Travel Agents Still Matter According to the latest survey by the American Society of Travel Agents in March, 55% of U.S. travel agencies polled reported an increase in both revenue and clients in 2013 over 2012. The travel agent community continues to be a convenient punching bag for many travel consumers and travel industry media, dating back to the 1990s when online booking engines first began encroaching on traditional brick-and-mortar agency sales. However, denying the impact of travel advisors—as they insist on being called now—on global tourism sales today is naïve, considering they’re selling billions of dollars of travel worldwide. The big push at Virtuoso Travel Week—themed around “Enriching Lives Through Human Connection”—was to communicate the value of booking luxury travel through a luxury travel advisor. Virtuoso is driving that message home by highlighting its advisors’ in-depth understanding of specific destinations and travel niches. That relationship building and travel knowledge is what separates a travel advisor from a travel agent. “If a travel advisor is seen as just another way of booking travel, we’ve probably lost before we’ve even got started.Our real value lies in the totality of the relationship between the advisor and client throughout the entire travel lifecycle.” The challenge is communicating that value to the traveling public who believe that the services of the advisor community are solely for less experienced and cautious travelers. A lot of DIY people are booking travel on their own and if we get a chance to have a meaningful conversation with somebody, selling them on what a great travel advisor does is actually pretty easy. It’s just that people have so much information today and preconceived notions about what a travel advisor does.” Travel advisors can secure a room in a hotel that’s seemingly fully booked online; they provide backup assistance if something goes sideways; they know their preferred destinations better than anybody; they make transportation more seamless; and they have preferred suppliers who can provide better rates and more personalized local itineraries. Jay Johnson, owner of Coastline Travel Advisors in Los Angeles, said he knows those times of day to best visit Machu Picchu, for example, between the massive influx of tourists arriving via train and coach. “Siem Reap [Cambodia] for example, you go in with a private guide and you won’t see a soul,” she said. “You walk over a couple temples and there’s 550 people all waiting for the sun to rise.” Of course, the subject of additional pricing is a significant barrier for many travelers considering booking travel through an advisor. But agents flatly deny the validity of that, calling it a common misperception. “A lot of people think that using a travel advisor adds to the cost of a trip, when in fact, in many, many, many cases, a great travel advisor not only delivers great value, but will actually save you money,” said one. “Because that’s what they do all day.” What About Customer Service & Cost? Surprisingly during Virtuoso Travel Week, there didn’t seem to be a concerted effort to promote the value of travel advisors within the context of heightened customer service. In the luxury travel space, one would think that advisors can play the role of someone who makes a busy business or leisure traveler’s life much easier. While all of those benefits are notable, nowhere is there a series of testimonials from luxury travelers expressing the quality of service an advisor provided. Or how an advisor anticipated a client’s needs due to the insight he or she had developed after booking multiple trips for them. Or how one advisor recommended another advisor who’s an expert in another destination the client is considering for a subsequent trip. Especially for luxury consumers, that type of dialogue resonates deeply with them when time management and personalized experiences rank among the top issues facing wealthy consumers. And helps cut through marketing speak. Equally important, when Virtuoso says a great travel advisor can actually save you money by finding better deals than an individual could online, it would help to have some data to support that. Otherwise, it’s tough to really believe that applies on a widespread basis. Would it be possible to have examples of travel-related costs as they appear online, with comparable figures that an advisor was able to deliver? Or, even if the cost ok booking through an advisor was slightly higher, there could be evidence of how the advisor delivered more value and a better overall travel experience. During the show, Upchurch mentioned the fluctuating relativity of cost, value and ROI when hiring the services of travel advisors. He said sometimes working with an advisor might add 20% to the overall cost of a trip, but the experience could be 100% better. That sounds good, but it would help to have concrete examples of that on the website to shift the general public’s views about the role of travel advisors in 2014. “Parents are really in tune with the passage of time, and they want to make sure they’re giving their kids these lifelong experiences to help them become better global citizens,” said Bendt. “The world has just gotten a lot more open, so parents and grandparents want to share those types of experiences with the kids, and the grandparents themselves want to visit those major travel milestones…. So I think that’s what is really driving the increase in interest today.” However, parents often come to him with too many bucket list requests, which he explains to them would take too many years to realistically accomplish, even through their children’s college years. So Bendt says that’s where he’s more and more mapping out multiple trips over the course of a child’s grade school education to create a well rounded yet executable travel program for the whole family. Bendt and Upchurch added that more parents are making travel decisions based on the children’s language, history and geography classes they’re taking at school. Virtuoso calls it “purposeful planning” when advisors incorporate some kind of educational component into a travel booking, designed to deliver a more transformational experience and specific takeaways.
Posted on: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 12:10:27 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015