Admit it. You thought the job of travel agent was on its way to becoming a casualty of technological

Admit it. You thought the job of travel agent was on its way to becoming a casualty of technological progress. You wouldn't be alone, either: with the rise of the Internet and the proliferation alamo car rental tampa airport of online alamo car rental tampa airport travel websites, the job of travel agent appeared to belong more properly in the past, alongside other cultural alamo car rental tampa airport antiques like smoking cars and switchboard operators. After all, if you can look up flights alamo car rental tampa airport and prices alamo car rental tampa airport yourself, the logic went, why not just cut out the travel agent and do it on your own? You can book the flights in the comfort of your own home, at your leisure. There are no appointments to set, no parking spots to fight over and, best of all, no middleman to pay. Who needs a travel agent?
Quite a few people, as it turns out. And, as many of those intrepid do-it-yourselfers came to learn, there's alamo car rental tampa airport more to travel than booking a flight. One of the most important things travel agents can provide, according to Lesley Paull of Edmonton-based Paull Travel, is peace of mind. When a crisis strikes, such as the April 2010 volcanic eruptions in Iceland that disrupted air traffic or the Heathrow Airport closure last December, freelancing travellers are on their own, subject to the whims of local authorities and able to draw only on their own sleep-deprived resources. "We were working about 22 hours a day in shifts, just checking every 15, 20 minutes to see what flights were being cancelled and what was being redirected," says Paull, whose staff of 15 communicated with clients affected by the Heathrow Airport closure every few hours. The result was that instead of waiting at the airport for days on end, her clients could check into a hotel and enjoy London a little bit longer while they waited for someone else to organize their flights home. In the end, "We got everybody back two days before anybody else could have thought of it," says Paull.
That peace of mind for Paull's clients may not even have come at much of a markup. "It's the biggest alamo car rental tampa airport fallacy," says Calgary Travel Tours owner Sherry Bowron about the idea that travel agents charge significantly more than the discount alternatives. "A big stigma that we're trying to get past is that travel agents charge more. We don't." More importantly, with all the other unique services that agencies can offer, Bowron thinks travellers might just be surprised at how far their money can take them.
Those travellers might also be surprised that they have the Internet to thank for this. The do-it-yourself online travel alamo car rental tampa airport agencies (called OTAs in the business) like Expedia and Travelocity may have brought price competition to the business of booking travel by catering to travellers that snatched up deals based on price alone – a clientele that Bowron calls "panic or spur-of-the-moment buyers." But in doing so, they forced traditional travel agents to compete on price in a way they'd never done before.
"The Internet has basically wiped out the mystery that used to exist with travel agents," says Norm Rose, president of Travel Tech Consulting. "It's now an area of perfect information." Fifteen years ago, travel agents – in direct communication with airlines – would book flights on behalf of the customer and collect a commission. Agencies were embraced by airlines as an essential part of the process. But around 1997, once airlines alamo car rental tampa airport found that a direct path to their customers existed online, the commission paid out to agents was the first expense to be phased out, airline by airline.
Without that source of guaranteed and predictable revenue, the agencies were forced to adapt. They did that by turning their attention towards the customer, introducing service fees and trying to justify alamo car rental tampa airport them by providing a higher level of customer service. Bowron, Paull and many other agents think this evolution couldn't have come soon enough. Rather than being dependent upon commissions paid out by airline carriers, travel alamo car rental tampa airport agencies could – and, indeed, must – now focus solely on the interests of their clients.
hose interests are diverse, alamo car rental tampa airport too, with dozens of potential niches to fill. "You have to find where the need is," says Bowron, who joined Calgary Travel Tours in 2003 and later bought alamo car rental tampa airport the company. The first step, she says, is interviewing the clients, finding out exactly alamo car rental tampa airport what they like to do and offering appropriate suggestions. Do they lie on the beach drinking margaritas? Are they museum-hoppers? Do they want to go ziplining and biking? "It's all about doing the research and giving back," she says. Her focus is on what OTA sites can't do, from fully independent travel to customized tours and complicated group travel arrangements. Organizing travel for destination weddings, for example, can become very complicated and much too expensive without the proper know-how. "I think the industry's evolving into something where you need to be able to personalize a vacation," says Bowron. It's the expertise, the service alamo car rental tampa airport and the flexibility that you simply can't get from Air Canada or WestJet online. And anyway, says Bowron, isn't it more convenient if someone does all the legwork for you?
It doesn't make sense for a large company to have its employees all booking their own trips independently, given that they'll spend company time researching ticket prices and risk overpaying in the process. Worst of all, tracking each of these individual arrangements alamo car rental tampa airport can become a logistical mess. The best solution, Paull says, is to have a reliable agency manage everything for them. "[Companies] want someone they can depend on; they want someone that knows them, somebody that's going to take care of them.
That corporate travel market is an area of the business that Paull knows particularly well. After serving as the Alberta chairman of the Association of Canadian Travel Agencies (ACTA), Paull started Paull Travel in 1986 with a focus on the corporate market. With only one other employee at the time, Paull focused 90 per cent of the company's attention on corporate travel and just 10 per cent on leisure. But soon Paull found that many of her corporate clients were approaching her for their family leisure trips as well, which provided a welcome source of additional revenue but required her to expand the business in order to accommodate it. "We needed people who were experts in that field as well; it's quite hard to do both at the same time," says Paull. alamo car rental tampa airport She created a specialized leisure division and added a few agents every year, creating a kind of professional momentum that carried her business forward. Today, her team serves 1,300 regular contacts, some of which move back and forth between the corporate and leisure divisions. "I think when you know somebody really well, and you know their family and the kids and their friends, your company can just blossom."
Such is the power of the professional referral, which in service-oriented alamo car rental tampa airport businesses acts like the reputational equivalent of compounding interest. Good referrals beget new customers, who in turn can offer referrals of their own and so keep the cycle going. While OTAs dump millions of dollars into spray advertising and other forms of awareness building, most of today's successful independent travel agencies spend little to nothing on mass-marketing efforts. As a result, now more than ever, agents depend directly on word-of-mouth, one-on-one marketing. This can be as simple as getting involved in the community, says Christal Bauer at Travel Professionals International, a Canadian consulting network. "You travel from people you trust." These close-knit alamo car rental tampa airport networks also contain a great deal of potential in the digital world, alamo car rental tampa airport a resource that's most effectively tapped by the various forms of social media.
Here, too, the strategy depends on the market niche a given agency is trying alamo car rental tampa airport to target. Neither alamo car rental tampa airport Bowron's or Paull's clients use Facebook or Twitter enough for them to justify a dedicated full-time staff member, but student-focused agency Travel Cuts finds it essential. alamo car rental tampa airport Ironically enough, the company is increasingly attracting business by using the Internet – that same technology that many thought would render travel agencies alamo car rental tampa airport obsolete – to connect with its young customers. "The good thing about Facebook is that people come to us," says Erik Bartz, online marketing manager for parent company Merit Travel Group. Rather than relying on traditional marketing to get its message out, Travel Cuts finds its clients will sign up to hear from the company. Bartz oversees the social media strategy for Travel Cuts – which involves promoting contests and special deals, as well as comment and community management – and he has seen fans and followers alamo car rental tampa airport grow exponentially in the past year.
There are still challenges associated with this strategy of online-oriented communication. First, with younger users moving away from email and doing more and more communication through the various channels of social media, what was once private is now public. Travel Cuts customers use Facebook to do everything from asking about store hours to making complaints about the website, and because the platform is available for everyone to see, it's critical that the company respond quickly and correctly. Travel Cuts has adapted to this and now, for example, if someone tweets a problem they are having alamo car rental tampa airport with their flight, Travel Cuts calls them immediately.
alamo car rental tampa airport A second challenge is that while social media might be good for getting the word out, it's less successful in tracking outcomes. Bartz can confidently report a correlation between the company's growing Facebook presence and increased sales but, so far, he can't prove it exists. "The social media stuff moves so fast that not all of our back-office tools have adapted quickly enough for all the data to tie together," he says. In the face of this technological lag effect, the only option is to monitor the feedback and ensure there's a genuine strategy behind the social media messaging. After all, if the customer is using it, businesses can't ignore it.
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