SUCCESS STORIES
From Bust to Boom
BY MIMI KMET
Agent@ Home Magazine July
An Internet company finds success as a travel retailer after dot-com fallout
When the dot-com industry went bust a few years ago, Bruce Fisher and his wife, Yaling Yu, went into the travel business out of necessity. Today, their Honolulu-based at-home agency, Hawaii-Aloha.com, is booming. Last year, the agency did $5.4 million in gross sales, nearly double its 2005 sales, according to Fisher. Moreover, gross sales in the first quarter of 2007 are up 120 percent over the first quarter last year, thanks mainly to their embrace of technology.
"We started out as a dot-com in 1997 and got dot-bombed when the Internet marketing business went bad in 2000," Fisher says, referring to the Internet marketing company they operated from home. But what kept Fisher and Yu afloat was their affiliation with Planet Hawaii, a portal with a hotel booking engine, which was still getting plenty of traffic. Fisher says, "We were getting commission checks from Planet Hawaii, because people were booking travel. We had a licensing agreement to run Planet Hawaii, so we were getting any money that came through."
And when that agreement came to an end, Fisher and Yu, who operated Hawaii-Aloha.corn as the website for their marketing company, posted their phone number on the site.
"We made a conscious decision out of desperation, because we were going out of business," Fisher says, adding that the response was almost immediate. "When we stuck the phone number on our website, someone called, and I didn't know what I was doing. So I booked the air on Orbitz, I booked the hotel on the Planet Hawaii affiliate program, and I used a supermarket coupon that offered free companion inter-island air. I bundled it together, and it was cheaper than what the client could find online at the time."
The transition into travel retailing seemed natural, since Hawaii-Aloha. com had clients such as the former Aston Hotels & Resorts (now ResortQuest Hawaii) and Prince Resorts Hawaii when it was an Internet marketing company. Nonetheless, Fisher and Yu weren't familiar with all of the hotels there, he admits. So Fisher bought the book "Hawaii for Dummies," and HawaiiAloha.com started growing as an inbound Hawaii travel retailer. In fact, he says, "By the second year, we were so overwhelmed by the amount of traffic we were getting, we were turning down business. At the same time we weren't making a killing." This put Fisher and Yu into another dilemma: They needed employees but couldn't afford to pay them regular salaries or rent office space. At that time, Voiceover Internet Phone (VOIP) service, which uses the Internet as a phone connection point, was becoming popular.
They embraced the new technology by setting up a part-time agent with VOIP in her home. Now, when HawaiiAloha.com's toll-free number rings, it rings on all phones with the company's VOIP service, and the first person to answer takes the call. Agents also can transfer calls to one another, participate in conference calls and perform other phone functions as if they were located in the same office.
Today, Fisher and Yu still book travel from their home office, while 15 agent affiliates, most of whom are in Hawaii and all of whom are certified Hawaii specialists, work completely on an independent , basis, aside from the VOIP connection.
But that's where web technology gives way to personal interaction.
"Once a customer interacts with our website and makes contact with us, the Internet experience ends and it's humanized from that point forward," Fisher says, explaining that clients then speak to the agents via phone. "We use Internet technology just to make things easier," he says, noting that agents also have live, online chats with clients.
Each of the Hawaii-Aloha.com's agents has a blog on the website. And the company recently celebrated the one-year anniversary of its podcast, www.hawaiialoha.com/podcast, a travel show that goes online three times a week, covering topics such as all-inclusive options and inexpensive airfare. Fisher also answers questions submitted by podcast customers and provides information about packages. The podcasts resulted in regular appearances on the Travel Channel's "Hawaii Do's and Don'ts."
In addition, Fisher appears regularly on AllExperts.com in Hawaii, where he answers questions about traveling to the islands. Although he does this gratis, his appearances boost his credibility, and some of the people who have posed questions are now clients.
Next on the tech agenda is developing a proprietary database program. "We develop our own stuff," Fisher says. "There are so many cookie-cutter sites out there," most of which use engines such as Expedia to operate.
Hawaii-Aloha.com is also venturing into wholesaling with its commissionable "Oahu Carefree All-Inclusive" package, which it rolled out in April. "Hawaii is not really an all-inclusive destination, but there are a lot of people who want it," Fisher says.