Results at a glance — Genie Travel Company
- 200+ Trainual seats added in the past year — expansion powered by self-serve onboarding, not top-down hand-holding
- Named a Top Training System in Trainual's 2023 Top Customer Awards
- AI search is the #1 most-used feature — advisors get instant answers anytime, including nights and weekends, without waiting on support
- Launched fully operational from day one — Trainual was live before Genie Travel Company opened, so onboarding existed before the first advisor
- One small team supports hundreds of advisors — everyone self-serves at their own pace
Most companies find Trainual after the growing pains. A team scales, knowledge scatters, the same questions get asked five times a week, and someone finally goes looking for a system to hold it all together.
Genie Travel Company did it backward. They had Trainual established before they had a single travel advisor to train.
"We actually had Trainual up and running before we launched Genie Travel Company, because we know how important it is to have everything in one place," says Liz Cherne, VP of Independent Contractor Programs and Marketing.
That instinct came from experience. Genie Travel Company is a division of Riverdale Travel, an agency that's been selling travel for 102 years — since 1924. When the team decided to open a path for people to break into a new industry, they didn't want their new hires to figure out onboarding as they went. They wanted the roadmap built before the first advisor ever signed in.
The problem with getting into travel
The travel industry has a math problem. The average travel advisor is 60-plus years old, and most agencies won't bring someone on without five years of experience. That's a closing door — a shrinking, aging workforce and almost no on-ramp for newcomers.
Meanwhile, the demand to get in has never been higher. After the pandemic, Genie Travel Company saw a wave of people rethinking their careers and chasing work they actually loved. Plenty of them were already the unofficial travel planner in their family — the person who lives for the logistics, details, and perfect itinerary.
"For us to be able to take a regular person who is the travel planner in their family and help them turn that skill set into a business — it's remarkable," Liz says.
The challenge was translation. Genie Travel Company had a century of institutional knowledge and an effectively infinite universe of vendors, destinations, and booking systems. How do you hand all of that to someone brand new without burying them? How do you take all of that knowledge and all of that access to information and put it in a way that somebody can really absorb? It gets very overwhelming fast.
Meeting people where they are
Genie Travel Company's answer was to stop trying to teach everything at once. As Liz puts it, nobody starts selling travel off a handful of tips — there's too much to absorb in one go. So instead of the hour-long webinars that are almost a rite of passage in the travel world, they broke knowledge into short, digestible pieces inside Trainual.
"Trainual allows us to put together little mini-videos so we can meet people where they're at, instead of going to all these one-hour webinars that are kind of infamous in the travel industry."
The structure matters because of who Genie Travel Company's advisors are. Many are independent contractors with full-time jobs — they run their travel business at night, after their 9-to-5 job and after their family's settled. Step-by-step onboarding lets them move at their own pace, one piece at a time, whenever they have the time.
It's the first thing they touch, too. A new advisor's first email is their branded Travel Genie email address. The second email's number-one instruction: sign into Trainual. From day one, it's the single source of help.
The feature the whole team lives in: AI search
Here's where the "everything in one place" philosophy pays off. By a wide margin, the tool Genie Travel Company's team uses most is Trainual's AI-powered search — and the reason is simple: their advisors need answers now.
"In our industry, if you're working on something, you need an answer that moment. You can't wait until somebody emails you back."
That's the reality of a distributed team working odd hours. An advisor might be deep in a booking at 11 p.m. with a client waiting. With Trainual, they have immediate access to answers without relying on someone being available to respond. Search means they don't have to wait.
"If you're working at 11 o'clock at night and I'm asleep by 8, you can go into Trainual and get your answer. All of our answers are in one place."
Liz has a favorite way of describing it: "Trainual is like your wife. Your wife knows where the scissors are in the drawer — they've been there for 10 years. Anything anybody needs at any moment, like your wife, we have an answer for you."
Need something specific — a particular cruise line, a particular destination? Type a keyword and the relevant training surfaces in seconds. No hunting, no guessing, no waiting on a human to clock in.
Support that scales past the founder
The deeper win is what search unlocks structurally. Genie Travel Company's whole model depends on helping a lot of people succeed at once — and that's exactly what a single expert can't do alone.
"I'm good at my job. I can't help 100 people be good at their job. I can't help 500 people by holding their hands through the process."
Trainual is what closes that gap. It lets a small team give every advisor personalized, on-demand support without anyone standing over their shoulder.
"What Trainual allows us to do is support every single person where they're at, where they want to be, and where they need to be. Within a moment, they have an answer. Being able to have every single answer in one place is the key to our success — so everyone can keep moving forward, as fast or as slow as they want."
That self-serve foundation shows up in the numbers. Over the past year, Genie Travel Company has grown its Trainual footprint by more than 200 seats — expansion that would be impossible if every new advisor needed hand-holding from the top.
"Everybody can help themselves," as Liz puts it.
The approach has been recognized beyond Genie Travel Company's own walls, too: the company was named a Top Training System in Trainual's 2023 Top Customer Awards.
The bigger picture
Strip away the software and Genie Travel Company is really in the business of opening an industry to new people. Travel is fun. It's a highlight of people's lives, and getting to be part of that is a rare kind of opportunity. But it's historically been hard to break into — expensive, slow, gatekept by experience requirements most newcomers can't meet.
Genie Travel Company's bet is that the right training system can change that equation. Take someone with a genuine passion and a natural knack for planning, give them a structured path and instant answers whenever they need them, and you can turn a hobby into a livelihood.
"The travel industry is hard, but with Trainual we can make it easier. We can meet them where they're at. It feels like we're holding their hand all the way through."
For a company that launched on Trainual before it launched at all, that's the whole point — the system was never a fix for a problem. It was the foundation the business was built on.
