The Internet, experts said, was going to kill travel agents. In the nineties, airline and hotel executives gleefully dreamed of cutting out the middleman, saving on commissions, and creating direct relationships with their customers. Instead they got OTAs (online travel agents), whose dominance has led to even higher mass travel distribution costs. Hotel companies are fighting that by offering guests incentives to book directly on their websites.
However, the big surprise to the MBA consultants is probably that the Internet actually propelled carriage trade travel agents into superstars. Maybe they aren’t quite like Food Network’s Iron Chefs in terms of public stature, but they’ve got a bigger spotlight than ever before. Travel magazines regularly publish lists of specialist agents, and web savvy retailers use social media to gain large followings and generate business. If you happen to be Facebook friends with one of this new breed, the constant stream of champagne welcomes, private plunge pools, and tropical sunsets can make even the strongest of us envious of the glam life they live. Some of us with enough dough and time give in. Bookings follow.
In turn, haute hoteliers now spend large amounts of time and money attending luxury travel trade shows, so they can network with top agents and fly them in to see new properties or get a first look at new amenities and renovations. All the major luxury hotel groups have travel agent advisory boards, so they can get agent feedback on new initiatives, and offer programs enabling top-producing agents to pass along special perks to customers who book their hotels.
All the love for luxury travel agents is purely bottom line. Matthew Upchurch, CEO of Virtuoso, a consortium of 355 high-end agencies with $14 billion in sales, says the rates his advisors book are higher than the rates hotels get directly on their websites. Michael Batt, chairman of Travel Leaders Group, with over 6,500 locations, whose top-producing agents make well into six figures, says the same. It’s a direct result of both commissions from suppliers and the fees today’s stressed out affluent consumers are willing to fork over to save themselves the precious commodity of time.
What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger; so said Friedrich Nietzsche. In fact, before the World Wide Web, travel agents toiled at their desks, first on phones, paging through phone book-sized directories of hotels and airline schedules to make picks for their clients. Familiarization trips, or in industry lingo, FAMs, were a treat. A couple times a year an agent might leave his or her desk to visit a foreign country and check out new hotels. Agents would then write reports and keep Polaroid pictures on file to share around the office or show clients if they came in. As the travel agency industry was computerized, agents were bound to their desks, staring into blinking screens on bulky terminals while entering cryptic codes to search for accommodations and flights. They went home at 5 p.m., so by the time you came home from work they were gone for the day.
Today, many of the best travel agents work virtually, not only from home but from around the world. Top luxury agents are on the road well over 100 days a year, flying around the world to get a firsthand look at the newest lodge in South Africa one week, then popping into Los Cabos for a couple nights to get the scoop on post-hurricane recovery. Days later the same agent is in New York. After all, the new Park Hyatt just opened. Weeks later this same person is back to check out the Baccarat.
Posting pictures on Instagram and tweeting, today’s agents carry the world on their laptops and smart phones. They can check room availability just like you and me, but unlike most of us, they have developed relationships with general managers, hotels managers, reservations managers, and concierges. Chances are, when you call or email your travel agent, they are not even in the country, but thanks to the Internet, they can figure out if there is space at that new hot hotel and then, with a quick text to the GM, ensure you get the room where the view of Central Park is not blocked by another skyscraper.
Having just walked the hotel top to bottom and knowing you travel with four steamer trunks, they will tell you to book the Junior Suite with the huge walk-in closet instead of the very nice one-bedroom suite where there are only two small drawers and not enough hanger space. How in the world could you have figured that out from the description on the hotel website? Whereas the luxury travel agent of yesteryear worried about carpal tunnel syndrome, today’s agent is likely to be jet lagged just back from checking out the newest resorts in Bali, all thanks to www dot com.
