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TAP’s Added Value

Educational Webinars

Every Tuesday, anyone can tune into the “TAP Into Tuesday” webinar. Although most webinars are focused on travel — destinations, attractions and experiences — Tri-State Travel has homed in on another aspect of the travel business: motorcoaches.

Tri-State Travel is a full-service tour operator and one of only three TAP members that is also a charter motorcoach operator. Most group travel leaders rely on motorcoaches, but many have no idea of what to look for when it comes to booking them.

“No matter if you’re a tour operator in California or a group flying into Chicago, you have to get around somehow,” said Andy Hillard with Tri-State Travel, and “not all motorcoach companies are created equal.”

Tri-State Travel has twice led webinars about motorcoach education. The first was on motorcoach safety, and the second was about electronic logging devices, which the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration will require all motorcoach drivers to use beginning in December.

The devices, which sync up with the engine to record driving time, are intended to improve safety and make it easier to track data about drivers’ shifts. The change will affect the group market, Hillard said, because group leaders will need to start thinking about tightening up itineraries or adding more time, an extra night or a relief driver to avoid going over the daily limits on driving time.

For motorcoach safety, the webinar went over questions to ask, such as the carrier’s Department of Transportation (DOT) rating, if it has a full-time safety director and what its maintenance practices include. Group leaders should also ask about the average age of the operator’s fleet and the coaches’ amenities. For comparison, the average age of Tri-State’s 25 coaches is 2.5 years. Group leaders should also ask for a carrier’s DOT number to look up its records online.

TAP Into Tuesday webinars are free and open to everyone; they take place every Tuesday at 2 p.m. Eastern time. The webinars are available at www.tapintotravel.com/webinars.

Baseball Passport Program

Travelers are always looking for some sort of incentive, and STAT Baseball Road Trips is essentially “a frequent travel program,” said Michael Coldesina, manager with Sports Travel and Tours.

The company started the baseball passport program about 17 years ago. The agency gives travelers a Passport to Baseball, and every time they visit a stadium on an itinerary, they get a stamp in their passport. When they’ve visited all 30 Major League Baseball stadiums, Sports Travel and Tours invites them on a weekend trip to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. As the Hall of Fame’s official licensed travel partner, Sports Travel and Tours holds an induction ceremony there for travelers who have acquired all 30 stadium stamps and even pays for their overnight hotel accommodations.

“I think it gives group leaders a product that I don’t think they’ve traditionally looked at,” he said. “People are trying to do these trips on their own and visit the stadiums on their own because they don’t realize there’s an outlet for them to go and take all the hassle out of the process.”

Sports Travel and Tours has been running baseball trips pretty much from when it opened in 1996; the company soon realized that “a lot of impetus of these trips wasn’t the game itself but to visit the stadium,” Coldesina said.

The company tries to include all 30 MLB stadiums on at least one tour each year. Some itineraries include three or four stadiums, especially on the East Coast, such as Fenway Park in Boston and the Yankees’ and Mets’ stadiums in New York. Although the program centers on stadiums, itineraries include plenty of other attractions, destination and historic sites.

Women-Only Getaways

Main Street Experiences started its Women in Need of Spoiling (WINOS) program to take girlfriend getaways beyond wine tastings and day spas to fully escorted trips tailored for a female audience.

“The tours are for women, by women,” said Jennifer Lum Lee, director of marketing for Main Street Experiences, formerly Main Street Tours.

The five-woman company has mostly worked with seniors, so WINOS “opens up a whole new world for us,” she said. “This is going to be a lot of fun because it’s what we would want to do.”

Main Street started the program about a year ago as a partnership with Elaine Moulder, owner of Brilliant Edventures, based in Georgia. Most girlfriend getaways don’t include transportation and meals, and the partners wanted to offer the full group experience to small groups of women.

Although the smaller groups won’t get the same deep discounts as large groups, Main Street and Brilliant Edventures have the connections to get some discounted rates and special perks.

The two companies have plans to launch WINOS as a retail product but have also been doing custom group itineraries. WINOS in Waco includes a tour of sites from HGTV’s smash hit “Fixer Upper” and a stop at Magnolia Market, owned by the show’s hosts, Chip and Joanna Gaines. The trip is built around the Rootstock Wine Festival and includes dinner on the historic Waco Suspension Bridge. A new itinerary, WINOS and the City, will launch in May 2018 and plays on HBO’s popular show “Sex and the City.” Travelers will take a walking tour, visit filming locations from the show and be pampered by a beautician before a night out on the town to see a Broadway show.

WINOS will be launching four to six new itineraries next year, with destinations such as Maui, Hawaii; Wyoming; and San Francisco.