When Travel Advisors Build Their Proof Long Before They Build the Business
By Meredith Calloway, Chief Membership Development Officer
People ask me all the time what separates the advisors who make it from the ones who stall out. They are hoping for a silver bullet, not the disappointing, honest answer: it's just someone who did the unglamorous work for a long time before it paid off.
Heather Vergara, founder of Show Them the World and one of GTN's top producers, is a perfect example of this. Before she was booking trips, she was a senior director of marketing at Quaker Oats. When she left that career to be a stay-at-home mom with no real plan for what came next, she started writing a travel blog, just because people kept asking her where to go. She had no client list or revenue, and she genuinely didn't know if it would turn into anything. What she didn’t realize was that she had been unintentionally building the proof before she needed it.
Her most popular blog post to this day isn't a sales pitch, mainly because at the time she wrote it, she didn’t have a single client to sell to. Instead, it’s a personal, detail-by-detail account of a trip to Zion and Bryce Canyon, including the moment her son panicked before a rappel.
It's the same with how she didn't set out to be the Hawaii expert but did the research and became one because it became one of the only places open early in the pandemic. People started calling her the local guru because she'd already put in the unpaid hours, and when the demand finally arrived, she was already there with all the answers. From the outside, this looks like luck, but it’s a direct result of her having put in the work before seeing the payoff.
I told her during our conversation that this really hit close to home for me. Early in my own career, I was obsessed with finding the formula for client attraction, as if there were a blueprint out there that would make the whole thing click if I could just find it. What Heather did instead wasn't a strategy, but a habit. A coach once told me, “Give them the best; they'll pay for the rest,” meaning hand people your best information for free, because that's what builds trust. Heather wasn’t intentionally following this advice, but just happened to be a journalism major who liked to write and was already practicing it without knowing it was a strategy.
Heather didn't build her client list from ads or a marketing funnel. She had a blog and a local Facebook group in her town, and she linked the two together. She shared that while anybody can post in a Facebook group and say "call me, I'll book your trip," she was the one who could direct people straight to the proof she’d been building on her website.
My favorite part of this episode was when Heather told me about a trip to Capri last fall that showed her how much all that unpaid, unglamorous groundwork had paid off. She and her family had booked a cheap, entry-level room at J.K. Place Capri on a travel advisor rate. The moment they walked in, the hotel upgraded them to the penthouse terrace suite. Her teenagers looked at her like they didn't quite recognize her. She told me it was the moment they realized that their mom is the real deal. And as a parent who raised several teenagers, I know firsthand how impressive an achievement this truly is.
They weren't looking at a nice hotel room. They were looking at years of blog posts that nobody paid her for, and at questions answered in a Facebook group, with no idea where any of it was leading. That work didn't flip the switch from hobbyist to travel entrepreneur on its own, but it laid the foundation so that by the time Heather put a real strategy in place and built her business, the proof was already there waiting for her.
If you love hearing stories like Heather's, tune into The Travel Business Unpacked podcast! Each episode dives deep into the real stories, practical strategies, and transformational moments that turn travel dreams into thriving careers. Listen and subscribe on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and check out Heather's full episode here.