U.S. Travel Agents: Dead or Alive? (part one)
In 1978, three years before MTV aired on cable television, an English band named The Buggles released Video Killed the Radio Star, a song that addresses the mixed attitudes towards 20th century inventions and new technologies for the media arts. When MTV debuted on August 1,1981, Video Killed the Radio Star was the first video ever shown on the 24-hour music channel.
The Buggles’ song became an instant prophecy. The age of radio stars was dead, the War of the Worlds won by MTV’s cutting-edge visual aesthetic, which featured an instantly recognizable logo and footage from the first Space Shuttle launch countdown of Columbia, as well as around the clock music videos.
Radio stars had been usurped by modern technology and a consumer audience –GenXers mainly –eager for a fast paced, multi-sensory medium and an after-school appointment with the hottest new bands. For better or worse, MTV transformed the music industry.
As video killed the radio star, so it was predicted that the internet would be the death of the traditional travel agent. In 2013, CarreerCast even went so far as to include U.S. travel agents in its annual roundup of “useless jobs.” Like librarian Romney Wordsworth in Episode 29 of The Twilight Zone, the travel agent was condemned to death for being an “obsolete man.”
The overall consensus: Who needs a travel agent when there are dozens of DIY online booking sites? Who needs a travel agent when the digital revolution has given consumers the ability to customize their own voyages? Haven’t smartphones replaced the traditional duties of the travel agent, making a once thriving profession obsolete?
But while CareerCast, the internet, and, in some respects, the airlines themselves (once airlines had a direct line to customers through online booking sites they stopped offering commissions to agents) left the travel agent industry for dead, it has proven to be a profession that will not go gently into that good night.
The internet has transformed the travel industry, and the travel agent/advisor has transformed with it.
How Travel Agents Learned to Adapt and Rebuild in a Changing Market
In the up-to-the-minute age of online booking sites, metasearch websites, digital connectivity, and mobile apps, the modern travel agent is an endangered species, but like all endangered species he or she has found a way to adapt and realign their profession to compete with the internet and keep pace with the broader changes in consumer shopping habits.
In the U.S. in 2018 there were 185,000 individuals working at travel agencies and other travel arrangement services. This marks an increase of 25,000 jobs from 2010, when luxury and business travel took serious losses; the post-recession hit travel agents hard, resulting, according to CNN, in a loss of nearly a quarter of their revenues. An increase of 25,000 jobs over a short, eight-year span suggests that a new generation of travelers want personalized, local expertise.
They want artisanal and handcrafted itineraries, so to speak, unique experiences that self-serve sites can’t provide.
It’s a fact that’s further underscored by a report from the American Society of Travel Advisors, which says that the number of people using travel agents reached a three-year-high in 2016.
Today’s travel advisor is a boutique travel agent who caters to a boutique clientele that favors authenticity and singular experiences over mass-production and holiday packages, quality over economies of scale, and critical expertise over the type of commentary and trolling one finds on review sites. While anyone with an internet connection can search travel websites like Expedia or Travelocity, not everyone can plan a detailed, regionally curated, in-the-know holiday like a professional travel advisor.
While “todays” travel advisor might may not organize as many point-to-point trips as in the past, complex trips involving numerous flights, groups of people, or off-the-beaten-path destinations are a thriving part of the industry; today, the modern travel advisor is a specialist -luxury travel, senior travel, extreme travel, etc. -or an expertise in a particular country, culture or region.
Still, adapting to the rapidly changing digital market and rebuilding the industry model isn’t something that travel advisors accomplished overnight. Prior to the early 1990s, the travel agency industry thrived. Things started going south when airlines reduced commissions that they paid to agents in an effort to cut costs. Later, the rise of the internet and the proliferation of e-commerce sites like Expedia, Travelocity, and Orbitz nearly put travel agents out of business. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were roughly 132,000 travel agents in the U.S. in 1990. By 2014, that number had been cut nearly in half, to 74,000.
The Complex World of Online Booking
The easy, DIY accessibility of online booking is fraught with luck, gamesmanship and timing, which, in the end, make accessing a cheap or even reasonably priced fare a time-consuming endeavor, and not all that easy.
In the book Attention All Passengers: The Airlines’ Dangerous Descent and How to Reclaim Our Skies, award-winning journalist and leading consumer advocate William J. McGee states “that at any given moment there are six billion airfares housed in the industry’s global distribution system.
About half of those fares are designated for corporations, leaving roughly three billion different pricing combinations for everyone else.”
In other words, online booking can be stressful and frustrating. Shopping around for the lowest fare or best holiday package can take up all of a consumer’s waking hours. As no single travel site offers the lowest fares on all occasions, looking for a deal quickly becomes a trip down the rabbit hole. The constant clicking, tapping, and scrolling becoming what Tim Wu described in The Attention Merchants as creating a “mental state not unlike that of a newborn or reptile.”
Is Sunday night the worst night to look online for tickets? Are Tuesday afternoons the best time to shop for fares, as many experts claim new fares are loaded into reservation systems on that day? Who knows? Airline pricing and distribution is complex; the algorithms are continually changing.
According to McGee, “it’s possible that two passengers crammed in elbow to elbow paid fares that differ by a factor of 10.”
Enter the modern travel advisor. A travel advisor can save the consumer time, get a better deal, and make cancelations and re-bookings less stressful. An advisor can help navigate the complex world of online booking, like Virgil guiding Dante through the dark wood of error. The modern advisor is working for the traveler who would rather outsource the stress and frustration of searching through three billion different pricing combinations in search of the lowest fare.
Marketing to Niche Travel Groups and Taking Risks
According to Forbes, the travel and tourism sector added a record $8.8 trillion to the World’s combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2018, growing more than all other economic sectors but one. In an industry that expansive and profitable the travel advisor isn’t going anywhere, let alone the grave. Still, it’s a post-recession comeback that’s only sustainable as long as the advisor’s role in the industry is ever-evolving, changing with new technologies and consumer habits; from marketing to a range of demographics and sub-groups –millennials, seniors, veterans -to exploring new opportunities and taking risks, industry growth and the role of the travel advisor is based on an acute willingness to adapt.
For example, recent studies by many hospitality research firms found that over 30 percent of millennials are looking forward to hiring travel advisors in the next two years. Tech-savvy, brand-disloyal millennials were once considered the demographic that would accelerate the demise of the travel agent. However, modern advisors have found a way to market their services, angling to the millennial mindset with a pitch that suggests the right vacation can “change you,” a self-discovery concept that millennials embrace.
Hays Travel, a husband-and-wife team who built their tourism business from the ground up, recently acquired collapsed tour operator Thomas Cook’s 555 shops. While many in the industry don’t see a bright future in the package holiday sector, John and Irene Hays disagree. It’s a risky venture. And ghost resorts like the Golden Sun Beach Resort in Almeria, Spain, a half-built and abandoned temple of leisure that illustrates the true wreckage of Spain’s financial crash, are still fresh in the travel industry’s collective conscious. Still, risk and reward, is the foundation of progress.
How the Health of the Travel Advisor Industry Affects Travel
Today, too many people want to travel while massive crowds are causing environmental degradation and dangerous conditions. Places like Amsterdam, Venice, Rome, Dubrovnik, and Barcelona struggle with overtouriusm (Barcelona, a city of 1.6 million, averages 32 million tourists a year).
Meanwhile, the shared economy -and Airbnb (some call it an Airbnb Invasion) in particular -prices-out locals and acts as a catalyst for gentrification. Online booking, customer review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor, and social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook have all contributed to overtourism. Technology has created “tourists hot spots,” not holiday destinations.
A healthy travel advisor industry can’t turn back the clock on internet-enabled travel conveniences, but it can steer travelers to more alternative destinations and sightseeing opportunities.
It can guide a new generation of consumers away from popular beaches and sight-seeing tours -where, it seems, illegal bathing and selfie-based violence has become the norm, not to mention public drunkenness, vandalism, and death (11 people died on Mount Everest in 2019 because of overcrowding) -to a country’s hidden gems, underrated locales, and off-the-beaten-path attractions.
In other words, a travel advisor can be an influencer (see Taiwan), curating travel trends and singular experiences and affecting what has widely become a globally shared pastime. If the modern travel advisor is a specialist offering a boutique experience, then he or she can work with local officials to help prevent a country with a young tourism sector from becoming a tourist theme park.
Or to put it another way: the modern travel advisor can help curb overtourism.
Then, COVID-19.