an awesome retreat and how to align the location with what the facilitator is sharing so that the activities help teach the retreat theme (rather than unrelated activities that happen to be available at that location).

Also, if you can manage the retreat by collecting and organizing the legal and registration forms, as well as helping with the participant’s flights and their pre and post retreat travel plans – that will make you invaluable.

Then if you are able to help your facilitator with their marketing plan – that is where you can REALLY shine! Most retreat leaders are not very good marketers; their retreat trip pages are terrible and they have no marketing plan for selling-out their retreat.

If you understand what needs to be on that retreat trip page to be engaging as well as legal – that can make all the difference to your retreat leader.

Keep in mind that in most countries there are Seller of Travel Laws that 99.9% of retreat leaders are not aware of. In fact most facilitators should NOT be collecting monies for their retreats – a travel professional should be doing that for them. Once they take funds from their clients for packaged travel they can be considered a Seller of Travel.

“Seller of travel” means any resident or nonresident person, firm, corporation, or business entity who offers for sale, directly or indirectly, at wholesale or retail, prearranged travel, tourist-related services, or tour-guide services for individuals or groups, including, but not limited to, vacation or tour packages, or vacation certificates in exchange for a fee, commission, or other valuable consideration. The term includes any business entity offering membership in a travel club or travel services for an advance fee or payment, even if no travel contracts or certificates or vacation or tour packages are sold by the business entity.

If you read this like we do, that means any retreat that packages room, food, transportation, and if they are receiving compensation for that package (even if it is free room and board) that means they are selling travel from our perspective.

If you can take the funds for the trip and disperse the “net funds” back to the retreat leader that is a fabulous service you can offer and something we have been doing for years in our company.

So we hope this has given you some ideas about how you can serve all the retreat leaders out there on the highest level. 🙂

To your wanderlust life,
Sheri and the whole Wanderlust Entrepreneur team!