Event Planning: How to Host a Group Vacation Trip

How would you like to see the world and get paid while doing it? Welcome to event planning, vacation style. An event vacation planner is probably one of the more difficult programs to try to run, especially if you are doing this on a home-based basis. While the idea behind this program sounds simple to put together, the means of getting enough clients onboard with each trip is sometimes more difficult than you may have imagined.

In order to become a full-fledged vacation event planner, you will need to go and get yourself bonded and insured. This is crucially important because you will be collecting money from your clients that will be your responsibility to keep track of and will be liable for any losses suffered on behalf of the paying client. In other words, if the client pays you and you are supposed to use that money to pay for their part of the trip and your office or home gets robbed and the money is lost, the client will come after you for their money back. Once you have been bonded, it is time to start selecting vacation trips.

The difference between you and a travel agent is that the travel agent waits for clients to come to them and let them make all the decision on their vacations, while you are going out looking for clients to come along with the trip in which you have preset all the criteria and agenda for the group. When you are looking for a great vacation to put together, be sure to find something that not just anyone can put together. For example, anyone can book a vacation to travel via plane to Orlando Florida, stay at a cheap off brand hotel and spend a few days in the Disney Parks. This would not be the type of vacation you would want to attempt to market for your business. You need to find places that are harder for most common travelers to get into or more so that they typically would not be able to afford on their own. A better example of a vacation trip that you would want to put together would be to plan a trip to Paris, France for a week. You would need to contact several of the higher class resorts in that city to get the largest discount on room and board (also a good way to negotiate free extras for your group). Then you would need to arrange bus-style transportation for your group with a preplanned agenda of what you want to take your group to go see (again contact several to force competition for best rates). Finally, you would need to arrange airfare from a central deportation point in the United States to France (with larger groups, it may be cheaper and a lot more fun to charter a private jet for this flight). When making all the arrangements and getting the rates together for the entire package, be sure to tell all these businesses that you are traveling in a group of at least 50 people (companies will bend over backwards to give you anything it takes for a guaranteed booking of 50 people in one deal).

So now you have your package price put together in front of you. Now you know what it will cost for this trip for 50 people. At this point you can figure out the per person price for the trip. I would estimate that including travel time to and from France and the 7-night stay out there, this vacation would probably take a total of ten days. I would also assume that everything included, this trips total cost for all 50 clients would be around $50,000. The $1,000 price per person for this trip is generally about 60% cheaper than the same trip would cost for each person to try to book individually. This means for the clients to try and book this on their own, the trip would cost about $2,300! Now you have an attractive vacation at an unbeatable price. Here is where the profitable part of this company comes into play.

Your trip has a per person cost to you of $1,000 per person and you have booked this vacation for a year from now to make sure that you have plenty of time to fill all 50 spots for the trip. In almost all cases, you will have had to make a deposit of at least 10% this far in advance with all the companies involved in your trip. So you have a out of pocket cost of about $5,000 (you will want to be sure to make this up as soon as possible). This makes your deposit cost per person out to be $100 each. Now you need to setup a deposit and payment schedule for your clients. As will all other travel companies, you will need to have everything paid for no later than 60 days before the trip. As a result being that your trip is booked for a year away, this enables you to allow up to ten monthly payments from your clients if they book right away. For an easy example, I will suggest a plan for those booking in the first month (a year from the trip) and one for those booking 6 months from the trip. Your retail price for this trip is $1500 (this gives you a profit of $500 per client). Your total potential profit for this trip would be $25,000!

For those booking with 10 months of time to payoff the trip I would require a deposit of no less than 10% ($150 your deposit cost per person plus $50 profit) and setup nine more monthly payments of $150 to payoff the $1500 total price. For those booking within 6 months of the trip, I would require a deposit of no less than 25% ($375) And 5 monthly payments of $225 to payoff the balance.

No that you have booked and received all of the payments from all 50 clients with 60 days to spare before the trip, you can breath a sigh of relief that you have pulled off the most incredible event planner program possible. You can also enjoy the fact that you have made a $25,000 profit 60 days before the event even takes place and its all ready to take off on its own now!

Enjoy your paid vacation!