Tracie Ruffell never expected to become a travel agent, even though she says she’s been “talking about travel since I came out of the womb.”
“I never actually planned to work in travel, but looking back, I was acting like a travel agent long before I became one,” she says. “I’d come back from holidays and spend hours telling colleagues exactly where I’d been, what I’d done and why they should go. Then I’d spend my lunch break finding them the best deals.”
After leaving school, she worked for an insurance company before spending seven years at Clarins’ head office. A Going Places open day then proved the catalyst for her move into travel.
“I marched up to the person in charge who told me there was an hour wait. I said ‘I haven’t got time for that, I’m on my lunch break!’ She bumped me to the top of the queue.”
The interviewer was so impressed with Tracie’s encyclopedic knowledge that she was given the job the next day and promoted to Assistant Manager within three months.
Relationships are everything
This year marks Tracie’s 30th year in travel, and she credits her success – and her ability to retain clients – to the strong relationships she has built with people, along with a few unconventional methods.
While in her 20s, Tracie took a counselling course, which she says has helped her get people to open up to her.
“When I speak to a new client I say, ‘Talk to me like I’m your doctor.’ If you tell a doctor, ‘I’ve got a headache,’ there are hundreds of possible causes. But if you explain exactly where it hurts, how often it happens and what triggers it, they’ll diagnose it much faster,” she explains.
“Travel works the same way. The more clients tell me about how they travel, what they love, what they dislike, the better I can tailor their holiday.”
Rather than focusing on making a quick sale, Tracie takes the time to get to know her clients and build relationships for the long term..“I don’t want them to be a one-off booker; I want them for life.”
Having strong relationships with suppliers, too, has helped Tracie secure new business and preferential treatment for her clients.
It’s about who you know,” she says. “One new client wanted to stay at a luxury hotel in Monaco that hadn’t released its rates yet. I picked up the phone to someone I knew and, by that afternoon, I had exclusive access to them.”
Tracie’s quick thinking and going the extra mile secured her over £1,000 commission on five hotel nights, but it’s the relationship that’s been created which she hopes will pay off in the future.
“I asked her who she’d been booking with and she mentioned a well-known agency. She spends roughly £100,000 every Christmas on a holiday, so now that I’ve won her over, hopefully next Christmas she’ll spend that with me!”
Giving birth to a successful business
After several years working for a handful of holiday companies, Tracie met her husband, Dan, and they married when she was 41. It was then that she decided to launch her own business.
“People come back from their honeymoon and have a baby. I came back from mine and launched a business, which is my baby,” she jokes..
Dan also joined the business this year and together they launched a sports hospitality division, based on Dan’s experience in recruitment and as a sports journalist, plus his general love of sports.
“For me, it’s not just booking a holiday and getting my commission. I’m doing something I love and I get paid for it, which is a win-win,” says Tracie.
