Advisor Speak: Carrie Wallace Wants to Be Your ‘FamGuru’

Carrie Wallace Wants to Be Your ‘FamGuru’By Paloma Villaverde de RicoCarrie Wallace was frustrated with the follow up to FAMs. She would have great FAM experiences, see beautiful resorts, discover delightful destinations, but when she got back to her office, she’d have a pile of e-mails to catch up on, more bookings to deal with and other tasks that come with running an agency, so she’d put getting her FAM notes organized on the back burner, hoping to one day catch up. The problem is, we all know how difficult it is to play catch up. So, Wallace did something about her frustration. She created the FamGuru platform and app, which debuted at the 2023 Virtuoso Travel Week. Recommend Standard Image Template“There’s so much we can do to change the way the industry acquires, organizes, uses and monetizes the knowledge that we get from our FAM trips. It’s super powerful,” Wallace tells Recommend. “I’ve traveled on many FAMs, been to five continents on FAMs and I was really frustrated. I would go on these trips, do a ton of activities and although I wanted to come home and market it to my clients, it was [nearly impossible]. I felt bad, too, because the host, or supplier, had done an amazing job.” FamGuru allows advisors to keep track of their reviews, insights, images in one central hub, it auto-generates a report back to the agency and allows them to do so in real-time. “By leveraging technology,” says Wallace, “we intend to make FamGuru the industry standard for FAM trips.” She says it boggles the mind that “we haven’t done this before in this industry.” But there’s more. This isn’t just for advisors, it’s also for suppliers. “I was speaking to suppliers and I heard, ‘FAMs are so much work.’ And I thought, there are two sides to this coin. Suppliers spend so much time, hundreds of hours sometimes, and thousands of dollars putting together these great trips for us and it’s such a disappointment if I get back to my desk and don’t have time to broadcast this out to my clients. With that in mind, we developed a platform for suppliers as well.” Suppliers using FamGuru can utilize it to put together the itinerary, all the sales collateral, all the best photos and anything else they need to share about the trip. “From a functionality standpoint,” says Wallace, “they put all the information that they would normally put on e-mail and normally chase on e-mail into the platform and they push it out to the advisor app.” She adds, “The FAM is a massive marketing opportunity that we really haven’t leveraged. So, the goal is to make the advisor more effective and improve the ROI for the supplier as well as the advisor (they, too, are spending time out of the office as well as money). We want to sell more travel as a result of these FAMs.”Advisor Says ‘Perfect Solution’So how does FamGuru work in the real world? We asked Helen Buckner, a family travel specialist with Ciao Bambino, who’s been using it during a 5-week self-directed FAM. “Every FAM I’ve been on (either self-created or otherwise), I have scribbled hand-written notes in a notebook,” says Buckner. “By the time I get home, e-mails and trips have piled up, and I haven’t found the time to type up those notes and share them with my team at my host agency. I’ve felt really guilty about that. When I heard about FamGuru, I thought it was the perfect solution to share my learnings and notes with the team, and it will be more easily accessible to me than digging through a notebook to see these notes later, too. “After each site inspection, I take a few minutes and go back over it to see if I missed anything or put things under the correct category. I love that the categories are already there, and you just enter what applies under each category heading. It will help to quickly see what you are looking for later. I just started adding pictures today, and that was very easy to do. “I can’t wait to see all the information in one report from the 40+ properties I’m seeing on this trip. It is a fantastic resource for travel advisors and I HIGHLY recommend it.” FamGuru is available free of charge for advisors from the App Store and Google Play. For more information, visit famguru.app or contact info@famguru.app.
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