TORONTO — Travel advisor Kathleen Penner makes travel dreams come true for her clients – and also turns marketing dreams into reality for her fellow travel agents.

Penner, whose Plenty of Sunshine Travel agency is affiliated with Trevello, shares her skills at Canva with other agents via online classes.

If you’re unfamiliar with Canva, it’s an online graphic design tool that’s easy to use.

Or rather, easy-ish.

Canva is a popular online graphic design tool (photo credit IB Photography – stock.adobe.com)

As Penner tells Travelweek: “I actually started doing these classes because one of my [Travello travel agent] friends had done a post on our Facebook group that she needed help with Canva. She was a bit stuck on formatting some posts and making flyers to grow her group cruises. So I posted that I would love to help her and that we should set aside time to meet via Zoom, so that I could share my screen and walk her through some items that were a sticking point for her.”

From those humble beginnings, Penner’s Canva classes just grew and grew. “Many others jumped on and said, ‘Oh, I’d love to join too.’ ‘Can I come?’ ‘Can I come?’ It grew exponentially, and our classes ended up starting, and they are fabulous.”

One of the sample pieces created for Kalthleen Penner’s Canva classes (image courtesy Kathleen Penner)

“IT’S LIKE HAVING A GRAPHIC DESIGNER IN YOUR BACK POCKET”

For any travel advisor promoting their agency’s services on social media, Canva is indispensable. “Canva is a wonderful tool for designing beautiful graphic art for social media posts (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc). You can also create Reels easily,” says Penner.

She says she enjoys using Canva “because it makes my posts and content look very professional. It’s like having a graphic designer in your back pocket. It is very fast and easy to batch-create a post for every day of the month within seconds. This has saved me so much time, yet I can present things that look like I have spent a lot of time working on.”

Penner turns to Canva a lot for lead magnets. And she’s used many of Canva’s pre-made templates for travel-inspirational quotes. “This is especially nice for my higher-end clients who want things to look very beautiful and presented professionally.”

Canva is free to use, plus there’s a paid option with even more functionality. Both programs use an intuitive drag-and-drop style, says Penner. The free option has more than 1 million designs to choose from and 1000+ design types – so not exactly bare-bones. The paid option has unlimited templates in the premium line, and 100 million+ photos, videos, graphics, audio and more.

Says Penner: “The classes are geared to both options. It doesn’t matter if you are paid or free; you can still have quality graphics. You can quickly resize a post that fits on Facebook to make it fit on Instagram with one click. I love the paid option because it can remove the background and has AI tools to reword the text in your social media posts to make it sound more exciting.”

Penner opened her home-based agency in 2018 and was voted the #1 Best Travel Agency in 2021 & 2023 and #3 in 2022 by readers of The Hamilton Spectator. A self-described techie, she prepared for travel’s restart by joining a Facebook group on enhancing group sales, taking free classes on Coursera on how to do Facebook ads as well as learning about SEO, writing skills, graphic design, leadership skills, getting comfortable with public speaking and more. She also used the COVID downtime to get her CTA accreditation.

“I love technology, I think it is there to make our life easier, not harder,” she says. “The more automation that we have in our processes, the better we can serve our customers because we are not spending so much time doing the same things over and over. Automation helps.”

She adds: “I do a weekly YouTube show where I meet with a different cruise line every week, and I can make reels from show clips that draw people into watching more of my content. We can also create YouTube intros and closings. I can also create YouTube thumbnails.  I create thank you cards for my clients, and I even made my business cards in Canva and had them shipped to a Staples store for me to pick up. The possibilities are endless, and when I face a creative block, I can explore templates to discover so many items to create.”

“WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER”

Penner works hard to make her Canva classes as easy to follow as the tool is easy to use. Participants join live or watch the recordings later. “I like to record them and put them on YouTube on a private link, and then I can share them with those who have attended our class,” she tells Travelweek. “This way, they can pause the video, work through the steps I’ve just taught, and then push play again and advance through the video to the next steps.”

Not only is Penner a lifelong learner, she’s also a natural teacher. “One of my true passions is helping travel agents boost their sales – I love doing it! I adore being a travel agent and making my clients’ dreams come true with their trips, but there’s something special about helping out fellow agents. When one agent succeeds, we all do! There’s no competition because plenty of travellers are out there for all of us. We’re all in this together.”

Penner has also been exploring the potential to use her skills and travel knowledge on the supplier side of the industry. “I want to be that bridge that helps other travel agents increase sales and grow by connecting them with the supplier I will represent someday.”

She’s a big advocate of not just working in your business, but on your business too. It’s a mantra many agents have taken to heart over the past several years. “We need to work ON our business, and if we can’t work on our business, one day a week it will never grow,” she says.

Penner doesn’t charge for her classes. She asks that if participants find value in the class, they can e-transfer Penner whatever amount they choose.

“I feel that we as travel agents have been through so much with the pandemic and working so hard to get our business back up and growing that I don’t want someone who could increase their sales and their profits by using these classes not to be able to do it because they can’t afford to take part at this time,” she says.

Finding time to learn new tech skills – whether that means taking a class, or in Penner’s case, teaching a class – is all about priorities, and vision. “I love anything that makes my life easier,” says Penner. “I have so many things that make my job easier. The more processes are in place, the less work I must do to keep my agency going.”

Penner’s next Canva webinar is scheduled for Thurs. April 18, 2024; click here for more details. The webinars are open to all agents.