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Certified Travel Expert - CTE™
Exclusive Recognition For Exceptional Travel Planners
Gold Certification
Already an established travel planner?
Our Gold certification is reserved for travel planners who have a successful travel planning business and can demonstrate repeated success sending travelers on exceptional “bucket-list” trips.
Pass the following four Assessments and you will earn your Gold Certification:
Implementation
Expertise
Business Practices
Engagement
New to travel planning?
If you are in the process of launching your business then you should look at our Silver Certification to start.
Gold Certification - Assessment Tests
Implementation Assessment: Are you able to plan and deliver fantastic custom trips to your destination for travelers? You have an itinerary template or app that works for your trips, a method for planning and a head for details.
Expertise Assessment: Are you a “boots-on-the-ground” expert on your locale, able to create the perfect itineraries custom-tailored to each traveler?
You’ve probably traveled there extensively or better yet lived there. You’re already the local expert and friends come to you for advice on how to do it, where to go and what to see!
Business Practices Assessment: Are you legit? Are you easy to work with, ready to go the extra mile, all “i’s” dotted and “t’s” crossed?
We don’t give out our badges lightly – we need to make sure that we would recommend a traveler to your business. Because, once you become a CTE, we will!
Engagement Assessment: We look at some of your trips, review your itineraries, process, feedback. Typically, if you’ve done more than ten trips or been in business over a year you will pass with flying colors.
Our assessments are a combination of written work and in-person interviews. We get to know each of our Travel Experts before we certify them!
Certified Travel Expert - Core Requirements
The assessments cover a range of topics. We look in particular for three things that set our Travel Experts apart from traditional travel guides and agents:
You Are a Travel Expert
Our students are already travel pros with extensive personal experience. While we don’t teach you travel expertise, we do teach you how to make six figures using it!
You Want to Offer Custom Trips
Our experts know that the best trips are tailored trips, where the entire experience is planned around customers’ interests and needs.
You Offer Transparent Pricing
To qualify for certification we require that experts offer full transparency on what they charge clients, with no hidden commissions, hidden fees, middlemen or markups.