16 Tasks To Delegate to a Virtual Travel Assistant

Lockdowns are out and traveling is back in. While travel arrangements take a lot of time in research and making reservations, outsourcing to a dedicated virtual travel assistant can be your solution.

Travel agents, consultants, entrepreneurs, and casual travelers can now benefit from the help of virtual assistants to save time and money.

Read along to discover how a virtual travel assistant can help you out.

16 Tasks To Delegate to a Virtual Travel Assistant

Unless you have the financial freedom to travel without planning ahead, it can take a lot of time to find options that fit both what you need and what you want.

Delegating this process, and others, to a virtual assistant, can save everyone from that hassle, while also cutting down on costs by finding the best available flights, hotels, and more.

Here are 16 tasks you can outsource to virtual travel assistants.

1. Arrange Accommodations

When traveling, one of the most important things you need to secure is where you’ll be staying. You can delegate the responsibility of researching and securing your preferred accommodation to a virtual travel assistant.

Just let them know about your needs and they can make the necessary calls to make sure reservations are placed.

This means they’ll also be responsible for relaying any special requests like welcome packages and surprises, among others.

2. Book Transportation

Transportation can be tricky when you’re traveling. You can avoid being scammed, getting lost, and wasting time by having a virtual travel assistant secure transportation for your trip. They can strategize the most efficient routes before your trip, so you can maximize your vacation or trip time.

Whether it's a private service so your business trip goes smoothly, or a quick boat ride to get to your dream destination, a remote travel assistant can have the service booked in advance, or at least give you instructions on how to book tickets if you have to do in person, and the projected price. 

3. Research Options

It can be really advantageous to consult with a virtual travel assistant before going on a trip. They can help you gather a selection of options, whether it's destinations, detours, transportation, accommodation, activities, and more.

It’s not only destination information that they can research, but also current events in those places that can possibly affect your trip.

They can find information on whether it's a good time to go to one place, or if you may need to consider rescheduling or finding alternatives.

When going on a business trip, they can also list down your options for official meetings, hosting events, soirees, or other agendas you may have.

4. Personalize Trips

Need help finding the best destination that can fulfill your dream vacation? You should count on an expert to help you find the perfect places to go to.

A virtual travel assistant can cut down the time you spend looking for the right places to go to. Or, if you run a travel agency, they can do this for your customers. Once they know what kind of trip you’re planning to go on, they can easily pull up options that will satisfy the adventurer in you or your customers.

You can request a low-budget backpacking trip across Europe, or even a find a place where you can rent a boathouse near beach clubs. Maybe you’d like to explore Southeast Asian temples and street food.

Virtual travel assistants can give you the best options that would make a family vacation or honeymoon trips truly memorable.

5. Find the Best Deals

There are so many lifehacks on the internet teaching you how to get lower airfares and hotel discounts. Virtual travel assistants know those and more. They can also help you research them too.

If you’re hiring a virtual travel assistant for personal or business travel management, that means you have someone dedicated to finding you ways to save money while traveling.

They’ll find discounts from airlines, hotels, transport services, restaurant groups, and more. These experts can point you in the right direction to slash off more than you can expect from your expenses.

Travel advisors and agents can also expand their network with a dedicated virtual assistant for partnerships and vendor relationships, improving the value of service they provide to their clients.

Here’s what a virtual travel assistant’s schedule can look like.

6. Collate Itinerary Details

Life is easier when you’re prepared to travel. This doesn’t just mean you have your belongings and essentials. You’ll also need travel documentation, reservation details, and other proof of your bookings and purchases.

Having a personal virtual travel assistant can help you have all of your travel information in a handy app or file. They can even notify the concierge when you arrive so they’re ready for you.

Travel agents already spend enough time doing work for their clients. Itinerary planning and preparation can be delegated to a virtual travel assistant so it can be sent out punctually.

7. Prepare a Travel Guide

As they are also involved in planning trips, virtual travel assistants can also be tasked to prepare handy travel guides for your clients.

This can be a handy printout that travelers can bring along with them, a file, or an app that has all the details they need for their destination.

These personalized travel guides can also include safety precautions, dress codes, conduct codes, short foreign phrases, fun facts, and emergency hotlines.

Basically, it’s a personalized note that helps travelers always be prepared to have the best time of their lives during their trip.

8. Resolve Issues and Complaints

Encountering issues during your trip? You can forward these to your virtual travel assistant so they can find the best possible solution.

They can also be the ones to make calls and get updates on the resolution of your complaints, be it regarding your accommodation, transportation, or other itineraries.

9. Prepare Contingency Plans

Another perk of working with an expert on your travels is having contingencies. Businesspeople and casual travelers can both benefit a lot from a contingency plan prepared by a virtual travel assistant.

Don’t like your accommodation? They can easily help you cancel your reservation and find another viable option. Change of plans during your trip? Ask and they probably have exciting suggestions.

Even better, if your entire trip is suddenly impossible, they can help you reschedule your entire trip and even avoid rebooking fees.

10. Collect Payments

Travel consultants can benefit from the services of a virtual travel assistant by outsourcing the work to request, collect, and confirm payment from clients.

This includes sending out gentle reminders for late payments, notice on upcoming or missed dates, and updating in-house records of outstanding payments.

11. Offer Customer Service

Travel agents and consultants also encounter complaints from their customers. Virtual assistants are highly capable of providing excellent customer service to their clients.

This skill can be leveraged so travel agents have dedicated staff who handle phone, email, or text complaints and resolution. They can even answer questions and inquiries that come in about your business.

12. Promote Your Business

Virtual travel assistants can help promote the services of travel agencies and consultancies. They can create marketing materials, strategize and execute campaigns, draft emails and blogs, and perform social media management.

While tourism is largely influenced by user-generated content, it’s useful to have a representative on social media who can engage with the community of frequent travelers, helping you promote your business and even get prospective clients.

13. Provide Support

Virtual assistants are largely known for providing remote administrative support. They can also do this for travel agencies in need of some office support.

They can help get documents organized, implement a system for file storage, and even introduce automation and apps that will improve the team’s workflow. That’s all on top of providing daily administrative support.

You can also have them handle inbound messages on social media, email, phone, and SMS, leveraging their skill in providing concierge services.

14. Audit Invoices

With the organizational skills of virtual assistants, they can also take care of updating and auditing travel expense records, whether they’re working for a travel consultant or as a remote corporate travel manager.

This helps businesses gain insight into how well they’ve been managing expenses related to travel, or how a travel consultant’s business is doing.

15. Calendar Management

Companies can hire virtual travel assistants to fulfill the role of an in-house travel manager. That’s a team member who is in charge of all business travel arrangements.

Including all the mentioned tasks on this list, they will also be in charge of updating team calendars whenever business trips affect meetings, appointments, and deadlines.

They’ll also manage all other issues related to business travel including payments, creating corporate travel policies, and processing travel permits.

16. Travel Coordination

Another responsibility you can trust a virtual travel assistant with is to coordinate trips for others. Whether your agency is selling tour packages, or a few business trips are coming up, a virtual assistant can help optimize schedules, track, monitor, and assist all travelers.

Virtual travel assistants can also provide real-time support to travelers, help resolve issues, relay messages to on-site team members, and help create good experiences for everyone.

Work With the Best Virtual Travel Assistants

With more international and local borders open, travel has become more common again, slowly revitalizing the tourism industry.

As tourism-based businesses pick up, it can be a wise decision to leverage the skills of virtual assistants to prepare for the surge in customers that will continue to increase. That’s extended productivity, without the impact of a local hire on your operational costs.

Business trips will also become more frequent, increasing the amount of work that can be outsourced to a virtual travel assistant.

If you’d like the help of a virtual travel assistant in your business, fill out this form and one of our Consultants will get in touch with you.

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