In March of 2024, Jenn Lee was named president of the newly minted Vacation Planners, a franchise arm of Travel Planners International (TPI). The vision for the new brand was clear: to leverage TPI’s expertise in order to help independent travel advisors build their business and provide exceptional service to their clients.
Interest in Vacation Planners was strong from the start. Ever strategic and thoughtful, Lee considered applicants carefully and didn’t rush the onboarding process. As of now, there are six franchisees under the Vacation Planners umbrella.
Given how nascent the Vacation Planners model is, the January announcement that Lee would also take on the role of TPI president turned heads. How would Lee do two roles, and why now? We caught up with the industry leader to find out more about her new title and what the next year will look like for TPI and Vacation Planners.
You are now president of Vacation Planners and TPI, as well as chief marketing officer for both. That sounds like four jobs. How did this come to be?
At TPI, we've always wanted to be able to provide our travel advisors with as many options as possible for them to be successful in their businesses. The whole premise of starting the franchise division was that we saw the need — or really the challenge — of the experienced advisor who started in the host agency model who really just wants to sell.
That's all they want to do. They just want to sell. They want to scale. They want to make an impact on their local community. The franchise model gives them that, versus the host model, which is really great for someone who wants to build their own brand, their own business and their own identity.
We want to meet them where they are, right? That's why it makes more sense to have one president who is pushing the directives. We are bringing them together, yet keeping them two separate companies with two sets of employees.
And as the leader of both, you are able to help create a sense of continuity?
I can ensure that we have a consistency with the feeling of our brand, and our brand is both TPI and Vacation Planners. The culture, or the way we approach the client, feels similar at the TPI level and at the Vacation Planners level.
My personal mission is to create a sense of expected consumer experience. What is the consumer expected to experience when they work with a travel advisor, whether it's at a brick-and-mortar store, with somebody who works remote from home or someone who does this part-time? If we can create an expected experience through similar technologies or similar language, then it's going to start resonating.
Vacation Planners debuted in March of 2024, with you at the helm. Did you know then that you would — in under a year — also lead TPI?
No, this was not expected. It started to make more sense, though, as we launched Vacation Planners. It felt too much like two separate companies, versus being sister companies. That's when it was determined that we needed a consistent president and chief marketing officer.
What bumps came with that division of leadership?
It always was one family, but two brands. We separated everything — separate booths, separate advertising — and that just did not play well. It didn't resonate, and it wasn't creating an opportunity to leverage the strength of our reputation with TPI.
Advisors and partners were confused. That’s what we kept hearing over and over again. They’d ask, ‘Is TPI now going to become a franchise company?’ We were constantly trying to explain it. We tried to keep it separate for the sake of clarity, yet it made it more confusing and was disruptive to the TPI advisor base.
So, we recognized that to be viewed as one family with multiple brands, you need to have the same vision, mission, direction and so forth. That's why it made more sense to have one president who could see everything and bring things together. We will keep things separate, yet have continuity.
What’s one action you’ll take right away to establish that continuity?
It's really about doubling down on the “Sell travel your way” idea — we will support advisors to sell travel the way they want to sell travel. We're going to probably do joint booths and ads for TPI and Vacation Planners, though our employees [for each brand] will still be different. We're still going to have a separate IATA number. From an outward perspective, it should look like a company that's building multiple ways for advisors to sell travel.
Given your expanded role, will you have less time to participate in in-person trade events?
I will be front and center at industry events, for sure. And then, within TPI events, Dave Meihoefer, our vice president of sales and engagement, will be a big presence. We’ve got a killer team, and I'm there to support them.
How did the initial 10 months of Vacation Planners go? And what’s on the horizon?
Vacation Planners was announced last March, but I actually didn't kick it off until August. So, it's only been a few months, and we're developing everything from scratch.
In December, we decided to go the separate IATA route, so that put everything on a 30-day pause while we got new logins and new contracts. Now, we are excited to say that we have six full-time franchisees. Three of them are fully onboarded and we're doing all their marketing for them. The other three are in various stages of onboarding.
I have been very conservative with our forecast; at the end of 2025, I'd like to have 50-55 franchisees. We're looking to add just three a month for the first few months of the year, up until May. Then we will ramp up to five per month. We're doing that because it's a brand-new program, and we want to make sure that we are nailing it from an operation standpoint.
We are doing all the marketing for our franchisees — something that's not done in the industry currently, that I'm aware of. We do all their social media, all their email marketing (very specific to them), every flyer.
How has recruiting possible franchisees gone?
I haven't done much marketing outside of the TPI family, and I've done that on purpose, because I know I've already got buy-in there. There's a trust factor; I want to serve the TPI advisor first. I want the advisor who only does $400,000 a year to be the first one that gets to $1 million a year because he or she took the franchise model.
It's not about taking advisors from the TPI model. It's about looking at them and saying, ‘You're in the host space, where you're responsible for everything and you're not as successful as you want to be. In the franchise model, it’s our job to help amplify what you're doing so you can focus on selling.’
And then, what’s your vision for TPI?
I want to understand where TPI is, and where we have opportunity within it. It really is a well-run machine — there's nothing wrong with what's happening here. But where do we have opportunities that maybe we haven't looked at before? That’s first.
Then, we're having a retreat for every manager, director and vice president. That’s the first week of March, so we can come together so we all agree on what's going on. What is the overall vision? We want them to buy into the foundation of us being able to build multiple companies, and have multiple types of services, stemming from serving the advisor community. So, it's kind of a level-setting event.
I also think we have an opportunity with a different leadership style to really dive into data, which we haven't done before. TPI is a profitable, debt-free organization with amazing human beings in the building. How can we leverage that? How can we bring it into Vacation Planners, and how can we make this consistent? It's the consistency and continuity that needs to happen more than anything else.
