By: Cassandra Ingraham

Some of the best travel deals in the country are never seen by the general public or online suffers. We see Travelocity, Expedia, Hotwire, Orbitz, Cheapseats and a few others sporting excellent Travel deals, however, many of the unique deals, and often times cheaper deals, are not seen.

There affordable, clean and wonderful "little" resorts and travel spots around the world
that are well worth our attention. If you are a travel agent you know exactly what I am talking about.

The idea for many of us was to put these special travel deals in one place where impatient travelers could easily find them. If we don't make it easy for travelers to find quality independent travel agencies, agents and tour companies, then we have no one to blame but ourselves.

In 2005, http://www.travel360degrees.com joined OSSN (Outside Sales Support Network) for Travel Agents. The organization has a huge membership and is growing. During that year of membership we received hundreds and hundreds of e-mail notices from travel suppliers with great travel deals that could be sold to the consumer. Many of these emails were directly from the airlines themselves. And in many cases, the only way the consumer would know about the travel deals is if their travel agent informed them.

So we knew for sure that there were hundreds and hundreds of great travel deal that the general public
never knew about. We also realized that the travel agents had a massive task ahead of them if they were to take back a slice of the pie that the mega giant like Orbits, Expedia and Travelocity had taken.

Below are a few tips on how to get back a small slice of the pie.

Create an email database for all of your clients; add to this database often. Communicate with
this database often, let them know that you have travel deals and you are available to help them.


Post your travel deals, especially when there is a deal that has a good price. You can post for free on www.craigslist.org, Classifieds360 at http://travel360degrees.com/cgi-bin/classified/classified.cgi  (this is new and free classified ads section for travel only deals) and www.backpage.com

If you have a little extra in your budget and the travel deal is really good, take a look at Google's Adword, this is not free, but it does work, especially for building a large database. (speaking from experience)

Until Travel Agents can show the general public that they can compete with the mega travel sites in cost and quality, the general public will continue to go to the mega travel sites.


This article was written by the T360 Travel Staff http://www.travel360degrees.com