Travel Designer

Summary

Bell & Bly Travel is in the early stages of rapid growth, so this position will be ever evolving and changing. We are looking for someone who is highly detail oriented, a master of checklists (Asana anyone?) operations minded, and obsessed with customer service. This is a hands on role and you’ll be responsible for client documents, operational tasks, researching destinations and making sure our clients enjoy trips of a lifetime!

An A-Player for the Travel Coordinator Role is someone who embodies the following: honesty/integrity, ability to learn quickly, extreme attention to detail, proactivity, ability to prioritize, efficiency, calmness under pressure, enthusiasm, creativity, strong work ethic, great communication skills, and openness to feedback. 

A-players are always looking for ways to make the business better, to make the client experience better, and to learn and grow to make themselves better. They know how to proactively get things done, are excited to take on new projects, and are willing to work on things outside their job scope when needed. Last but not least, they know how to ask for help when needed and are committed to making Bell & Bly Travel a fun, healthy, exciting place to work.

About Us/Who We Are

Bell & Bly Travel is a travel firm set up to inspire and enable people to travel more broadly. We specialize in helping entrepreneurs, executives, families, and couples weave unique experiences throughout their lives. Our mantra is fewer, better clients and we help these clients with all their leisure travel needs.

 Bell & Bly Travel is affiliated with Brownell Travel, the oldest and most prestigious travel advisory in the United States. Through that affiliation, Bell & Bly is also Virtuoso and is in partnership with many of the top brands in travel like Four Seasons, Belmond, and Abercrombie & Kent. We also recently won Virtuoso’s Most Innovative Travel Advisor, out of 12,000 travel advisors worldwide, a huge honor in the industry. 

Though we love all kinds of travel, our business model is such that we exclusively focus on high-end experiences and luxury hotels. This focus has allowed us to become one of the fastest growing firms affiliated with Brownell. 

We also recently set up a scholarship to help support low income students to study abroad. The faster we grow, the more we can add to this scholarship and promote travel to younger generations!

The team generally works with in ± 4 hours of US Central Standard Time. We will work out your hours based on your time zone and our needs. We do have a preference for team members closer to CST (Western Hemisphere) but flexible for the right person. 

The founder, Sarah, is an experienced entrepreneur and has had a widely varying career path prior to founding Bell & Bly including finance, investing, and tech startups. She is passionate about mentoring new members of our team.

Last but not least, our core values are important to us and should be to anyone who joins the team:

• Love our Customers - I always do what is best for my clients and put herculean effort into surprising and delighting them along the way. I treat my clients like family and they do the same for me.

• Always be Learning - I am constantly traveling and learning all there is to know about new destinations. I spend time up front learning about my clients’ unique travel style and bucket list dreams. I help clients have amazing experiences on the ground that expand their knowledge of the world.

• Cultivate Adventure - I help clients gently push the boundaries of their comfort zones and use my deep industry relationships to craft amazing adventures and experiences that cannot be found online.

About The Role

Bell & Bly Travel is undergoing rapid growth, so this position will be ever evolving and changing. This makes it a great opportunity for those who can handle a multitude of tasks and some ambiguity. The Travel Designer position is a pivotal one in our company. You will be responsible for getting to know our clients and designing trips of a lifetime for them. You’ll work in very close proximity with our partners around the world to create stunning itineraries and work with your team of coordinators to ensure all the little details are handled. 

Primary Responsibilities

• Travel Design 

  • After a new trip is confirmed by the Travel Advisor or Sarah, the Designer will review the notes, craft a detailed RFP (request for proposal) and send to our various partners in the destination country

  • The Designer will then use their creativity and what they know about the client to work in depth with our partners to design the “perfect” itinerary

  • The Designer will present the itinerary to the client and work with them to make tweaks and changes 

  • The Designer will work to meet expectations for time to proposal 

• Client Happiness & Trust

  • Deeply getting to know our clients by reviewing discover calls, all past client data such as feedback forms, etc.

  • Communicate effectively  and warmly with our clients to make sure they have an amazing experience working with us from beginning to end. This communication could be over email or by phone. 

  • Develop and deploy ways to surprise/delight clients through the planning process

  • Ensure that clients are responded to within 24 business hours by the team and managing timeline expectations for clients

  • Continually improving our travel design process to improve client experience

  • Deeply getting to know our clients through discover calls, reviewing all past client data such as feedback forms, etc.

  • Meet all client expectations - smooth process, professional communication, surprise and delight touches

• Travel Coordination/Trip Management

  • The Travel Designer should be comfortable jumping in to help with coordinator tasks when needed due to capacity, an urgent request, coordinators on vacation, etc. 

  • The Travel Designer is also responsible for oversight of the Coordinators to make sure all coordinator tasks are completed in a timely manner

  • Working with Coordinators to anticipate “what could go wrong” and making fixes prior to travel

• Continual Learning 

  • Learn by researching, attending webinars, setting calls with partners - required 4 per month 

  • Institutionalize knowledge by documenting learnings, writing trip reports, etc

  • Attend trade shows when needed

  • After one year of service, Travel Designers will be eligible to travel on fam/educational trips at the company’s cost  

  • Mentoring coordinators on destinations, partners, and client service

• Process Dedication & Improvement

  • Continuously updating trip planning checklist to reduce errors/improve efficiency

  • Regularly and effectively using team tools: Asana, Toggl, Google Suite, etc.

  • Proactively looking for ways to improve

  • Manage and track assigned KPIs and report monthly

Working Style

• This is a remote position, working directly with the the owner/CEO and in very close contact with the Travel Advisor and Travel Coordinators

• Most work will be assigned digitally via team management software but you should be available for calls when needed during regular business hours ~once per week, Central Standard Time. We do have a preference for time zones +/- 6 hours from CST (the exception being New Zealand/Australia in which general working hours could be something like 7am - 3pm, or a little later if you don’t have client calls that day)

• You will also be expected to have weekly 1:1 calls with any of your direct reports

• We will establish a regular cadence for check in calls – on these calls we’ll catch up on tasks for the week, share feedback, and brainstorm

• Everyone on the team is expected to work ~ 40 hours per week. Exactly which hours those are, we’re flexible on as long as client needs are getting met at a high standard. 

• We do not pay hourly - we salary A players who are here to get done what needs to get done. That said, we track hours and work to make sure no one is getting overworked. If they are, we adjust workloads, reduce sales, or hire more! Some weeks emergencies may pop up and you may work more than 40 hours. Other weeks things may slow down and you’ll work a little less. Expect the average to be 40. 

Training

• We have systemized a lot of our training so your first week will be consuming a lot of videos we’ve made, reading manuals, and talking over google hangout with our Travel Designer

• After the initial week of training, training will be as we go - we believe learning our style and then implementing it is better for retention

Growth Opportunities

• This truly depends on the candidate, their skill level, and their interests, as well as Bell & Bly’s success in growing market share

• Areas for growth could include title and salary increases. A Players on the team could eventually be promoted to Travel Advisor and beyond. 

Who You Are

• You must have 3-10 years of travel industry experience for this role! This could be as a Hotelier, hotel sales, as a coordinator at another travel planning firm, or other position dealing with clients.

• For this mid-senior role, you should love interacting with clients and have a great deal of empathy for them and for their unique situations. Being caring and wanting the best for our clients makes us the best! 

• You should be HIGHLY detail oriented – creating high quality itineraries is no easy feat. Suppliers often forget small details. It’s our job to catch those before the client even gets the itinerary.

• You should be creative so that you can design the best itineraries  possible

• You should work well with partners and be able to inspire them to creativity as well. For example, gently pushing partners to come of with something really unique for our clients

• You should love being on the phone and building relationships

• You should have great people skills and empathy for our clients, partners, and fellow teammates

• You should be able to adapt to our Bell & Bly Travel style - early on we’ll give lots of feedback on details such as the types of photos we like, the type of language we like to use, etc. Even these “subjective” pieces are important to a great product. 

• You should be operations minded – thinking about streamlining processes and making the client experience better at each step along the way

• You should have excellent English communication skills – especially written, but also over the phone 

• You should be great with English grammar, writing, and creating clean and attractive documents for clients that elevate our brand

• You should be highly task oriented and have a great work ethic - we want A players who are committed to getting things right and completed on time 

•  You should have integrity and honesty and be able to maintain the highest standards of confidentiality

•  You should be obsessed with customer service – we advise our clients on how to spend their most valuable asset, their time. Most people have such limited time and budget to put towards this, so we strive to get it right and make it memorable!

• You should get along well with our team and have fun! Life is too short to work with a team you don’t like! 

• In your video or in the section on “anything else we should know”, please tell us what’s #1 on your bucket list and why

• You should not be scared to suggest new, faster, or better ways of doing things! I am often too busy to dedicate time to this and always appreciate the team’s input.

• You should be clear and concise in your communication with the rest of the team, and appreciate that we will do the same for you. (i.e. let’s be straight forward, no BS, this is not an organization that is interested in politics)

• Skills

  • Native English speaking preferred

  • Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF

  • Axus

  • Asana and project management tools 

  • Interacting with clients 

  • Excellent written and spoken English 

  • Bonus: GDS experience

What’s in it for you?

• Full but Flexible schedule - work from home, a coffee shop, wherever! As long as you’re putting in the hours and getting high quality work done, it doesn’t matter to us (so long as you’re available for calls when we schedule and get back to clients/partners in a timely manner).

• Discover the world - experience the travel industry firsthand and quite literally spend your working hours learning about the world

• Promote tolerance – it is our true belief that travel promotes tolerance and makes our world a better place. We help clients travel more, raise global citizens, and learn about the rest of the world

• Help grow a business from the ground up – Bell & Bly is one of the fastest growing travel advisories in the USA and we need help to grow even faster

• Travel – if Bell & Bly maintains or grows from current revenue targets, Travel Designers and Advisors will become eligible for certain travel related perks (ranging from hotel discounts to fully paid scouting trips and team trips)