In this solo instructional video, Evan Carmichael answers a viewer’s question about how a new, web‑based travel agency in Sri Lanka can attract customers abroad. He first advises the aspiring agent to gain hands‑on experience by working for an established tour operator, emphasizing learning the business model, customer acquisition, and profitable trip types without risking personal savings. He then outlines three concrete marketing tactics for reaching international travelers: (1) Define a clear, purpose‑driven brand (“stand for something”) that differentiates the agency beyond price; (2) Connect with both online and offline media—travel bloggers, YouTubers, social‑media influencers, and traditional press—who share the same brand purpose, using the website as a showcase; and (3) Form local alliances or distributors in target markets who understand the culture, language, and sales nuances, allowing the agency to sell effectively abroad. The video concludes with a call to like, subscribe, and belief in the presented strategies.
Chapters
How to find customers abroad. So I got a great question from one of my YouTube viewers, love you guys, Sen, who wrote in to say, hi Evan, thanks for the very informative video. I'm Sen from Sri Lanka and I want to start a travel agent business with a website base, but I have no idea how to find customers abroad. I'm new to tour operating, I have no idea how the tour operating model works through a website as well. Can you help me? Appreciate it. Cheers. Sen, thank you for the great question, and in all honesty, if you have no idea how model works, the best thing I can advise you to do is go out and work for somebody who's doing it. Take 3 months, 6 months, a year, whatever it is, and go model success. You'll learn all the mistakes that you would have made, you get to make on somebody else's dime while they're paying you to do it. You'll learn how the industry works, you'll learn how to get customers, you'll learn what trips really sell, you'll learn so much more by by working with that company than trying to figure it out all on your own, and your runway lasts a lot longer because now you're not dipping into your savings to make this thing work. You're getting paid to learn how to do it, and when you launch, you'll be a lot more successful. So that would be my first kind of quick intro bit of advice. Whenever you have no idea how something works, go find someone who's already doing exactly what you're doing and go work with them for a little bit. And this is not like, ah, get a job and now I'm stuck in this thing for the rest of my life. 3 months, 6 months, whatever it takes, just so you learn. When you feel like your learning isn't happening anymore, you've capped out, you know, you've peaked, there's no more momentum, that's when you leave and you start your own business or you go find something else, okay? But I wanna give you 3 bits of advice to help you grow this business, to get your clients internationally from abroad to care about what you're doing. The first is stand for something. You need to stand for something with your business. Why do I care about you? What's so special about you? There's tons of tour operators. There's tons of places for me as someone from North America I can go to, right? I can go anywhere in the world on my vacation. Why am I coming to Sri Lanka? You gotta convince me that you are doing something important, right? So you have to find what is in you, what's your one word, what's driving this that makes you want to create this business. So if you stood for adventure, say, you know, you think the world needs more adventure. Then you lead with, you know, Yala National Park. Or if you are trying to get a sense of calm, you believe that people need more calm and to relax and to be stress-free, then maybe you're showing Adam's Peak. But why is your business here, right? Because if it's just to make money, I don't care that I'm gonna— when I'm doing my research as somebody from North America who might be a customer, I'm just gonna try to find the cheapest place, and that's where you're competing on price. If you want to stand out and not just compete on price, then you have to stand for something and make me feel connected to your business somehow and show me that you're doing this not just to make money but to make the world a better place. How are you going to do that? That's what I want to know. So number 1, stand for something. Number 2 is connect with online and offline media. What I would do is now that you know what you're standing for, you've created a great website around it that when I come to your site I feel something, I would start connecting with traditional media, and online media, bloggers, YouTube video people like me, people who are big on Twitter, who all believe in the same thing, right? So if it's adventure and you've got Yellowstone National Park and you believe the world needs more adventure, start reaching out to travel bloggers who talk about adventure, people on social media who are creating YouTube videos about adventure, and let them know about all the great things that you're doing and show them your website. Because if I love adventure, right, if I feel adventure in my bones and I come to your website, which now stands for adventure, I should be like, wow! Wow, this is amazing, right? I believe in entrepreneurs, so if you showed me a website that was all about believing in entrepreneurs, I'm gonna tweet about it, I'm gonna make a video about it, I'm gonna share it because I stand for the same thing. So it's connecting with people who have influence in the market that you're trying to reach, in this case North America or abroad, who believe in the same thing that you're trying to accomplish. Reach out to them and they'll help you spread your message. And number 3 is form alliances. So beyond just the media, beyond just having people share your link and say, hey, check these guys out, ideally you can also get somebody in local markets who can help sell your stuff for you, who understand the culture, who can speak the language, who, who can relate to the customers. When I had my first software company, one of the first things I did was I got international distributors, people to sell for me, and I would funnel actually leads to them and they would develop their own customers as well because I don't know how to speak to somebody in Japan properly, right? I can't speak Japanese, I don't understand the culture, I don't understand the rituals, the time zone difference is ridiculous, so I'd rather have somebody in Japan representing me who loves my brand and who can represent me well out there selling to his local market. So find and form alliances with local people who again stand for the same thing you do and who can present it in that same voice that you're creating, because those people understand the culture and can better sell to that local market. So remember, if you're trying to get more customers abroad: Number 1, stand for something. Number 2, connect with online/offline media. Number 3, form alliances. And believe. For those of you watching, like the video. You can subscribe to the channel to see more just like this. Thank you so much. I'll see you soon.
