Become a Home Based Travel Agent

Working from home is awesome, right? You have no one looking over your shoulder pushing you to complete a task. No one tells you when you need to start your workday or end it. All these decisions are up to you and you control your destiny. You can dress however you wish and if you choose to work in the middle of the night and sleep the next day, it is your decision. It sounds pretty terrific and how could you miss? LIFE… might be what you are missing. If you love to work and you work from home, you might find life is passing you by.

Don’t get me wrong. I am the absolute biggest fan of working from home. I have been speaking about it and singing it’s praises for more than 15 years now. I think I can write this article with such passion because I have personally had a difficult time learning the need to balance life and work and I hope to share some of my hard-earned lessons with you.

The desire to escape the structure imposed by the corporate world may have been one of the driving forces that helped you make the decision to work from home. While we think we want to escape structure, we often find that we miss it, and without some type of structure we are not able to realize our accomplishments. When we have limits set and time lines to work within we are often able to get things done. The boundaries between work and home; work and recreation; your company time and your personal time, are really more necessary working from home then one might realize. When you work outside of the home then home is really home and work does not typically encroach into your personal time. Sure, you may have had other obligations but at least your work was confined within the boundaries of a workplace and a workday.

Some people may find that this challenge manifests itself in the tendency to procrastinate when it comes to the workload and they may find self-discipline very difficult. For these folks, a more formal workplace separate from the home may be better suited to their needs. There are also ways to place structure upon yourself in your home office, which will help you accomplish more in a timely fashion.

In this article I am going to focus on those of us who may have no problem at all working from home in terms of discipline and motivation. Instead we find that the business can very easily take control of what sometime seems like our entire being. Does this sound familiar to you? Do you often find yourself at your computer working from 6:00 am till perhaps 9:00 pm at night and you may have only take some food and restroom breaks. Worse yet, you are so tired you cannot even remember what you were supposed to accomplish in the first place.

I come from a background of workaholics and so it was pretty much expected in my family to work all the time. Recreation was something we did enjoy but work was always seemingly the primary focus. It was schoolwork as a child and that continued as a young adult along with a job and that continued on to the career. The funny thing is that I am kind of proud of it because that is what I was taught was the right way to live your life. I cannot help but think my Dad would be proud of this trait I inherited. If I am so comfortable that I am doing the right thing then why do I have such a hard time making time for my personal life?

So what’s all this talk about how easy it is to work from home? Your decision to work from home surely will result in an enhancement of your lifestyle. You will no longer have to commute to and from a place of work. You can start to work at 5:00 am if you wish and stop at noon. If you want to work on the weekend and take off two days in the week, you can do this. You can choose the projects you want to work on and retain the rewards of your own efforts. You probably have no intention of working yourself into 18-hour days behind the computer, right?

We are all different and while some of us have a hard time letting go of the work leash, others have no problem with a more balanced approach to working at home. I admire that and I am working on it. It is my one of my many New Years Resolutions. I resolve to work really hard and play really hard this year. I am going to perfect my to do list and work my CRM so that I know in advance what I expect from myself every day and I am going to stop when I get there. I hope.

To that end I have been reading up on and have found some pointers to share with those of you who are finding this article to be about you too.

Try to confine your work to your work place. It may be your patio by the pool or a private office in your home. The location does not matter but where you do your work does. I would suggest you carve out an office where you can shut the door and stay focused. Try to not bring your work into your “living” areas of your home. This will help you to think in terms of work only in the work place and not in every corner of your home.

Try to establish a routine and a structure so that you can have a plan and be able to walk away from the work and enter your home at the end of a work period. Your routine may be something you will get the groove of after trying out several options. Perhaps you find your best time to communicate via email is early in the morning when you are fresh. Alternatively, you may find that doing your periodical reading of the trades and trade emails to be better handled midday. It is going to be how you are comfortable achieving your tasks that makes your day productive for you. This will help you be disciplined. It should also help you to use your work at home flexibility as needed.

Try to remember to stop when you have decided what that end of the daytime will be. It will enable you to really enjoy your free time at home and it will help your family to know when you will be able to give them your undivided attention. They certainly want you to succeed as much as you do, so help them understand the importance of your routine.

Make time to celebrate the end of your workday each and every day. Perhaps you choose to sit down and enjoy an hour watching the news with a glass of wine. Maybe you take your dog for a walk to celebrate your end of a productive day. Your dog will certainly not let you forget it is time. I believe my dog Zoe is the best alarm clock there is. She is certain to let me know when her walk schedule is due and telling a St. Bernard to hold on for an hour or two just won’t cut it. You could plan on taking your kids to the park for an hour or you could visit the gym or hop on your treadmill and watch the news. One of my personal favorites is to take a yoga class which makes me feel physically and mentally refreshed. No matter what the ritual is, it can help you close down the work mind and allow you to relax and enjoy some quality time you have earned.

Yes, we need them too! Travel professionals are so busy planning everyone else’s dream vacations that often we forget our own. Some say they feel like they are on vacation all the time because working from home is so much nicer then going into an office. While the lack of commute and lack of a corporate jungle is certainly a benefit, it is not vacation.

It is a challenge for those of us who work from home to flip off the switch because we feel we cannot leave our businesses. We are our businesses and if we are not there to handle it no one will. The solution to this should be whatever works best for you personally but here are some suggestions.

Hire your adult children to cover for you while you are away. We are in Mexico right now at our home here and while we can do all of our work tasks here with no apparent glitches, there is still one that we just cannot get handled from here. Our son, Andy is doing all of our book orders while we are gone for the next two months. We pay him to do this and he is glad for the extra money. Think about working with a fellow agent friend that can handle your business while you are away and you can return the favor for them. Many agents do this with great success. Another solution while not the best is to take the work with you. With Vonage, Skype, email, etc, there is really not too much you cannot accomplish remotely. If you must work on your vacation then just be careful to not let work become the vacation.

Working from home is a lifestyle choice and it should enhance your life not diminish it. By adding some discipline to your routine and allowing yourself some playtime at home you can certainly make your dream job a reality! Take care of business and take care of your life. It is all about balance. I will let you know how my New Year’s resolution is going as the year rolls on.

Joanie Ogg CTC MCC
Joanie Ogg Marketing Group
Editor

Joanie Ogg is a thirty-five year veteran of the travel industry and has been involved with the independent contractor evolution since 1988. She is the principal of Joanie Ogg Marketing Group, which specializes in consulting and speaking on the topic of Home-Based Travel. She also provides marketing and sales for wide variety of products under the umbrella HomeBasedTravelAgent.com.

A demonstrated industry leader, Joanie most recently served as the President of the National Association of Commissioned Travel Agents (NACTA) and TravelSellers. She and her husband Tom acquired NACTA in 1996 and sold it to The American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA) in 2000. Joanie’s tenure in the travel industry includes owning and operating one of the first successful host agency models. She has owned and operated several storefront travel agencies (both commercial and leisure), as well as a Hawaii wholesale tour company.

Her decades of success have garnered her numerous accolades over the years. Her accomplishments have been recognized by receipt of two Lifetime Achievement Awards from major trade groups, being named as one of the “100 Most Powerful Women in Travel” by Travel Agent magazine on several occasions, voted as “Travel Agent of the Year” by the readers of Travel Trade magazine, and has been recognized by many other industry organizations throughout her tenure in the industry. In 2008 Joanie Ogg was inducted into the CLIA Hall of Fame, an honor held by some of the most influential executives in the travel industry.

Joanie is a Master Cruise Counselor (MCC) and a Certified Travel Counselor (CTC). Joanie has co-authored two popular travel industry books for cruise specialists and home-based travel agents and has authored hundreds of travel trade articles. She has inspired tens of thousands of travel agents attending her presentations at trade events, cruise seminars, international trade gatherings and numerous local educational venues throughout the United States. With a time-honored background and forward-looking vision, she is often featured as a speaker at many of the travel industry’s major conferences and events. Joanie’s speaking talents are widely sought as a travel industry emcee by the most recognized travel organizations. She has emceed such events as Cruise-A-Thons, ASTA’s CruiseFest, The Trade Show, The Travel Institute Forum and all of NACTA’s National and International Conferences.


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