Welcome to the Travel Agent Toolkit
Here you will find a collection of resources designed to help you increase your visibility and engagement with travelers and boost sales. The Toolkit offers you a number of benefits:
Easily market your business to travelers
Take advantage of campaign content you can add your own branding to, on relevant topics that you can send to travelers. Current campaign topics include: 'tips for travel in 2021', ‘why book a vacation rental’ and ‘why use a travel agent for domestic travel’, with more to come in coming months.
Save time and improve your online presence
Choose from over 40 stylish and customizable templates which can be used across Instagram, Facebook, email, and your website.
Get more value, for free
Best of all, this won’t cost you anything. As an Expedia TAAP partner, you get free and unlimited access to the toolkit, including our marketing how-to guides and more content to come!
How does the toolkit work?
The toolkit is organized by ‘campaigns’ on relevant topics. For each campaign, you will be given supporting assets to help you market your business to travelers and boost sales.
Below is an example of the ‘Why use a travel agent for domestic travel’ campaign. This campaign includes a number of supporting assets that you can use to help educate travelers on the benefits of using a travel agent for domestic travel.
Okay, now that you understand how the toolkit is structured, you might be wondering how to get started? Below are the steps to follow:
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Select your preferred campaign
Choose the campaign theme that you would like to use from the left-hand column. In this example, we’ll pick the campaign on ‘Tips for travel in 2021’
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Download the assets you want to use
From the campaign page, you have access to all of the resources that you’ll need.
If the campaign offers a guide that you can send to travelers, simply click ‘Get the guide’ and it will download to your computer. For the email template, just click the ‘Get template’ button underneath – it’s that simple.
For the Facebook, Instagram, and digital banner ad templates, this is where the fun truly begins. Why do we say that? That’s because these templates are built in Canva, a free and easy-to-use graphic design platform. Anyone can use it, including you!
The benefits of Canva are that it makes it easy for you to add your company logo, edit the text, and change background images. You also get access to an additional 250,000 templates and hundreds of thousands of images to choose from. Not bad, right?
Let’s try one of these templates that we’ve pre-designed for you in Canva. Scroll down and choose the design you like the most. In this example, we’ll go with Template D. Since we plan to create some Facebook posts, click ‘Facebook template’
After clicking ‘Facebook template’, Canva will open up a screen showing you a preview of the template. Click ‘Use template’ to move forward. Note if this is your first time clicking on one of the templates, it will then ask you to create a free Canva account.
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Edit your design
So, you’ve picked template D.
As you can see, Tip #1 is already ready to publish to Facebook, but let’s use this awesome design to create a series of Facebook posts on the top tips for travel in 2021.
Before we begin, you should know that Canva has provided you with a series of beginner videos on how to use the platform.
We recommend you go through these videos as they will help you get familiar with the platform and take your design skills to the next level. That said, Canva is so easy to use that you might be able to follow the steps below without any help!
Let’s begin by clicking ‘Duplicate page’
Now it’s time to create your Tip #2.
Editing the text is super-easy, and we’ve prepared text in the ‘Social media messaging’ section of the campaign that you can use.
Double click the text and we’ll update the #2 tip to ‘Plan ahead’
Next up, you’ll want to change the background. Since the tip is about planning ahead, let’s choose an image of luggage.
On the left-hand panel, click photos and then search for ‘luggage’
Click on a photo that you like, and it will appear on your design. Then delete your old background image by clicking on it and hitting the ‘delete button' on your keyboard.
Right-click on the new photo, and click “Set Image as Background’
You can drag elements around so that it works better with your new image, too
Want to add your company logo?
Easy, on the left-hand panel just go to ‘Uploads’ and then upload your logo.
Click on the logo, and it will automatically insert onto your design. You can then resize it and drag it to wherever you like.
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Publish your post
You can now download the image to use it for your next Facebook post. Or, you can publish directly to Facebook! How convenient is that?
Please note that if you do not see the 'Publish to Facebook' button, or would like to publish to another account, like Instagram, then you can click the three dots and link the account.
In this example, we are going to be posting Tip #1 (Page 1) and using the ready-made messaging provided to you as part of the campaign.
Click ‘Publish now’ et voila! Your design has been published on your Facebook page.
Here’s an example of what the final result could look like for a series of 4 posts:
Please note that if you do not see the 'Publish to Facebook' button, or would like to publish to another account, like Instagram, then you can click the three dots and link the account.
Additional resources
We have also created a series of guides to help you take your marketing skills to the next level, such as ‘how to use social media to grow your travel business’ – you can find this guide and more to come in the ‘Marketing how-to guides’ section of the toolkit.