Become a Travel Agent

Home Based Travel Agents
You Won’t Believe This! – www.SKYPE.com
Tom Ogg

Joanie and I travel a great deal. I am usually on a cruise somewhere doing seminars for travel agents and Joanie is usually at a conference or some other travel event somewhere in the world. We have worked out a system for being able to stay in touch with each other and our son when we are both away. When we are in the U.S., we have cellular telephones that we only use to call one another. No one has the numbers, other than Joanie, Andy and I. When the cell phone rings, we answer, no matter where we are or what we are doing. I remember Joanie laughing about a time when her cell phone rang while she was doing a seminar and it was Andy calling with a question about how to do a certain load of wash. This works great because Andy knows that we are simply a telephone call away when he needs us, no matter where we are.

When Joanie travels abroad doing land based travel functions, she normally takes a planet phone with her so that we can enjoy the same type of communication. If Andy or I need her, she is a simple telephone call away. I tend to rely on local prepaid telephone cards in ports while on cruises to telephone home. Joanie and Andy know how to get a hold of me on the ship if an emergency takes place.

We have found that using the IM feature of AOL is almost as good as being able to talk on the telephone. Many times, while I am in my cabin online, I will IM Joanie and Andy and we can “discuss” the day’s events live. We banter and have a great time teasing one another for the moments that we are IM'ing. Of course, e-mail is our staple communication. I look forward to hearing from both Joanie and Andy every day while I am traveling and e-mail has really enabled us to maintain our family relationship with a great amount of distance separating us.

Of course, I always miss the ability to talk to either Joanie or Andy (or both of them) at will when I am on a ship. I suppose I could pay the ship’s $9.95 per minute rate, but it seems excessive to me. Add the fact that we have cell phone numbers, separate work numbers, multiple home numbers and it seems invariably that when I do call, no one is home. Not being able to speak with my family while traveling for long periods of time internationally has been a major issue for me.

Recently, I was on the second leg of a trip that spanned from Hong Kong to Istanbul, with stops just about everywhere in between. I had flown from Hong Kong with stops in Seoul, Korea, Tokyo, Japan, Los Angeles, CA., Atlanta, GA. and finally into Miami, FL to board Royal Caribbean’s fabulous Navigator of the Seas for a 7-day NACTA cruise seminar. It was a great bunch of agents on board including NACTA Area Managers Rusty Pickett from North Carolina, Susan Kimmel from Oregon and Sherry Kennedy from Florida.  

On the second day out, I got a telephone call from Sherry Kennedy. For those that do not know Sherry, she has been active on the Internet for years and has successfully been selling cruises on the web. She is quite entrepreneurial and on the cutting edge of technology. Sherry explained to me “Tom, you have got to download “SKYPE”, you can “SKYPE” anyone you want, anytime for free and talk to them for as long as you want! If you want to call a regular telephone number, you can call anywhere in the world for only .016 euro a minute (that is about $1.9 cents a minute)”

At first I was skeptical, so I started asking questions. “What do you mean SKYPE?”
“SKYPE, works just like a telephone, only you are calling from your computer.”
“Huh”, I responded, “You mean you telephone from your computer, but there is no telephone?”
“Yup, you have to try it, you will laugh so hard, you will cry. You can call Joanie right now, for free!”
“OK” I said, “what is the catch? What does it really cost? How can it be free?”
“Look, Tom, just go ahead and download it and try it.”

So I did. It took almost three hours to download because I was on a very slow dial-up connection, but when I got done with dinner and went back to my cabin, I was able to “SKYPE” Sherry immediately, for free. I couldn’t believe it. Within five minutes I purchased a telephone credit of ten euro and telephoned Joanie at her work number. She answered and refused to believe I was calling her from my computer. This was fantastic. Actually, she got tired of my calling her every five minutes or so. I was having so much fun.

So without going into all the details, I urge you to visit www.SKYPE.com, download the program and begin “SKYPING” your friends, family and everyone else that you know around the world for free. Be sure to tell your clients about it too, so that they can SKYPE their family and friends while on their cruise.

You will need a computer with a sound card that supports speakers and a microphone. I would suggest that you purchase a quality headset that includes a microphone. Plug the microphone into the microphone socket on your sound card and the headset into the speaker socket. On a ship, you will need “in-cabin” access, wireless, or some other way to connect your computer to the Internet. Once you are hooked up, you can start SKYPING!

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