Hi, I own a Cruise Planners franchise in Duluth, MN. I am one of the very few Cruise Planners who has a public "storefront" agency instead of working from home. Overall I am extremely happy with Cruise Planners. I don't think I would have been able to start up a full-blown functioning agency with so many vendor contacts at the commision levels where at on my own with just and IATA or CLIA number.
Looking back, the two things I would have done differently: it would have gotten more training in business. When you start any franchise, you are actually becoming a business owner. If you are not clear on exactly how to run a business -taxes, bookkeeping, marketing, etc there is going to be a huge learning curve.
In retrospect I also would have been someone else's associate first. Planning travel is no joke. The rules, the intricacies, the product offerings of so many companies really makes you feel like you're the slowest person on the earth when you first start booking because there is an incredible amount of research.
Despite what many people believe, booking travel for other people is not as easy as going to an Expedia interface. Client come to me with the complicated trips and a lot of questions. The biggest part of my business is groups and you don't know stress until you're planning a cruise with a hundred+ people.
With that said I had neither of the above when I started out. It took me about 8 months to really get things going. Right now we have it set up where I do all the booking and man the storefront daily and my husband does all the accounting and bookkeeping and face to face marketing.
With all that said, having business and travel industry experience would have been great before starting but I really feel that going with Cruise Planners over another cruise or travel agency franchise was a great decision. There are many days that I've sat in my office and thought to myself there is no way we could have without them. We got some fantastic training, the crm booking tools are top-notch and they are always improving, and the camaraderie is outstanding. The home office staff are the best at what they do and I have had a business development manager since day one to hold my hand through all of it. Overall I am extremely happy with our decision and I feel like it was worth the investment.
As a side note I usually use Reddit under the username SpicySnarf. CruisePlannerToni is my social media identity so I made this account this week since I will be blogging soon too.