FAM Trips Just Got Better

FAM trips have long been a way of life for travel advisors, a well-known perk of the job. But if you’ve been on even one, you know they can also be exhausting and chaotic. Between back-to-back site visits, extensive dinners and intense information appointments, there is often little time to process, record, organize and share the experience. At worst, participants are left wondering: What site visit is this picture from? Where is the business card for the adventure experience? Which resort had that delicious dessert bar?

Two travel professionals, Rochelle Zemke of Zemke Travel and Stephanie Everhart Cavelli of My Favorite Travel Agent, saw an opportunity to tackle the issue, hoping to provide a one-stop-shop organizational fix to the inevitable FAM trip information fallout. Ironically, the pair met on a FAM trip in 2012 with a group of other advisors. They watched as their peers struggled with various ways to capture and share the information they were taking in, with no one method fully capturing the experience. 

“Many advisors were unable to market their fam experience to current and prospective clients,” the pair write on their website. “Our vision is to reinvent the fam experience.”

The experience inspired them to develop a service that allows advisors to record, organize and share FAM trip information from one place. Afterseveral years of development, the My Fam Trip app has finally launched.

To start, users choose between Site Inspection, Cruise Fam or Guided Tour Fam. My Fam Trip provides a framework of organization for each trip where images, impressions and information can be inputted for individual sites and experiences. Each picture taken or uploaded into the app is watermarked with a customized, user-defined logo to output branded images. This feature addresses the issue of digital theft, providing users a marketing tool with the ability to send information or images out to clients, or send output reports of trips for themselves or to colleagues.

The app also allows FAM trip hosts to pre-load the app with static information, such as business card information and site stats. This feature alleviates the burden of information from those experiencing a tour so they can focus on inputting subjective impressions and helpful information.

Zemke and Everhart Cavelli believe having FAM trip information easily accessible and neatly organized in one place will be a game-changer for advisors, especially because it is designed for quickly inputting data on the go.

In a Travel Research Online interview, Everhart Cavelli notes, "There are really four key advantages to using the app to assist in your fam record keeping.” Advisors can expect to:

• Easily organize and retain everything observed during a FAM. 
• Store the FAM report and share the details with colleagues.
• Maintain the integrity of your brand and digital content with the watermark feature.
• Market in real-time and generate tangible revenue from your FAM experience.

The service, based at www.myfamtrip.com, can be accessed with an internet connection via phone, laptop or desktop and costs $25 for 30 days or $99 for a year.

Originally appeared in the Fall 2022 issue of The Compass magazine.