One thing you will need in your skills arsenal if you want to be the most well organized travel planner possible is the skill of creating forms. Forms help you gather information from your clients quickly and efficiently.
In this article I'll cover my favorite form building site, Jotform, but there are a variety of free and paid form generation websites out there including Google Forms, which I also recommend, and is integrated right into your google drive folders. Traveljoy also has it's own form template generator, that works really well you can view here.
Jotform can be used to create forms, surveys, or participant feedback. You can send the forms out as links, emails, PDFs or embed them into your website. Jess uses a variety of forms including ones for:
Initial client inquiry - the client's first interaction with Jess. This is the client reaching out.
Traveler Information such as date of birth, passport, etc. - Used after their deposit.
Travel Interview Questionnaire - Jess does this over the phone and makes notes, but some may choose to have the client answer interview questions via a form.
Travel Insurance acceptance or denial. Used to get on paper their decision on whether to accept or deny the purchase of travel insurance. This is a "Cover your butt" situation.
Trip Follow Up - Use this to follow up on a client's trip and get feedback.
Jotform uses a drag and drop system where you can select from a selection of choices the type of question you are posing whether it be a single Yes or No, or a short text or number field, or multiple choice. For example if you want a client's phone number, you simply drag the "Phone Number" field onto your form. If you want to know a little bit about their trip, you could drag the "Long Text" field on. If you want to create a question with multiple answers you could drag on the "Multiple choice" field.
Jotform gives you the ability to do so much more though. Pretty much anything to your heart's desire is available to be placed in your form, from image and document uploads to date selections to literally anything. But for the most part, you'll stick to the basics; short text fields, dates, appointment maker, multiple/single choice buttons, signature fields etc.
Advanced Features
You can really go down the rabbit hole making forms, and one of the more advanced features is using Conditional Logic. Basically, it means "if this - then that" type of thinking. So, say you have a line of questioning pertinent to personal travel and a line of questioning pertinent to business travel. You can set up the jotform to only show business questions if the client answers "business" to the question "What type of trip is this?" It will subsequently hide all the personal travel questions. If the client selects ZERO children, the form can be designed to not ask questions relating to kids. Here's a link on basic conditional logic.
Here is a great overview of how to use Jotform from top to bottom.
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