There's a belief in this industry that the biggest thing standing between many travel advisors and a thriving business is marketing. Get your funnel right, post more consistently, find the right lead magnet, and clients will come.

Christina Vieira of Showcase the World Travel would tell you that's only half the story. The other half is listening.

When Christina launched her Disney-focused agency in 2019, she built what she thought was a strong lead magnet — a 24-page Walt Disney World planning guide, complete with worksheets and detailed itineraries. It was thorough and genuinely useful, but it wasn't converting. It turned out that the busy moms she was targeting didn't want a workbook; they wanted someone to make it easy.

Christina figured this out not by studying marketing theory, but by paying attention during her client calls. The word she kept hearing, over and over, was "overwhelmed." She took her 24-page guide and rebuilt it around that exact feeling: Five Easy Steps to a Disney Vacation Without Overwhelm. By identifying the exact problem she was solving for her ideal client and mirroring their exact wording back to them, she changed the trajectory of her business.

That's the part that most advisors overlook. They build offers around what they want to provide rather than what their clients are already telling them they need. They write email sequences before they understand exactly who they're writing to. They invest in tactics before doing the listening that makes those tactics effective.

Christina's email strategy is a perfect example of what changes when the listening comes first. She doesn't send one welcome-home email asking for a review, a referral, and a rebooking all at once. She spreads that post-trip conversation over three to six months, adding value at each touchpoint — recommending photo book companies, sharing recipes tied to the destination, and continuing the relationship in ways that feel genuinely personal. Her automated sequences follow up on proposals for a full year and are directly attuned to her client's reality. For example, she knows that soccer season buries inboxes, and she addresses that directly in her emails. Even though her sequences are all set up ahead of time and are running in the background, none of them read as automated because they’re built on real knowledge of who she's talking to.

The Disney piece of her business challenges another assumption worth examining. Many advisors write off Disney as low-value work — too much effort, not enough return. Christina tracks her time per booking and knows exactly why it's among her most profitable: a repeatable process, a planning fee, and a virtual assistant who handles the logistics so she can focus on managing the relationship. When you know your client and destination deeply enough to build a repeatable system around them, the math changes.

Christina extends that clarity to how she runs her week. She works roughly 20 hours across three businesses, and maintains her balance with clear systems, defined priorities, and a firm understanding of where her time creates the most value. Tuesdays are completely protected from calls and client work because she knows that's where her best thinking happens, while Wednesdays are reserved for deep work. She understands that keeping her structure in place requires active protection, not just intention. You can set a boundary, but you're the one who has to make it stick.

Dialing in your business and optimizing your time like Christina can feel overwhelming, but most of us are closer to that than we think. The answers are already there in places like our client conversations and our calendars. We just have to be willing to act on what we find and stick to it.

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If you love hearing stories like Christina'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 Christina's full episode here.

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