This month I thought I would stray just a bit from my theatre analogies on how to be successful in this industry and instead talk to the very existence of our business. If the title of this article offends you, then Halleluiah! I am constantly asked whether travel agents will survive or even whether they are still around today, and I bet you are asked that question too.
So before you send letters to the editor asking for my death by various means, I simply ask you to read on. We have to have the answer as to why we exist before we can learn how to be successful at a job in which so many consumers just do not see value.
If you haven’t heard “travel agents are dinosaurs” before, then you probably you have heard various prophets of doom predict the certain demise of travel agents over the years. If not commission cuts, or direct sales by suppliers, then certainly the Internet was the inevitable death blow (or meteor, to tie in the above analogy) for travel agents.
Much to the chagrin of the now embarrassed soothsayers, travel agents are not only surviving, but thriving in the new world! There have even been recent articles in major publications describing how consumers who have grown tired of the hours spent online, suffering from information overload, are coming back to travel agents.
However, the travel agent they are coming back to has changed dramatically! Even 10 years ago, if you said you were working with a travel agent, a fairly common picture could be painted.
You would go to see a local retail location with the agent working 9-5 sitting behind a desk. It was also stereotypically a dreadful sight, with posters of the Greek islands from 1958 tacked on the wall, brochures strewn around and the backs of large computer monitors blocking the consumer’s view of the agent. That picture may indeed be the tyrannosaurus rex of our business.
Today, in the US, there is a very good chance when the consumer goes back to a travel agent, they are going home! To a Home Based agent, that is, who may meet the client in the agent’s home office, a local coffee shop or at the client’s own home.
Depending on which study is cited, there are between 30,000 and 100,000 Home Based agents in the US. Independent agents have been around for decades, but the terminology used to describe them has evolved over the years. From Pied Pipers to Outside Sales Agents to Independent Contractors and now Home Based Agents, the names have changed but the entrepreneurial nature of what they do hasn’t. What has also changed is the recognition and influence they now have in the marketplace.
The retail locations of yesteryear will not all go away and the ones that stay will shatter the stereotype described above and be enticing in their own right. But there will be substantially fewer of them, which has already started to happen.
However, as retail outlets shrink, Home Based agents are expanding at a rapid pace. Why? Because it is the perfect business for the independent entrepreneur with most travel sales still made person to person (albeit not necessarily face to face due to telephones and the Internet) and since there is no inventory to fill up your garage, the Home Based model works.
After years of fighting for recognition and legitimacy through associations such as NACTA (the National Association of Commissioned Travel Agents), there is no doubt in the industry today of the huge and growing impact that Home Based agents are having on retail travel.
Travel agents have beaten extinction and have evolved into a different way of doing business with tremendous success. Call travel agents dinosaurs if you like, but only if the analogy refers to their size and dominance in the world they live in!