The Select Traveler Conference offers the best in educational seminars for travel program directors and travel industry delegates. This year, the conference is offering three outstanding seminar speakers in addition to the traditional breakout sessions. That’s four sessions in three days that address your travel program’s marketing, management, operations and membership growth.
Here’s a rundown of this year’s speakers:
Super Session
March 30
Anne Beiler, founder of Auntie Anne’s Soft Pretzels, is an American businesswoman who grew up in an Old Order Amish family in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In 1987, she began making and selling soft pretzels based on baking she had done as a young girl. Her first sales were from stands operated at public events and markets. She perfected a soft pretzel that became popular almost immediately.
Within a year of starting the business, Beiler had several stand-alone stores and began opening additional stores in malls. Two years later, Auntie Anne’s Soft Pretzels were franchised, and before Beiler sold the company to investors, her stores were prevalent in airports and malls across the United States and in more than 20 foreign countries.
In 2008, she wrote a memoir titled “Twist of Faith: The Story of Anne Beiler, Founder of Auntie Anne’s Pretzels.” She addressed the National Republican Convention the same year.
Generational Marketing Session
March 31
Michael Sullivan is the founder of 50 Plus Communications Consulting, a generational marketing firm that advises financial companies and other clients on the nuances of selling to baby boomers and older clients. Based in Charlotte, North Carolina, Sullivan addresses the differences in selling to traditional older clients and to emerging baby boomers who are just entering their retirement years.
Sullivan addresses the five values most older adults adopt as they enter their retirement years: maintaining independence as long as possible, connecting with friends and family, giving back to society in some way, continuing to grow and learn throughout retirement and revitalization through recreational outlets and changes in lifestyle.
Sullivan recently completed a 20-year run as the columnist in Bank Travel Management magazine, where he authored more than 100 different articles on topics ranging from marketing to lifestyle cycles and how they affect selling to older Americans. He is the author of “101 Easy Ways To Increase Business With Boomerplus Clients.”
Awesome Creative Ideas Session
April 1
D. Parker Finney is unlike any speaker you’ve ever heard. This recent Dartmouth graduate already owns a place in the Guinness World Records for building the world’s longest Barrel of Monkeys chain. He loves building and organizing things, and he wants to put a free-food truck in the homeless district of San Francisco. That’s just the beginning.
He has already interned with Google for a summer, where he worked on YouTube and BigTable projects. He’s a Dartmouth College Fellow in Digital Studies and interned with another Web company, OpenHatch.org. He attended the Ivy League school as a Presidential Scholar. And he’s a member of the Dog Day Players, an improv comedy troupe based in Dartmouth.
If you’ve never attended a motivational, improvisational, free-thinking session led by a fast-rising 20-something, now’s your chance.
See you at the Select Traveler Conference in Huntsville.
To register, visit www.selecttravelerconf.com.
