"Travel really found me. I’ll be honest with you,” said Kendra Carver, the owner of Kendra & Company Travel Agency.
While owning a travel business might not have always been the plan, it’s no surprise this is where she ended up. As an “organization queen,” Carver was always the one planning her family vacations, which included handling all the travel documents and having folders with everyone’s name on them.
After successfully planning a group cruise, her mom suggested she look into doing travel for a job. And where does one go to learn more information these days? Facebook. From there, a friend connected her with an agency that was hiring, and Carver was hired on the spot. She worked at the agency for five years before acting on the urge to begin her own company.
“I just felt like I wanted to have my own brand, to have my own agency where I could really focus on romance,” Carver said. In September of 2020, Kendra & Company Travel Agency was officially launched.
It has been a “wild, crazy ride” for Carver, as she hit the ground running from the get-go. Success is never simply handed to a person, and Carver’s organization, diligence and hard work continue to pay off as her business grows.
Success Factors
One factor that plays a huge role in her success is giving each client she works with a great experience. This includes making a good impression, explaining the benefits of using an advisor and especially seeing the whole experience out from start to finish, even making it a point to call each client after their trip.
“I find that a lot of clients don’t want these cookie-cutter trips anymore. They want experiences. They want to do things. They don’t just want to stay on the resort anymore,” Carver said, adding that she designs trips based on each client’s interests. This has resulted in satisfied returning customers as well as new business from referrals.
Carver also places importance on education, and this aids in the growth of her business. She continues to not only attend seminars and trainings but to travel herself.
“I try to keep up with a lot of training and things that are going on in the world just to keep myself abreast of everything,” Carver said.
Growing her unique brand and defining what her agency means to her have also been huge components of her success. For Carver, it’s all things romance. She not only books destination weddings but also attends them too, taking care of pre-wedding meetings, scheduling hair and makeup trials and preparing welcome bags for guests, among several other tasks.
“My destination wedding business has been growing incredibly, and I think I add a little bit of a different element because I travel with the majority of my destination wedding groups and do group coordination and management,” Carver said. “I love it. I love love, and it’s great to kind of see everything that you’ve been planning for the last year kind of come together in one single day.”
While her destination wedding business is really taking off, Carver currently books all things romance, including proposal trips, elopements, honeymoons, anniversaries and vow renewals.
Future Goals
With all successful businesses come future goals, and Carver has several. In addition to hiring a Client Experience Manager and one day solely focusing on destination weddings, she also hopes to become a mentor for new travel advisors.
“It would have been so much easier, so much better, if I had the tools to be successful. I didn’t have that when I started my agency,” Carver said. “I would love to be able to mentor someone who’s in my same position who maybe doesn’t have anyone that they can go to. I want to be able to be that light for someone.”
When it comes to advice she has for new travel advisors, Carver stresses the importance of finding a mentor, continuing to learn and declaring a niche – in addition to remembering that “every client is not my client.”
“Niching down will really make you the expert in your field,” she said. “It’s going to take time because you have to be okay with saying no to things that don’t align with your brand, that don’t align with your vision.”
For Carver, her vision is clear and was brought to life with hard work, dedication and passion.
This article originally appeared in the Summer 2023 issue of The Compass magazine.
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