Pivoting in the Face of Change
Girl Scout alum and travel industry veteran Michelle Fee, the CEO of Cruise Planners, has had a career she never could have imagined in her 20s.
Her father decided to launch a travel agency and invited her—while she was still a young mother trying to figure out how to juggle parenting and work—to join the business from the beginning. He thought the flexibility would work for her schedule.
“I tripped into travel,” she laughs
But the travel industry in the early 80s was a very different place than it is today.
“Forty-two years ago, there was no internet, and people had to walk into the agency in order to get airline tickets and vacation information. It was a whole different world,” she explains of growing that first business, Friendship Travel, in the early days.
“Then, in 1994, we realized we were starting to become a dinosaur. People started coming into my office saying, ‘I saw this price online, can you match it?’,” she remembers, looking back on when the internet started to change the way travel was bought and sold.
“Over the next couple of years, we realized the internet was going to take over a big part of our business and we needed to reinvent ourselves,” Michelle says. “So, we changed our business into a home-based travel agency, before people had computers in their homes.”
It was then, in 1994, that Michelle launched Cruise Planners with two fellow industry veterans, who have since retired.
“At the beginning,” she adds, “We weren’t business savvy enough to think this big. But we got up every day and just tried to figure out how to grow our business. We were a little company back then, and I didn’t envision what we would become today. I thought if we had 100 agents that would be success!”
Today, Cruise Planners is the largest home-based travel franchise company in the nation, with more than 2,500 franchise owners and locations in all 50 states.
“People thought at the time that travel agents would eventually go away but we’re just doing businesses differently. There used to be a travel agency in every strip center, but you’d be hard-pressed to find one now.”
Still, at the core of the business’ success is the importance of people skills, according to Michelle.
“People still deal with people that they know and like,” she says.
Michelle, who looks back on her time as a Girl Scout Brownie with fondness, likens the way her business works to the troop model.
“We aid our advisors, like a troop leader would,” she says, drawing parallels to Girl Scouts’ “girl-led” troop paradigm. “We help them to build their business. We teach our franchisees to set obtainable goals, and once the goals are set, our coaches help our advisors set a road map for how to reach those goals.”
While switching to a business with a. different model was a big pivot, Michelle says she makes smaller pivots regularly.
“Not everything works—you make some right decisions and some wrong decisions. You can’t run a business thinking every decision you make is going to be right,” she says, “But failures help you grow.”
These pivots have left her comfortable adapting and making changes—skills that were critical when the global COVID-19 pandemic broke in March of 2020.
“When we heard we had to go home and work from home for eight weeks I thought, ‘How are we going to do that?’ But those eight weeks turned into well over a year,” she recalls.
“We became prepared and we ran the company from our homes. We have a big technology team and they made sure everyone had a connection, a laptop … everything they needed to do their job from their house. It was challenging, but we didn’t back down.”
Michelle understood the need to communicate and stay connected to her national network of travel agents during this challenging time. She embraced Zoom, taped videos for the agents to keep them engaged, and launched a weekly digital newsletter. She also started to sell more land vacations than cruise vacations.
Today, business is back and better than ever for Cruise Planners—and Michelle’s team is now adept at adapting to change.
“I’ve had some buddies who have owned other travel companies who have gotten complacent, and today they are no longer there. I don’t know many industries out there that haven’t had to evolve.” she says, adding. “Change is the new black—you have to go along with change.”
